When she was 18, Hannah D’Amato auditioned for a spot at the Berklee College of Music. Midway through her audition, one of the male judges walked up to her guitar amp and lowered the volume knob. Demoralized and insulted, D’Amato decided to bypass the prestigious institution and start a band on her own. Thus the origin story of Fake Fruit, the Bay Area punk trio she’s been fronting over several incarnations since 2016.
That sense of defiance courses through the band’s second album, and first for Carpark, Mucho Mistrust. In 12 tightly wound tracks, D’Amato and her bandmates, drummer Miles MacDiarmid and guitarist Alex Post, forge a rickety bridge between the righteous indignation of riot grrrl and the staccato unease of the UK’s post-punk revivalists. D’Amato’s plainspoken delivery and sneering wit provide the record’s center of gravity, as she monologues about a shitty ex (“You’ve got punisher’s lust/I’ve got mucho mistrust,” she quips in the title track), reckons with dwindling self-worth (“Well Song”), and bids adieu to a slimy narcissist who “made me look psycho” (“Psycho”).
The album takes its name from a Blondie classic, but the nervy outbursts of “Psycho” and squawking, sax-addled no wave of “Gotta Meet You” have more in common with the paranoid racket of Bush Tetras. You could certainly draw a throughline between that group’s underground hit “Too Many Creeps” and the lyrical concerns of Fake Fruit, which prominently include scummy men, toxic romances, and the myriad ways humans can exploit one another. D’Amato, who left an unhappy relationship before making Mucho Mistrust, surveys these frustrations with such bluntness that listening to Fake Fruit often feels like overhearing one end of a heated phone call. “Who taught you to behave this way?” she asks at the start of “See It That Way,” opening the record in media res as dueling guitars snarl from one speaker to the other.
But there are also surrealist detours—the wacky sprechgesang of “Venetian Blinds,” written and sung by Post, lightens the mood—and tracks that move in a more reflective direction. In the latter category, “Cause of Death” is strikingly good. Evoking the confounding mindfuck of an obsessive crush, the track slows and shifts keys midway through as the band rides out a dramatic refrain against a swelling choir of backup voices. It is the most moving and melodic Fake Fruit song to date, and it tees up the mood for “Sap,” the closest thing to a ballad on here, its mellow chords scuffed up just enough to let the bitterness seep through.
Because of their talky vocals and post-punk lineage, and because they toured with Dry Cleaning in 2022, Fake Fruit could conceivably be slotted in with the UK’s vibrant cohort of talk-singing post-punk upstarts. But D’Amato’s vocals carry a distinctly American strain of directness—and unapologetic angst—that contrasts with the cryptic musings of, say, Florence Shaw. On “Más o Menos,” her sarcastic refrain—“I hope you had a good time on your sympathy tour/Hope you found everything that you were looking for”—even evokes Olivia Rodrigo’s breakup kiss-offs. There is detached cool in free-associative poetry, but there’s also power in saying what you mean and saying it loudly, Berklee admission committees be damned.
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