cootie catcher

There’s an alternate reality where everyone makes a living wage and the cleanest buses you’ve ever seen arrive every other minute. Where the most intense songs are about confessing your love to a crush at the apple orchard, and where gentle feelings and chaotic energy are inseparable best friends. This is the timeline where cootie catcher is right at home. This Toronto based four-piece exudes both vulnerability and unbridled excitement, creating a sound that hypercharges the open-hearted tenderness of twee pop with spiraling synths and giddy electronics. Their new album Something We All Got is the clearest and most vibrant reading of cootie catcher’s vision yet, with songs of sweetness, nervousness, and expectancy that beam out unguarded.

After releasing music made primarily in basements, Something We All Got is the band’s first flirtation with studio recording. The edges are still sharp, however, with some parts assembled from time-honored lo-fi methods and fun, personally-sourced samples seeping into the production. The sound is explosive and upbeat, with euphoric guitars, bubbly synth lines, speedy live and programmed drums, and all other manner of sound constantly colliding. cootie catcher has three songwriters–Sophia Chavez (vocals, synths), Anita Fowl (vocals, bass), and Nolan Jakupovski (vocals, guitar)–all of whom have distinctive voices but manage to overlap in their writing on shared concerns like navigating the lines of romantic and platonic relationships, their city’s social scenes, and struggles in both the microcosmic experience of playing in a band and the zoomed-out challenges of living through late-stage capitalism.

Joy still touches every surface of Something We All Got. “Quarter Note Rock” bounces around the room in a fit of jangling guitar chords, scratched samples, and interplay between breakbeat loops and somersaulting live drums. It’s a blast of positivity despite lyrics about how disappointing it can be to meet your heroes. A smiling electro pop instrumental supports having to step painfully away from an almost realized love on “Gingham Dress,” a song that subverts themes of domesticity as a backdrop for the dashed wilt of hopeless devotion. The ‘non-confrontational anthem’ “Puzzle Pop” cascades and soars through an examination of needing to ask more from others before concluding in a swirl of samples.

cootie catcher rolls down hills and jumps through flaming hoops throughout Something We All Got without ever muting the visceral emotions that drive these songs. There’s a palpable tension between the band’s exhilarating sonics and the raw, often uneasy sentiments expressed, but it’s an integral part of what makes them unique. Rather than hide, cootie catcher is instead fearlessly direct, running full-speed toward every confusion and excitement, and embracing the reality they’re in.