Bands will always sound like this: jangly and raw, infatuated with their own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves in their haste to convey a botanic garden’s worth of full-bloom feelings. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of power pop that understands, deeply, that the genre’s only goal should be to make age-old feelings like love and longing sound thrilling and new. It succeeds and surpasses that goal: Familiar but finely tuned, it’s likely to remind you of whatever music felt most romantic to you when you were growing up. For me, that’s Royal Headache and the Beatles and Hunx and His Punx and Girls; for you, maybe the Kinks or Cleaners From Venus or Alvvays. The album’s recombinant DNA is an asset—or, at the very least, not a hindrance—because 20-year-old Slater is also one of contemporary indie-rock’s sharpest pop songwriters, each of the record’s 14 songs containing its own cosmos of urgent choruses and natty phrases and artfully scrawled riffs. Radio DDR earns its comparison points, slamming you so hard and so frequently with scream-a-long hooks that it feels like a greatest-hits collection.
In addition to his duties in Sharp Pins, Slater is a lynchpin of Chicago’s young, fruitful guitar band scene: He runs a zine called Hallogallo that shares its name with a prolific DIY collective that also includes Horsegirl, Post Office Winter, and Slater’s other bands, Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe. He’s also obsessed with youth culture, and to read him talk about its centrality in his life—“the only thing that I know I can do in the world is make youth spaces,” he says—unlocks a layer of meaning within Radio DDR. These songs are about love, by and large, but they also ache with the notion that certain parts of life will inevitably slip away. They lurch forward urgently, like Slater is trying to bottle the feeling of being young before the fountain runs dry.
Is it frustrating that society and pop culture writ large centers around Being Young? Maybe, but it’s an easier pill to swallow when it tastes this good. The halting boogie of “You Have A Way” is a vortex of anxieties and boredoms that can boil down to one lyric—“Can I find a time with you?” Meanwhile, Slater chases “the seconds/I can’t suspend anymore” on the frantic, anthemic garage barnstormer “Is It Better.” “I Can’t Stop” sounds like something Royal Headache’s Shogun might have made in his teenage bedroom, and one repeated lyric makes this theme even more explicit: “I don’t wanna get older no more.”
All of Radio DDR carries this feeling of racing against the clock, which is part of the (perhaps oxymoronic) appeal: Slater’s lyrics reflect the invincibility and assuredness of youth, but his melodies are shot through with the melancholy that comes with getting older and realizing that the infallibility of your late teens and early 20s is just another ephemeral feeling. Slater makes these feelings sound impossibly potent: The “ahh-ahh-ahh” on “Storma Lee” is wistful enough to cause palpitations in even the sturdiest heart; when he sings “If I was ever lonely/Oh, how it’d tear me apart,” hitting those last three words with a glam swagger, you want to laugh at the hubris and the excitement of it all. This contradictory, lovestruck aura fills every corner of Radio DDR; it’s immensely gratifying to listen and remember that bands like Sharp Pins will keep striving to capture these ineffable feelings as long as people are having them. (Which is to say: forever.)
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
