The debut album from Depression Breakfast is a full-on blast of punk rock energy with every song exploding with unbridled energy before (somewhat quickly) wrapping up. This is par for the course with Punk Rock but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t leave you seething with energy.

Fortunately, it serves as a vessel for the disenfranchised to rally against The Establishment and The Patriarchy. The final track “Believe Me (I’m Not Lying)” encapsulates this message pretty aptly by vocalizing the disillusionment that women must undergo to convince someone that they’ve been abused, assaulted or manipulated. “My body is not my own” and “Who would believe me?” rings out repeatedly from the narrator as a disgusted but all-too-familiar inquiry.

“There’s No D in Privilege” is the shortest track on the album, clocking in at just 49 seconds, but manages to cover toxic masculinity and the systematic changes required to disrupt it. “Professional” clenches through the refrain of “Fuck You, Pay Me” as a middle finger to the stinging income imbalance felt by women (and the fashion requirements that often come with it).

Just Because I’m a Womxn continues the punk rock tradition of expelling demons politically and socially but it’s a damn shame it has to exist at all. On one hand, it’s a cathartic record to hear these issues spoken to so directly. On the other hand, it absolutely sucks that we still live in a world where these things even need to be written about. Fortunately, silence is not the answer and Depression Breakfast is proof of that.

“Fade Me Away” is a new track from Thad Kopec and Cale Tyson taken from a forthcoming collaborative EP entitled Who Hurt You. Now, Tyson has relocated from Nashville to the Los Angeles area, so including this track here may seem like a bit of a stretch but given the enjoyability here, we’re going to bend on our own self-imposed rules.

From various write-ups on the record, Tyson explains the recording and creation process:

“This EP was recorded at Thad’s house. After Thad remixed ‘What Doesn’t Kill You,’ I knew I wanted to work with him on new material. We met up and decided that we’d start recording an album in a month. I figured I’d be able to write enough songs for the album in a month (foolishly) and came to the first session with absolutely no songs. So we decided we’d just meet up and make songs out of nowhere, usually extremely hungover. We spent 5 days on these 5 songs and each wrote and recorded the lyrics separately.”

The EP features two tracks with Kopec on lead vocals, hence the note about the lyrics being separate endeavors.

We Own This Town rules aside, the melancholy of the song is soothing and, if you’re familiar with each individual musicians style, the collaborative is clear. There are flourishes through the song that clearly nod to prior works from each and they gel together perfectly.

The entire EP will be available on September 20th, keep an eye out.

The latest full-length release from Okey Dokey, Tell All Your Friend, is either a brilliant marketing strategy or a north star heralding the end of the full album era. Maybe a bit of both. Back in late 2017, they band released “Hometown”, the first single from Tell All Your Friend and proceeded to spend the entirety of 2018 & half of 2019 slowly trickling out every single song from the new album as a standalone track. Each track has its own unique artwork, unified across one another with Aaron Martin’s fantastic illustrations. The full album was released in late July 2019 and serves as more of a compilation for those that have been paying attention than it does a grand event for the band. In fact, they hardly mentioned it on their social media.

There are two additional factors to this release tactic that should be noted. First, the band started releasing singles for the next album, Curio Cabinet I, before Tell All Your Friend (the album) ever even hit streaming services. Secondly, they didn’t take down any of the prior singles so a listener curious about Okey Dokey will see a massive amount of releases as opposed to just one or two. This results in a constant flow of new music from the band, which results in fan appeasement and fodder for their social media. From the outside, there’s no downtime for Okey Dokey, new music is always on the way and anyone new to them will find tons to listen to.

Is this tactic for everyone? Maybe not but it’s worth taking note of. It’s not an entirely new idea given that most music was singles based until the advent of longer playing formats but they’re leveraging it in a way that is massively effectively for our current digital world requirement of putting out Something New Everyday.

That’s a lot of waxing on about the band’s release strategy but not a lot of words about the album itself. In short, it’s fantastic. It’s entirely likely that this release technique required the band to shape their album in a way that every song really could enjoyed as a standalone piece. There’s no album filler, no downtime in the back half and no songs lacking in hooks. It’s unfair to give that credit to anything other than Okey Dokey themselves, a duo that has honed their breezy, head-in-the-clouds, pop to damn near perfection.

It’s an understatement but Spotify, Apple Music and all the other streaming services of their ilk have changed the landscape for musicians in a fundamental way. Garnering fans requires patience and connections with Playlisters to elevate your single track out of the masses. Releasing a record as a long series of singles certainly detracts from the celebration of a New Album being born into the world but Okey Dokey’s done it in a noteworthy way. Will this be the new normal or simply a singular tactic one could choose to take? It’s the Wild West out there and it certainly seems like the experiment is working.