Cuticles - More Joy

Cuticles come from Oamaru, a town roughly eighty miles up the coast from Dunedin on New Zealand's South Island, which turns out to matter. Their 2023 debut Major Works landed far better than anyone involved seems to have expected, and More Joy is the answer: twenty-one tracks, no slowing down, a band that took the reception as permission rather than pressure.

The lineup has shifted since the first record. Lisa Preston is out, Albert King is in on keys and guitar, and vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Folina Vili joins alongside founding members Austen McMillian and Matthew Plunkett. The attack is unchanged. These are fast, gnarled pop songs that finish before they can wear out their welcome, carrying titles like "Real Men Get Teary," "Packaging Is," "Ogled Moat" and "Making Up Shit." The guitars come down like a rain of nails. Melodies keep surfacing anyway.

The label's own pitch is "an enlightened Dunedin Sound on Adderall," which is unimprovable. The chassis is 1980s New Zealand underground pop, Doublehappys and Goblin Mix, all jangle and grit and songs perpetually on the verge of coming apart. The engine is considerably louder and faster than any of that. Warts and all, never looking back.

LP on Siltbreeze, SB 208. A doozy.