Males Will Hit You Hard with ‘Heavy Going’ [Stream]

“Have you heard a weaker heartbeat?” question Males on “Heaving Going,” surrounded by punchy basslines, jangly guitars and words that hold you dangerously close. Males wrap you in the textural familiarity of Lemuria, The Get Up Kids, and every band that made you feel safe when you were fifteen. They vacillate between cautious optimism and jagged existentialism, resulting in lamentably aspirational verses (“Our wants are never tries”) that leave you with devastating lines like: “Oh, you’re dripping a part of me.” You don’t know where it comes from, but it hits you hard. It leaks despair — gut-wrenching, helpless despair — and their leadened emotionalism begins weighing on you. And, god, you understand: heavy going. This song is about a relationship gone awry. Males struggle and stumble, all the while using music to cope. They hurt, they relate and they make you feel a little bit better with their glitter attitude.

You can stream the Dunedin, NZ based band’s self-released None The Wiser, on Bandcamp. None The Wiser holds eight other songs just as good as this one.