ALBUM REVIEW: SUCKERPUNCH – Maggie Lindemann
Some debut albums are released to little fanfare; MAGGIE LINDEMANN was never going to be afforded that sort of anonymity. The American singer-songwriter announced herself in 2016 at the tender age of 18 with Pretty Girl, a song that hit the Top Ten in many major charts. The following year, a remix from CHEAT CODES and CADES appeared that, to date, has nearly 840 million plays on Spotify. Transitioning to a more pop-punk sound, Lindemann‘s debut EP PARANOIA dropped last year to significant acclaim and now she has her first full-length; SUCKERPUNCH arrives today via her own independent label, swixxzaudio.
After intro/welcome in begins the record with melancholy piano before gradually bringing in some choral vocals and a rumbling bass, take me nowhere gets Lindemann‘s first full-length effort up and running with a track unlike anything she’s recorded before, taking more of a gothic line with EVANESCENCE and WITHIN TEMPTATION. However, aside from this and the solid novocaine later in the record, the rest is much more akin to what Lindemann is best known for – pop rock with a punk sensibility. she knows it gives off big ALL TIME LOW vibes and whilst self sabotage is more on the pop end of things, the catchy hook in the middle is a classic earworm to lodge in one’s brain for the foreseeable future.
Long-time collaborator SIIICKBRAIN pops up on break me! to deliver a scratchier, electronic backing that marks a neat change in pace and Kellin Quinn of SLEEPING WITH SIRENS fame lends his hand to how can you do this to me?. Of course, there are going to be links made with PARAMORE and AVRIL LAVIGNE (the latter especially as Lindemann has said in the past how much of an influence she was) and whilst you can make allegories throughout, the two tracks that really showcase them are you’re not special for the former and closing track cages for the latter.
However, whilst SUCKERPUNCH is a genuinely fun listen, once its 40 minutes are over it’s a challenge to recall much about it; the hook in the aforementioned self sabotage aside, it doesn’t stay long in the memory at all. Furthermore, phases and i’m so lonely with you cause the middle of the album to bog down in formula; a bit of guitar here, a dash of electronica there, lovely voice over the top, rinse and repeat. Even when break me! changes things up, girl next door brings it back to mediocrity and it takes the acoustic-led we never even dated to finally get the momentum up again.
One could argue this is an album written for TikTok – SUCKERPUNCH is 15 tracks long but not one of them passes three-and-a-half minutes in length, each song an individual soundbite that may well become the soundtrack for a viral trend later down the line. To defend Lindemann here, her young age means she’ll be more sensitive to the way music is consumed nowadays and will have adapted accordingly, but it does paint a damning picture of where music is in 2022, a far cry from the time where you could only buy a single album a week with your pocket money and hope it wasn’t awful, where the main aim for bands and artists right now is hoping their new material sticks in the mind long enough to not become the audible equivalent of ‘today’s news, tomorrow’s chip paper’.
Make no bones about it, MAGGIE LINDEMANN is a talented individual and SUCKERPUNCH is a solid debut effort with some flashes of potential. There will need to be more substance on future releases if she is to survive in this industry though, otherwise she will fall foul of a landscape that she is so earnestly trying to tap into.
Rating: 6/10
SUCKERPUNCH is out now via swixxzaudio.
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