EP REVIEW: Lie Through Your Teeth – Stuck Out
With AS IT IS swapping pop-punk and pizza for mid-noughties emo and military drummer jackets in their quest to write the next Black Parade and NECK DEEP have swapped heartbreak in Wrexham for social commentary in their alt-rock wonderland Sonderland; British pop-punk is approaching a crisis at the crossroads. Thankfully, our friends down under have been pottering away and perfecting the prototypes their British predecessors put in place. With STAND ATLANTIC, YOURS TRULY and DUNE RATS delivering the goods this year, STUCK OUT are sticking their heads out of the windows for a piece of the pop-punk pie on their most confident collection of songs yet, Lie Through Your Teeth.
Whilst their contemporaries have found their secret formulas to revitalising pop-punk through experimenting with alt-rock, surf-rock and synth-pop; STUCK OUT stick to their guns, going all in on something that lusts after the mid-10’s golden era revival of British pop-punk. Opener Inverse isn’t a million miles away from fitting snug into the setlist of AS IT IS’ debut Never Happy, Ever After; mixing the rough-and-ready rawness of old-school pop-punk vocals with the blissfully jangly riffwork of nineties emo, the band’s dual harmonies hitting home as melodies flood the floor of your eardrums.
Elsewhere, False Promise is as close as we’ll get to The Peace & The Panic-era NECK DEEP with it’s pop-sensitive pout at war with it’s magical melodies and melancholic musings whilst Hollow evokes the darker depths of YOU ME AT SIX, albeit with the knuckleduster knockout of KNUCKLE PUCK, sobering choruses echo internally, building and bubbling with brilliance as it bleeds out into Underdog-aping riffs that rip up the rulebook. But at no point does Lie Through Your Teeth ever come off as a trip down memory lane, but rather a reimagining of the ghosts of pop-punk past.
STUCK OUT’s secret weapon is the epitome of saving the best for last in the form of closer and lead single Mindless, featuring a guest spot from YOURS TRULY’s Mikaila Delgado. Whereas some big-ticket box-office features can leave their hosts in the dust, Mikaila’s appearance simply compliments the work at hand, interweaving with STUCK OUT’s DNA, a little like Patty Walters and Benjamin Langford-Biss once did.
Lyrically, STUCK OUT follow suit with their Aussie friends in finding their words through their woes – cementing the fact that long-gone are days are of easy-listening pool party pop-punk. Across the four songs that fill out Lie Through Your Teeth, there’s a lot of reflection and a lot of resentment as vocalist Josh Walker does some soul-searching. It asks questions of the listener, to truly step back from the slippery slope of social media for a second and think about how things really are deep down inside, best posed on Inverse: “Is this all vacant complication from the burdens I’m bestowed? Is this all part of something greater than the emptiness I know?”.
Admittedly, at four-songs long, Lie Through Your Teeth feels a little far-fetched, in the sense that STUCK OUT are sounding as sophisticated as a band who could be putting out their sophomore full-length, let alone their debut, and yet they’re still chucking out EPs. However, for what it’s worth, this is yet another fantastic calling card for pop-punk down under.
Rating: 8/10
Lie Through Your Teeth is set for release on December 18th via SharpTone Records/Greyscale Records.
Like STUCK OUT on Facebook.