Chicago rock band Dehd’s music is 2 issues: mercilessly catchy and meticulously camp. The trio’s greatest hit to this point – 2022’s Dangerous Love – was a smoke machine-fogged rush of instant-singalong glam. Now, their fifth album arrives in a swirl of bratty pop-punk: opener Canine Days’ stop-start guitars accompany pouty playground-chant lyrics dripping with teenage melodrama. Later, they flip to sweeping, big-chorused Americana (Laborious to Love), mix slacker indie and classic soul for the irresistible Temper Ring – a sleazy, tacky story of unexpectedly reciprocated lust – and, on Necklace, cleverly meld nation and grunge, the exaggerated scuzz offsetting sugary-sweet melodic hooks.
Modern guitar music is in fixed, unavoidable dialog with the previous, and Dehd inject numerous enjoyable into this dialogue. There’s a knowingness within the band’s dressing-up-box strategy to genres previous, and a distance, too; Poetry typically feels as if it has a sepia filter (it comes as little shock to search out Whitney’s Ziyad Asrar on manufacturing duties; a band who helped pioneer this sort of faux-retro really feel).
But there’s actual feeling right here, too (“Everybody I do know is a damaged coronary heart,” is the devastating commentary sneaked into Canine Days’ ode to adolescent freedom). Whereas the band can’t fairly preserve the heady momentum of the album’s first half – it does finally peter out into samey, mid-tempo indie – Poetry nonetheless offers ample proof that its makers are consultants at wringing leisure and emotion from archly resurrected rock historical past.
