Outdoing Spirit of the Beehive as the Philadelphia-reared lo-fi group named after the world cinema title from the 1970s that’s most obscure to contemporary American audiences, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick swap that band’s futuristic take on shoegaze for an endearingly ramshackle folk-rock sound (you know, that other thing the Philly DIY rock scene has been doing really well lately). After releasing their debut album in the thick of the pandemic, and pursuing various extracurricular musical projects and undergoing certain major life changes shortly after, the band recently re-emerged with news of their follow-up project titled The Iliad and the Odyssey and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick—the only album title I’m aware of that’s just three book titles smashed together—which saw them overcome the challenges that come with five band members composing music in a different city than their lead singer after Ben Curttright relocated to Nebraska.
“The writing process on this record was a bit different than our first. We were spread out and writing a lot of this in smaller groups, then as a full band,” the band’s Sean Kelley shares before introducing the record’s latest single, “Wild Rose.” Kelley notes that this separation comes through in the structure of the track, which features layered vocals reciting different lyrics over live-sounding instrumentation that lands somewhere between the slowcore ballads of Carissa’s Wierd and the overstuffed stages of Brian Jonestown Massacre. “You can tell how each part was really written to the parts that came before it rather than us making all the decisions together,” Kelley continues. “I think that allowed for our own individual sound to come through a bit more.”
Check out “Wild Rose” below, and pre-order the album with the really long title here before it lands April 25 via the also-relatively-wordy Count Your Lucky Stars Records.
