Long Island pop-punk group Macseal recently revealed they’d be continuing their album-every-five-years tradition with the news that their sophomore full-length Permanent Repeat would land this summer via Counter Intuitive Records. But rather than dropping an EP every year leading up to the LP, the band has been mostly quiet since the release of 2019’s Super Enthusiast (well, there was a Scooby-Doo theme cover in there somewhere)—which makes more and more sense as the tracks from their latest project are unveiled.
The latest of which, “Four Legs,” sees vocalist Ryan Bartlett translating the complex feelings of a major life experience into a breezy sound that’s thus far relatively unexplored by his band. “‘Four Legs’ is about meeting my niece for the first time and how existential it made me,” Bartlett shares. “There was suddenly this brand new person in my life who I Ioved instantly, which was such a cool but scary feeling. It made me appreciate where I was in life a bit more than normal, and question how I was living up until then.”
“Four Legs” sees the quartet leaning further into the power-pop sounds of the turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock radio scene than they did on Super Enthusiast, with the band having shared that Fountains of Wayne and Goo Goo Dolls helped shape the sound of Permanent Repeat. “Musically it’s probably the most power-poppy song we’ve written, and was really fun to put together in the studio. The way the harmonies layer in the chorus is one of my favorite moments on the whole record.”
Check it out below, and pre-order Permanent Repeat ahead of its July 12 release here.
