Grumpy
Unfindable Ring
BAYONET
For Grumpy, the punchline often seems to come first. It’s hard to miss the band’s dark sense of humor, the kind that tends to saturate online spaces and prompts a direct reaction in “WTF,” a song off their new album Unfindable Ring that you wish you could save in .GIF format. The closing track, “Queens,” which bandleader Heaven Schmitt justifiably calls “the most beautiful song I’ve ever written,” quotes the “nobody care me” meme. There’s a song with the line “I’ll swing my cock like George Clanton,” to which the vaporwave pioneer personally replied to Schmitt over DM, “That’s fire bro.” But to peg Grumpy as a group of Brooklyn experimentalists with an absurdist bent would, in itself, be hilariously off the mark. There’s jokes everywhere, but always shadowed by a long tail of earnestness—or, rather, a kind of wicked sentimentalism—that’s capable of hitting even the most unsuspecting listener right in the gut.
Grumpy—more accurately described as a sextet mostly composed of Schmitt’s exes—have been planning this record for a while. They reveal as much on the song that name drops George Clanton (titled “George Clanton),” a pretty meta song that also shouts out Schmitt’s uncle, who “keeps wondering when I’ll drop my album” (a humble moment that belies the fact that Schmitt has been performing alongside Americana superstar Zach Bryan, who cheekily titled his latest record With Heaven on Top). Unfindable Ring technically serves as the full-length follow-up to 2020’s Loser, but the band campaigned behind their last two EPs hard enough for them to carry the weight of an LP. They opened the door to Grumpy’s shapeshifting unpredictability, which the new album only further affirms.
After all, there’s only so much grandiosity you can fit into a six-song record. The “grand gesture type thing” they allude to on the opening title track of Unfindable Ring—in a romantic context, though it also scans as a musical inclination—is thoroughly embraced throughout the LP, which cares little about how an album should flow. “I disobey balance / I’m writing epic ballads,” Schmitt sings on “George Clanton,” which is not to say that these ballads are by any means conventional. The succeeding “Cool Ranch” initially has you wondering why a song about wanting to get Punk’d adheres to that particular style, until it lands on a devastating realization: “You’re leaving me slowly.” By this point on the record, it’s clear Grumpy are following a distinctly emotional, often absurdist logic, which is why a sense of asphyxiation then begets musical fragmentation on “Solicitor Rights.”
Or why, on an album that’s quite generous in its use of vocal filters, Schmitt keeps their voice clean as they repeat the word “effects” on “Queens,” a six-and-a-half-minute piano ballad. Comparison points abound: on “OBL,” euphoria takes the form of shimmering alt-country that’s inextricable from the Wednesday extended universe (Schmitt may be living in New York, but they’re North Carolinian); “Twenty Five” is reminiscent of the Soccer Mommy album helmed by Oneohtrix Point Never, although Grumpy, of course, keep the production in-house. On the jazzy “Last of Your Kind,” Schmitt is told they look like Kurt Cobain, and there’s no denying the grunge influence on the record.
But Grumpy aren’t poking around for the perfect style to claim as their own. Like the SEO-unfriendliness of their band name, so, too, is the Grumpy sound pretty unfindable. Maybe it doesn’t always have the effect they hoped for, but it’s uniformly striking.
