Cootie Catcher
Something We All Got
CARPARK

Cootie Catcher’s 2025 debut Shy at First is, indeed, rather timid. Taking after an array of underground rock weirdos like Cap’n Jazz and The Moldy Peaches, they didn’t know how to best apply their love of goofball soundplay, so they wrote “normal”-er songs and then bizarred them up with one out-there component. For example, “Friend of a Friend” featured a constant pitch-shifting synth that seems dead set on throwing off the rest of the band. Across the record, Cootie Catcher pillaged a toy chest of novelty percussion instruments and synthesizers, but didn’t quite unite them. They clearly wanted to write in many different zones, but didn’t seem confident to overlap, sticking in one lane for a whole song before moving along when the red light turned off.

Less than a year later, the Toronto quartet knows where and how to employ their chaotic-evil tendencies on Something We All Got, better integrating their record scratches, samples, and Nickelodeon-slime synths. It’s the classic growth trajectory: the jigsaw pieces were always there, but now they’re slotted together confidently rather than forced awkwardly into half-right spots. That makes them sound liberated on Something We All Got, a record that’s unpredictable, nimble, fidgety, odd, and inspired. They’re structuring songs differently now—they’ll allow a verse or a chorus to hold court, playing it straight before pulling the rug out and darting off who knows where, not wanting you to get too comfy or, more likely, following the whims of their attention spans. “Straight Drop” can’t keep up with itself, Joseph Shemoun’s drums tripping from section to section as each member of the band swerves to follow suit. Despite the frenetic approach, they’re considerate of the record’s dynamics and flow. The safer, more even-handed cuts like the Frankie Cosmos–esque ballad “Rhymes with Rest” reset the pulse after a burst of mania.

“Puzzle Pop”—the title of track 11—is an accurate genre descriptor for Cootie Catcher. They occupy an uncharted sweet spot in the indiesphere: more chaotic than Charly Bliss, but nicer than Feeble Little Horse; more melodic than Beat Happening, though less jangly than Good Flying Birds. The references come thick and fast because they cover so much ground. Tracks like “From Here to Halifax” have clean, capo’d, chordy riffs that would fit in on Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All, or approximate Algernon Cadwallader if they were introduced to Weezer’s debut before they’d properly woken up. The record was mixed by Nate Amos of Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei, and some of the tracks are echoic of those projects—like the vocoder silliness and why-the-hell-not flamenco of “Puzzle Pop,” or the slouched Americana of “No Biggie.” Elsewhere, “Quarter Note Rock” with its boy-girl co-crooning and scrambled-circuit sound FX resembles a nihilistic cover of a Yo La Tengo track before giving up with a loose-limbed drum solo.

The Cooties have three singer-songwriters, which is perhaps one reason for the far-ranging scope. Nolan Jakupovski handles the hungover mumbles (he can’t, or doesn’t, sing-sing, but that didn’t stop Calvin Johnson or Rivers Cuomo). Anita Fowl and Sophia Chavez are more tuneful, approachable, and coy, though none of them tries too hard to sing perfectly. These sound like don’t-overthink-it takes recorded moments after the lyrics were scribbled down. “It’s un / un-u / un-u-su-al / if true,” goes the scaffolded verse of “Quarter Note Rock” over synthetic marimba plonks. There’s something here about how Cootie Catcher deconstructs the meaning of the word “unusual” while subverting listener expectations. We think we hear “it’s on you” before the next origami flap of the cootie catcher opens to reveal that it’s unusual. And the next: if true. “Unusual” but “true” is the Cootie Catcher MO. A strange but authentic band, prankish but deadly serious—though you have to be patient in order to realize as much.

We’ve seen that four-person headshot album art on history’s iconic sleeves, from The Beatles to Queen to Blur. Here, it’s covered by Gen Z hipster geekrockers with mismatched aesthetics. It’s hard to tell if this is satire, if there’s a hidden layer of reclamation, or if they’re simply stumbling into that lineage. But the absence of a joke is almost the joke—being real is so radical nowadays that you’re surely not serious. That’s the same space that “Going Places” exists in. The record’s penultimate track has the delicate emotional punch of a coming-of-age movie’s final act: a rumbling, heart-aching, four-chord sing-along that bottles the devastating but thrilling realization that everything’s changing. In a way, it’s the most Shy at First song here, unfolding linearly, but it’s also not; the arrangement is more epic, like “Only in Dreams” or “Transatlanticism” or “23” in stakes, if not execution. Over battered acoustic guitars, the vocal harmonies fly into each other like they’re being cried across a parking lot in the rain. “You are going places / Whether you like it or not” is the central refrain, equally charming and poignant whether intended for a friend or a pep talk to the mirror.

You could argue that the band is strongest in this mode, when they cut the bullshit, focus the scope, and write a song for the top of the world. But with Cootie Catcher, the context is important. If every song were like this, it wouldn’t land. Even if this were the final song on the album—instead of “Pirouette,” the platonic ideal of Cootie Catcher and the best introduction for newcomers—it wouldn’t work as well, the fortune wouldn’t come true: the one that says Cootie Catcher are going places. Whether they like it or not.

FLOOD

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Michael Duncan

MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX

MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,
DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX