Future Teenage Cave Artists

Everything they touch holding a vintage sheen of some kind, but it’s such a broad and masterful selection that there’s no sense of pastiche. The lyrics across the record let it down - they match the random patchwork of the sound, but take a step too far in the direction of gibberish for the most part.

A ragged, gnarly listen, Future Teenage Cave Artists is, fittingly, one of the band’s most experimental offerings in years, offering short bursts of breakneck, catchy garage rock, counterbalanced by plenty of reverb-drenched dissonance and eerie atmospherics. Just as it feels like it may be settling into something approaching conventional songcraft, the band chucks in a blast of competing ideas that sound like they’re eating each other alive, desperately scrambling for survival.

If Future Teenage Cave Artists is the only cultural artifact left behind in an apocalypse, future generations will at least have an interesting scripture to use to rebuild.

There's more hope to be found in the sound Deerhoof assemble into single songs that play like a hallucinating DJ's set. Any element sounds perfectly straight by itself, but layered together, they feel imported from the multiverse. [Jul 2020, p.87]

It’s never an easy listen, sure, but there’s method to the madness.

It wouldn’t be a Deerhoof album if there wasn’t a barrage of unexpected riffs, squeals and feedback littered across most tracks, as well as a few madcap lyrical excursions.

Even if nothing on here rises to the career-best heights of 2003’s Apple O’ or 2005’s The Runners Four, it’s another strong album from a band whose sheer continued existence (and refusal to bend to conventional recording standards) often feels like a triumph of absurdity in the face of encroaching hopelessness.

In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music.

A polished version of the group’s classic style propels this concept, but their invigorating eccentricity disintegrates as the album progresses. The opening title track feels familiar, with its quintessential electric riff, but this vibrancy quickly breaks down with songs like “Reduced Guilt”, whose tense harmonies drive a constant sense of unease. The record feels rote for the band, until it reaches its enigmatic conclusion. [Sep 2020, p.49]