Wide Awake!

In range, energy and freshness, this may be their best album yet.

There’s a disagreement about whether this should be classed as their fourth, fifth or sixth album, but there’s little doubt that Wide Awake! is up there with their very best.

Truly, Wide Awake! is a success all round--the joyous sound of a band taking everything that makes them great and amplifying it, toying with it and producing something even greater.

Wide Awake! is a letter-perfect musical contemplation of modern times, where social uprisings are actually affecting positive change. It's urgent and potent music that's thought-provoking and danceable, and whose rage is measured by a pointed optimism.

This is the most diverse record put out under the Parquet Courts banner. ... It’s no enormous stretch to say that Savage is possibly the finest lyricist working in rock and roll today, and he’s certainly one of our most engaging vocalists.

By enlisting pop wunderkind Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton as their first-ever outside producer, Parquet Courts has opened up its musical palette even more than most recent effort, 2016’s ballad-laden “Human Performance.” In fact, “Wide Awake!” may be the most woke punk-rock record since the heyday of the Clash, and it starts off with a very appropriate soccer-style chant.

Their vocal frustrations make perfect fodder for their post-punk blasts, and in combination they add up to some of the most invigorating music currently being created, making Wide Awake! a valuable and vital call to arms.

While Wide Awake! is perhaps less adventurous than the band's last two "proper" records, it is more sharply focused, with twists and turns that knock you off your dancing feet. [Mar - May 2018, p.58]

Wide Awake! is a full arc of an album, one that captures both Parquet Courts’ usual keyed-up exasperation and their new, hard-earned optimism.

Wide Awake still sounds like Parquet Courts, but it’s a far more colourful, warmer and bolder version of the band.

Wide Awake will have to respectfully play 3rd place behind Sunbathing Animal and Light Up Gold, as those are the ones to beat.

A brutally funny, scuzzy and lacking-in-seriousness affair, it truly is one of the most entertaining New York guitar albums of modern times.

Parquet Courts’ ridiculously good new album Wide Awake!, is a delirious ode to the power of collectivity thinly masquerading as a gameday anthem.

Wide Awake! might be too scattershot to appeal to a much wider audience, but it does cement Parquet Courts’ position as one of US indie’s more intriguing outliers.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

With light-touch production by Danger Mouse, this is also the funkiest and sweetest Parquet Courts set yet, trading off some of their trademark guitar fireworks for danceable jams.

Far from softening Parquet Courts’ edges, [producer Danger Mouse] has enhanced everything that makes the quartet great--sound, imagination, style. The Beastie Boys, Black Flag and Talking Heads are all here in spirit.

Chaotic, visionary and righteously pissed off, Wide Awake! feels like the perfect rock record for the times. [Jul 2018, p.113]

Here they sound truly alive, impassioned and buoyant on their finest LP to date. [Jun 2018, p.33]

With Danger Mouse's help, the band has crafted a diverse and intrepid album, stepping out of their comfort zone musically while also exuding a trenchant political posture.

As usual, there’s a lot more going on than first meets the ear.

Wide Awake is certainly not their best, but it is their most wide ranging and as such, it could just be one that splits the hardcore fanbase right down the middle.

Those who are open to hearing the band take on a variety of styles and bend them to their will should be very happy with Wide Awake! Those who want the band to crank out an album of just bitter, bopping punk may have to wait until next time.