Naked Giants Think They Know (But Don’t Really Know) Who They Want to Be

UPDATED: March 5, 2018 at 3:08 p.m.

Naked Giants’ website features the following quote from drummer Henry LaVallee: “I just want to make as much noise and have as much fun and get as sweaty as I can.” A cursory listen to their new single, “Everybody Thinks They Know (But No One Really Knows),” might suggest that the band’s music is the embodiment of LaVallee’s mission statement. The track’s fast tempo, seemingly-untrained singing, distorted guitar, and excitingly sloppy drum fills are hallmarks of a DIY punk aesthetic that is often further characterized by the noise, the fun, and the sweat. But look any closer and “Everybody Thinks They Know” is trying for more than just fun. Naked Giants are trying too many things at once in their path to stardom, and they’re failing at too many for “Everybody Thinks They Know” to be a total success.

To make a more current comparison, the chorus’s inclusion of the ubiquitous “millennial whoop” evokes any number of late-2000s/early-2010s indie pop choruses. Furthermore, the production of the song is too polished to deny that Naked Giants have grander career aspirations than sweaty fun. The instruments, especially the drums, are recorded and mixed in a glossier way than one tends to hear in indie punk music, and the dissonant, arrhythmic guitar and bass chords that start the recording sound more planned than the mid-show tuning they are meant to evoke.

Is this aesthetic diversity a good thing? In the opinion of this reviewer, it is not. “Everybody Thinks They Know (But No One Really Knows)” is hamstrung by its ambition to be both a punk head-banger and a radio-friendly indie anthem. And in the end, it achieves neither goal, too intentional for punk and too melodically Spartan for indie pop. The name Naked Giants provides a likely unintended but nonetheless useful shorthand for this stylistic dilemma. Will the band be Naked—raw, sweat-and-noise-loving punk rockers, as suggested by Henry LaVallee—or Giants—polished and commercially-oriented indie stars? Time will tell, but for now, here’s to hoping they stop trying to be both at once. As the “Bible says, no one can serve two masters.”