SOUND BITES

  Spurred by relocating back to Texas and getting interrupted by a pandemic during recording, Spoon's tenth album was a long time coming; its nearly five year gap from previous outing Hot Thoughts marks the widest gap between albums to date. These events also led to a refocusing of the band's sound, leaning into a looser, more rock n' roll aesthetic. It's possible, actually, that Lucifer On the Sofa may be the purest rock record Spoon has ever created; that's not to say that this record is a wall-to-wall fist-bumping anthems, but there is certainly less atmosphere and sonic world-building than we've heard from the traditionally restless explorers in quite some time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when these excursions into more traditional rock territory are as thrilling as The Hardest Cut , a downtuned, sludgy boogie that plays like a meaner and more well-spoken incarnation of ZZ Top. It's a true outlier in Spoon's discography, but o...

As has been established at this point in their 20+ years of existence, Spoon is incapable of making a bad record. Even their missteps can be boiled down to minor gripes; on previous release They Want My Soul , though, I felt Dave Fridmann's in-the-red production style didn't do the songs justice, and as such was left just a little cold by a Spoon record for the first time... well, ever. So, on tenth record Hot Thoughts , Fridmann's been enlisted again. However, the difference this time out is that the songs seem more suited to our modern, loud times. There's a noticeable shift away from indie rock here, as the band explores a more rhythmic avenue for the majority of the songs. Beats pulse, guitars jangle, and there are a lot more background sounds happening here than on previous Spoon albums. It's not as though they've never experimented before, but this is the first time they've employed such an exploratory nature of such an extent; to be clear, there...

Spoon have long been considered one of modern rock's most consistent purveyors of quality records; in fact, they put themselves in a fairly unique position with their previous studio album, 2010's Transference . That was a record that was actually quite good, but had the misfortune of following a string of four utterly fantastic Spoon records, which cast an unfairly critical pall on it. It was a gold nugget among diamonds, a record that didn't sound like a failure but kind of felt like one (albeit a minor one). Now, coming off their longest break between records, Spoon are back with a new record deal and another batch of effortlessly catchy songs on eighth LP They Want My Soul . It maintains the air of cool that Spoon has always had even while knowingly veering toward the mainstream, sanding off a few rough edges and opting for bigger hooks and less quirk. You can hear it throughout the record, but especially in the unabashed sunniness of official lead single Do You . As ...