Just in time for summer, Lifeguard have arrived with the kind of guitar record you can play loud all day without wearing it out. They’re a young, raw art-punk threesome from Chicago, finally putting out their debut album with the hotly awaited Ripped and Torn, on Matador. They started making noise when they were still in high school — two-thirds of Lifeguard are still in their teens. But they’ve already got a fervent following. They released the twin 2023 EPs Crowds Can Talk and Dressed in Trenches; last year they dropped the high-energy single “Ministry/Energie,” and did a Wipers cover on the flip side.
Yet that just hinted at the power of Ripped and Torn. Lifeguard have their own wonderfully brash power-clang guitar attack, jumping right in with the frantic “A Tightwire” and keeping the buzz going for 12 jagged songs in barely over a half-hour, without a pause for breath. They sound willing to try anything, except being boring.
Lifeguard come from the hopping teenage Chicago underground rock scene, the Hallogallo collective, with kindred spirits like Horsegirl, Friko, Answering Machines and many more. It’s named after the art/music zine published by singer-guitarist Kai Slater, which he started up during the pandemic to keep the DIY scene in touch with each other. (In turn, the zine’s named after a Neu! song.) In addition to Lifeguard, Slater has a completely different other top-shelf band, Sharp Pins, who just released an superb album Radio DDR, going for a mod lo-fi jangle-pop sound that bristles with intelligence.
If these bands have anything in common, it’s their hyper-active youthful energy, cocky confidence, cool record collections, and a refusal to follow cliches. There’s a family connection as well: Lifeguard drummer Isaac Lowenstein’s older sister Phoebe plays in Horsegirl, who just released their own bang-up album Phonetics On and On. (The two bands collaborated last year for a giddy cover of the Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored.”) These kids don’t waste time, and neither does this album.
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Ripped and Torn was produced by Randy Randall, from the excellent L.A. noise-punk band No Age. Slater, Lowenstein, and bassist Asher Case jump right in, with fiery rockers like “It Will Get Worse.” Their sound is definitely in the Matador tradition — it makes sense for Lifeguard to drop this stellar debut thirty years after the peerless Matador spring of ’95. That might be the hottest streak any rock label has ever had, cranking out stone-cold classics by Guided By Voices (Alien Lanes), Pavement (Wowee Zowee), Helium (The Dirt of Luck), Yo La Tengo (Electr-O-Pura), and Chavez (Gone Glimmering), all within a few weeks. But this album would fit right in, and that’s high praise indeed.
“Under Your Reach” begins with 20 seconds of white-noise synth buzz before the rhythm section kicks in with a martial beat, leading to a harmony-drenched chorus. “Like You’ll Lose” is steeped in Eighties U.K. postpunk, with the dub-wise throb of the Raincoats, Gang of Four, or the Pop Group. Fugazi might be the loudest element in their sound, especially the quiet-to-massive bass breakdowns in songs like “A Tightwire.” But you can also hear the Pacific Northwest roar of Unwound, with the stick-to-the-ribs crunch of their Midwest forebears like Arcwelder. There’s also a surprising amount of early-2000s NYC dance-punk, especially the Rapture.
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Yet Lifeguard turn it all into their own style of craftily melodic body-slam punk hooks, including a kinda-sorta theme song in “(I Wanna) Break Out.” They cut Ripped and Torn at Chicago’s famous studio Electrical Audio. The band released a 2023 video from a live session recorded by the late Steve Albini — a torch-passing of sorts, since they’re steeped in the kind of uncompromising rock Albini spent his life making and recording. (Strange but true: Case and Lowenstein first met as tweens when one noticed the other was wearing a Tortoise shirt. Insert your own Millions Now Living Will Never Die joke.)
Ripped and Torn hits hardest at the end, in the enigmatic chime of “T.L.A.,” a song of yearning where Slater sings, “Words like ‘tonality’ come to me.” The abrasive guitar harmonics might evoke legends like Polvo or Mission of Burma, but as always, Lifeguard give each sound its own fresh twist. They pace the whole album like experts, hopping from idea to idea within the same song, never letting the pace drag. Spending the summer with Ripped and Torn is gonna be fun.
