By the looks of it, this next one ahead of us is set to be a kaleidoscopic and densely chromatic summer. At the very least, as far as our musical forecast is concerned. You ask both alt-psych rock supergroup Fuckin Whatever and singer/songwriter Ryan Adams. Amidst recent notable music unveilings, including but not limited to Sir Paul McCartney, The Offspring, and The Blossom, it has emerged that the self-billed “Beach Boys for the nihilist TikTok generation” as well as the Pax Americana Recording Company-founder both saw fit to time the release of their respective highly anticipated forthcoming projects within a week-span from one another, dating early June. Incidentally, both the Taking Back Sunday, Circa Survive, and Grouplove-distilled quartet—composed of selected key members from each of the aforementioned original outfits and responding to a somewhat questionable name—and the American heartland rocker opted for an artistic inclination veered to design and portray their soon-to-be-unwrapped sonic tapestries through tints and tinges aplenty.

Counting Circa Survive’s and Saosin’s Anthony Green, Taking Back Sunday‘s Adam Lazzara and John Nolan, as well as additional percussion from Benjamin Homola of Grouplove amongst its ranks, Fuckin Whatever is a postmodern and analogue side-project gestated throughout longstanding kinships minted as part of the alternative/emo rock scene over the past two decades. The group’s debut self-titled five-cut extended play is out on 4th June on Philadelphia-based boutique imprint Born Losers Records, and features zero—yes, zero—electric or amplified instruments on tape. Co-frontman and Taking Back Sunday vocalist Lazzara clarifies how the record is instead made up of “[…] pretty much 80% mouth noises and 20% Ben slapping things around the house”, hence banking on rudimentary a cappella arrangements and visceral percussive rhythms to paint collective mental and spiritual landscapes made of rainbow-shaded rays and holographic skies.

It thus probably comes as no surprise that all three teasers dropped in anticipation to the full mind-bending gesamtkunstwerk dabble in pretty strong abstract, deconstructed, and psychedelic territory. This is perhaps best exemplified by their trippy and hallucinating lead single “Trash“—revealed to the public under purposefully elusive and mysterious circumstances in early February as part of a decisively understated roll out. Facts started to become clearer around the drop of the band’s second preview cut, coming by way of the funkier and more immediate groove-pop of “I’m Waiting On You“, about a month later. Fastforward to just weeks ago, the rather hippie and free-experimentation quartet—whose inception can be traced as far back as a remote USA parking lot during the 2016 Taste of Chaos tour—released what is poised to be the final taster before the full collection of tracks sees the multicoloured light of day: “Original Sin“. The record also marks the rated-R outfit’s official debut on licensed digital outlets (their first two songs were only made available through DIY platform Bandcamp in alignment to its Bandcamp Fridays initiative), showcasing an even more heightened songwriting sensibility in the guise of arguably the stickiest tune of the three.

On his part, former Whiskeytown-frontman and alt-rock prodigy Ryan Adams seems to have chosen to stick to dropping the reported trilogy of full length LPs he initially announced back in 2019 after all, albeit with a re-tooled roll out sequence. The first in the series, the unplugged-affine Wednesdays, whilst initially slated to be the second one after Big Colors, was actually already surprise-released this past December as the first instalment. Big Colors on the other hand, which was supposed to inaugurate the triplet body of work two years ago, has now officially been recycled and repurposed as what appears to be the principal creative statement of intent for the 46-year old poet, scheduled as second chapter with a worldwide street date pencilled in for 11th June (a third and final double album titled Chris is reported to drop later in the year). Clocking in at just below forty minutes of runtime and spanning twelve cuts in total, the project is shy of three songs that were initially announced to be sequenced on Big Colors when Adams first announced the saga (two of which, “Dreaming You Backwards” and “I’m Sorry and I Love You“, ended up making the cut on Wednesdays, which in turn saw its own tracklisting shrink from the original seventeen to just eleven).

On 23rd April, the hypnotic and ethereal “Do Not Disturb” got lifted from its second tracklisting position and used as first single off the upcoming studio full length by Adams and Pax Am. Standing as the eighteenth solo LP from the singer, the record is fiercely shaping up to employ a host of hazy, sun-soaked, and hollow color schemes in order to refract its outgoing tinctures through the lighthouse it was meant to act as in the first place. In the words of Ryan himself:

Big Colors is the soundtrack to a movie from 1984 that exists only in my soul. It’s a cliché inside a watercolor painting of neon blue smoke rising up off summer streets in the night.

It’s the most New York California album I could cut loose from my musical soul, and for me as both a guitar player and songwriter, this is the zenith point dream time.

While I won’t be able to match this album for its depth and broad color forms in the future, this is the sound of my soul and a door to a place I’ll be returning to again.

The treasures in our past are the shamanic visions of the future when the destination is dream zone 3000. This is that.

I’m only dreaming in Big Colors now.

The above excerpt is clearly paining a broad illustrative brush, though one can’t but rejoice over the blissful electric alignment of summer pigments and tones that both Big Colors and Fuckin Whatever are presently affording us to worship and adore. A radiant, glowing, and iridescent portal through which, all of a sudden, tracking the right mapping to one’s life wholesomeness does not seem too arduous and impenetrable anymore. These are budding creative fragments teaching us that colouring outside the lines is a purpose’s ultimate defiance—the only heightened and levitating cosmic field where black and white are declassed to archaic ends of a continuously superseded dialectic spectrum of movement, light, and electromagnetism. One that, instead, embraces the ultraviolet and the infrared as its lowest common denominators, and transfuses a brave new proto-sphere made of decaying palm trees, dour neon signs, and ephemeral sunsets culminating into a… big whatever one wants it to be.

I’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and I hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV