Isle Of Wight punks Grade 2 wrestle with a whirlwind coming-of-age on rollercoaster fourth album Talk About it… Grief. Growth. Grafting every step of the way. Twelve years since they first cranked amps as schoolkids rattling their music room out on the Isle of Wight, Grade 2 have plenty to talk about. From seeing dreams dangling precariously during COVID to blasting back with 2023’s self-titled third LP, frontman Sid Ryan, guitarist Jack Chatfield and drummer Jacob Hull looked to have claimed their place on top of the world. But storming festivals like Rock am Ring and rubbing shoulders with heroes like Rancid and Guns N’ Roses was only half the story. Offstage, the trio were dealing with the quiet dissonance of island life back at their parents’ places, finding time for romantic relationships and plotting the path for-ward through a world increasingly going to shit. Rollercoaster fourth album Talk About It is a chronicle of every tribulation and triumph. “The title-track was initially called Communication, a song about how men don’t talk about the things that really matter to them,” explains Sid. “But it became Talk About It, which sums up the whole album, touching on every emotion that you feel while being in a band, from love to loss to personal turmoil to ambition. It’s a coming-of-age story about Grade 2 entering adulthood...” From dealing with a dog-eat-dog music industry on Cut Throat and learning to live life at 100mph with Crash And Burn to confronting political toxicity on Rotten, paying tribute to their waterlocked home with Smugglers Haven and processing the pain of loss heartfelt closer Otherside, it’s a wild ride. And a compelling first step on the next chapter from one of modern punk’s brightest lights. “This is everything we’ve been through,” Sid smiles, bittersweetly, “but we’re still here!”
It’s been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band—made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass—dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: “I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it,” Dreyer says. Partly inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car reckons with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. In fourteen dynamic tracks, the band grapples with the existential topic and the human need to find comfort and a sense of security in an existence where we’re often thrust into chaos without permission. Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before. “As much as I don’t enjoy the creative process because it’s taxing and often not fun, I also think it’s the most fun that I ever have,” Dreyer contemplates. “It’s the revelations you make, the breakthroughs. It’s banging your head against a wall and suddenly something clicks in a way that feels almost divine, like it came from somewhere else.”