SNOWMEN: A Kick to the Face

The Internet tells me these guys started off as a Strokes cover band. I can appreciate that. Which is kind of funny considering their lead singer looks more like a 1983 waterbed salesman than he does a cool, greasy downtown NYC fashion plate. Whoever the least cool dude is you can picture — picture that guy and layer on like five more degrees of dork. Like if Tim Harrington from Les Savy Fav went back to school to get his accounting degree. In Topeka. Looks aren’t everything, of course, so who the hell cares if the band isn’t exactly sexy MTV fodder (if MTV still existed). I’m just happy to hear an actual rock band come out of Brooklyn that doesn’t try to be much more than a fun, post-punk vibe with art rock overtones, akin to the aforementioned predecessors, LSF, and their more experimental buddies, Liars. Music that is clearly meant to be played live to a young crowd of sweaty men.

If anything is left of their Strokes past, it’s the groovy bass lines that seem to snake their way through every track. That’s not to say that they haven’t moved on and adopted some other bands in their repertoire on this, their debut album. And it’s a hodge-podge, to be sure. There’s a breakdown section in “Primordial Soup” that sounds like an exact Black Sabbath riff. “War Pigs,” maybe? I don’t know — I’m no fan or expert of that music, but if I hear it, it must either be intentional or a tribute of some sort. There is a lot of Bloc Party going on (including what feels like a direct interpolation of “Helicopter” on their tune, “The Visitor”), and even more Parquet Courts (the track “Make Time/Waste Time” the primary example). And even a suspiciously Cure-like bass intro on their song “You Can’t Relate.” If you’re sensing a trend here, you’re not wrong. A new band coping some styles and some sounds intentionally or not from their post-punk heroes. Not that I’m inside their heads, but if you’re going to borrow, why not borrow from the best?

This may all sound good or bad to you depending on your POV, I suppose. We want our bands to be original. We want them to sound like themselves and nobody else. But do we really? Don’t we want to hear stuff we like? Do we always need to be challenged? And, sure, we may not be moving music forward in the evolutionary sense, but people probably didn’t appreciate or like platypuses when they came along. They were like, what was wrong with a fucking duck? And otters are cute. I’m fine with an otter. Beavers build dams and I’ve seen those YouTube vids of people who rehab them in their houses and they end up building shit out of their kid’s toys and piles of shoes. It’s adorable. The world is fine with these creatures and are still cool with them. In fact, one of them is pretty delicious if prepared well. But what point does a platypus serve other than as a curiosity? Like music that challenges our notion of what rock music is. Or what a mammal is or isn’t. Sometimes we just want that cute egg-laying waterfowl. Or that cute mammal that we’re used to and makes us feel good. Just like Snowmen.

Now, the name. I’m not sure if this is some sort of coke reference, or if they joked around that the band would last as long as snowmen or something, but it is an impossibly bad Google name. There are already bands with the same or similar names that hog the results and make for a tough slog trying to get info on them. Also, Snowmen is arguably just not a great name. Especially in NYC, where it truly barely ever snows. It seems they met at NYU, which makes sense, but also makes me wonder how long ago? These don’t appear to be kids at this point, so they either all took several gap years or have been at this for a bit. Whatever the case, this is an immensely enjoyable record. They happen to be into what I used to be into, which makes for a good refresher in 2025. Kids — or whatever they are — moving away from the stupid shoegaze and bleep-bloop trends to make some actual energetic rock music is never something I’ll complain about. I can’t say their lyrics are going to win any poetry contests or inspire Springsteen or Dylan comps or anything, but who really listens to lyrics anyway? Plus, their words are pretty NYC-centric, which always wins the day.