I am, and have always been, staunchly against the Spotify-driven trend of hyper-specific microgenres. Not only is it straight-up stupid much of the time, it’s also actively confining artists themselves, often shoving them into even smaller, odder boxes and forcing them to compete with the other bands trapped inside. We ought to work toward transcending genre, not doubling down on it. And yet: I must admit that Girl Scout’s debut record, Brink, has made me finally understand the appeal of the Spotify-popularized label of “bubblegrunge.” It is, begrudgingly, the most apt description of the Swedish trio’s sound that I can think of: the bright, bouncy “Same Kids,” for instance, feels like someone set the bubblegum pop tunes of 2010s tween TV (think Lemonade Mouth or Victorious) to heavy guitars and distorted bass.
The 13 tracks of fuzzy, bright, guitar-driven alt-pop on Brink cover an impressive amount of sonic ground for a debut: spiky post-punk sits next to lush synth-driven arrangements; deadpan wit neighbors widescreen melodrama; and—buoyed by production from Drop of Sound’s Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Snail Mail)—the whole thing moves with a confidence that belies the fact that, while the band is already responsible for three stellar EPs (especially Granny Music), they’ve never actually made a full-length record before. Emma Jansson, Per Lindberg, and Kevin Hamring met studying jazz at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music but bonded over ’80s and ’90s guitar records instead of lead sheets, and you can hear both halves of that origin story all over Brink. The arrangements are tight and deliberate, every drum entrance and bass line locked in with conservatory precision, but the songs themselves have a scrappy, garage-rock restlessness that keeps contrasting the poppy polish. I’m not sure there’s anything Jansson’s voice can’t do, either; she oscillates between a low, Mitski-esque tenor, airborne falsetto, blade-sharp belts, and Courtney Barnett-style dry confessionalism with complete and total ease.
Both Jansson and Hamring grew up as expats—Jansson bouncing between Japan, the U.S., and Germany before settling in Sweden at age 12; Hamring spending much of his childhood in Canada—and there’s a shared sense of incongruity that gives the album’s quarter-life anxieties a texture deeper than the usual “growing up is scary” indie fare. “Brink came out of a time when I couldn’t really picture what the future might look like,” Jansson has said in press materials, “somewhere between dread and anticipation.” That liminal unease is the album’s emotional throughline, even when individual songs vary wildly in how they choose to express it.
And Brink is often at its most compelling when it finds that unease in small, specific places rather than big declarations. “Ugly Things” is maybe the clearest example: over finger-picked electric guitar and slow, steady drums, Jansson catalogs the mundane indignities of daily life—the nausea-inducing detergent on the grocery store floor, the construction site blocking the view from the west bridge, a concrete slab on an industrial road where she once sat criss-cross reaching out toward a multilane highway—and then reframes all of it through the presence of someone who makes those ugly places bearable. “You make them better than they’ve ever been,” she sings in her high, clear-headed voice, and the line earns its sweetness precisely because the ugliness around it is so lived-in and tactile. On “Uh-Huh,” that specificity takes on a more playful edge: a crush who quoted Vonnegut to sound smart, who paved the corner by the neighbor’s pool while she watched from her window, who she now sees in the automatic laundromat and feels in the static rain. Jansson’s voice starts the song light and airy, almost falsetto, over a glimmering synth, but by the final chorus it’s sharpened into a full-throated belt—the transition happening right as the lyrics turn from fond remembrance to something more pained (“When you spoke I heard the world laugh / Can’t take it back, you really made your mark”).
It’s only when the album goes big—when it lunges for the soaring anthem—that things occasionally start to flatten out. Not because the bigness is badly executed (it isn’t), but because the strangeness and emotional heft get somewhat lost inside the stadium-built, larger-than-life pop sheen. The nostalgic “Same Kids” is perhaps the most obvious example; as fun as it is, it flirts a tad too closely with convention (again, there’s something distinctly Victorious about the melody and production) to make the best use of the band’s grungier, odder instincts. Those wide, heavy anthemic swells crop up throughout the record: on “Crumbs,” on “Song 1,” at the end of “Homecoming,” and only the latter feels like it properly earns it, having built toward that explosion of sound from the very first second of the track. The lyrics tend to feel a little weaker as well: “Cut the fake shit / Til we’re grown / Playing records we were always in the zone / We can make it on our own,” is pretty cliche on “Same Kids,” and the story of “Song 1” (“She wore that dress you like / … / It used to make your eyes light up / Not it’s for someone else”) feels rather trite.
That’s not to say, though, that Girl Scout is best when they’re quiet and serious; in fact, my favorite song off the album might be the ridiculous mid-album number “Operator,” an ode to telephone operators that Jansson herself described as “Such a dumb song!” It is! And it’s also great fun. The band goes full Guerilla Toss and gets downright weird with it, all wiry guitar riffs and chanted “Beep-beep”s. It’s utterly danceable, but without losing any of the uniqueness that makes Girl Scout stand out in the first place. I’d also argue it kicks off the best four-song run on the record: “Operator,” of course, followed by the dry, addictive indie rock churn of “Simple Life” and the soft and sweet “Ugly Things” before finally arriving at the utterly idiosyncratic “The Kill.” The latter is built on a mystery tuning Jansson has said she can’t even identify, its plaintive acoustic vocal punctuated by harsh electric bursts that land between her syllables like exclamation points; alien synths warble beneath the later verses, and then the whole track dissolves into an unhinged synth solo from collaborator Kalle Johansson. Girl Scout’s range boggles the mind between those four tracks alone.
The album’s title is apt in more ways than one. Brink is a record about standing on the edge of something—of adulthood, of change, of decisions that suddenly carry weight they never used to—but it’s also, in a more literal sense, a band standing on the edge of figuring out what kind of band it wants to be. The outro, fittingly, dissolves back into the hum and piano plinks of the intro, the album eating its own tail like it’s not quite ready to commit to an ending. Maybe that’s the real promise of bubblegrunge as a descriptor: it’s a word that contains two things at once, and Brink is at its best when it lets both of them coexist without smoothing either one out—the grit and the gloss, the weirdness and the warmth. And if Brink is how Girl Scout sound when they’re still figuring it out, I can’t wait to hear what happens when they jump off the edge. [AWAL]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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