If I’ve written it once, I’ve written it a hundred times on this blog: I love power pop, and I don’t care who knows it. I think everyone on this blog, and all of you reading, feel very similarly about music in general. There’s something you love that you feel compelled to justify even though most people probably don’t care. When I get to feeling like that about pop punk or power pop, I always point to Charly Bliss. I personally find their particular brand of sweet and sour to be the most expressive example of the sound, and the band is one of the best bands touring right now.
It really drips with fun pop sensibilities. It feels like 90s alternative in a way. The music is very accessible and simple to follow. It’s very engaging in the way that pop music just seems to relate to everyone. It’s extremely catchy with a lot of hooks and melody. I personally love it because it just feels like a lot of the angsty teenager music I listened to when I was an angsty teenager. It expresses relatable emotions in a serious way that can grab anyone’s attention by hiding heavy thoughts inside a catchy tune.
The first track was from their 2017 full-length Guppywhich was a fun trip through pop punk. This year’s Young Enough embraced more modern thoughts in music and embedding them within Charly Bliss’s version of pop punk. It sort of sounds like a more upbeat version of new wave that bands like Cults and Chvrches have brought into the 21stcentury. Echoing throughout all of the records is vocalist Eva Hendricks’s voice. The reason Charly Bliss is so expressive as a band is because of her vocals and lyrics. They can either seem forced and frayed to express depressed exhaustion or strong and fierce to convey anger. It’s such a wide range that each song is its own little journey.
Despite producing this year’s critically acclaimed Young Enough, the band dropped an awesome 5 track EP, Supermoon. They’ve described the EP as the transition from their pop punk roots into the synth-pop style of today. You can clearly hear that in the 5 songs and see how the band opened their songwriting style into a far more expansive way. Their whole discography is great and very worth your time.