Enumclaw

Speak to Enumclaw singer Aramis Johnson for just a second about his band’s sweeping second album, Home in Another Life, and he’ll tell you how he doesn’t want to be seen—just another millennial-pilled musician, someone too deep into therapy-speak and ceaseless vulnerability to tell you just how fun it can be to play in a rock band. Johnson is 28, after all, still sporting the kind of youthful swagger that suggests most everything might just be a joke. Put on Home in Another Life, and you can spot that esprit instantly: the way the guitars swell and screech behind him as he talks about beer, thongs, and love during the inescapable “Spots”; the surging hook about Sally’s lack of apparent stupidity above the sunbaked jangle of “Grocery Store”; the shout-out-loud protestations that clamber atop arena-sized drums during “Not Just Yet.” Recorded in a four-day Seattle sprint by Enumclaw’s four dudes last winter, this is the kind of explosive record you want to blare during a top-down drive along the California coastline or while aiming headlong into a Midwestern sunset.

But keep talking to Johnson about Home in Another Life for very long at all, and that formidable façade steadily collapses, a stone wall slowly being pulled apart. As breathless and alluring as these songs sound, they are powered both by Johnson’s abiding self-doubt and a drive for self-improvement, the desire to be more than he is right now. It is written into each of these 11 tracks, Johnson’s heart tucked just beneath the sleeve of these pulsing tunes. Work backward from tender closer “I Want Some Things for Myself,” where Johnson yearns to swap his anxiety and hopelessness for patience and focus. “I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation” examines shame from every direction, aiming for self-acceptance amid imperfection. And magnetic from first second to last, “Change” is an absolute anthem about trying to be anything more than fucked up, about getting past the habits that hamstring you. Are you really millennial-pilled if you’re just trying to figure out your own life?

There is talk about God and sex, drugs and regret, all direct transmissions from someone wrestling with the weight of growing up. “Can I make it different? Can I make it small?” Johnson sings during one perfect moment of “Sink.” These songs do just that, reducing a life’s struggles to three minutes at a time so that they can not only be understood but sung above the clatter of what has quickly become a very, very good band.