FEELS, Post Earth
“Kids are dying in the streets and you’re bored in bed? What the hell?!”
Outrage permeates much of Post Earth, the second full-length from LA punk quartet FEELS. It’s in the title track, a riff-heavy dispatch from a near future when billionaires flee the dying Earth, only to find their own comeuppance. It’s in the tuneful, ’70s punk of opener “Car” and its dismissal of “one nation under fraud.” It’s in the jittery “Find a Way,” which demands, “Burn all the money, all the flags, all this stupid pride.” It’s in the entreaties to resist in “Tollbooth”—also mentioned above—“The world needs you! The world needs you and you and you.”
“I don’t think that the record is super specific to this political time in itself,” says bassist Amy Allen, who composes FEELS with Laena Geronimo (guitar/vocals), Shannon Lay (guitar/vocals), and Michael Perry Rudes (drums). “But in the broader sense of we all need to wake up and figure it out, because we’re running out of time. Our golden age is over.”
“Honestly I wasn’t thinking about trying to make the album have any kind of linear story,” Geronimo says of Post Earth’s themes. “I’m just so mentally consumed with what’s going on in the world right now that it ends up being that way.”
Maybe FEELS don’t intend to make a statement, but they definitely intend to speak out: “If you have any kind of platform, you should use it for good,” Lay says. “We don’t want to put anybody off; we just wanna say how we feel and speak to people that maybe feel that way too, but didn’t know how to express that themselves.”
That said, Post Earth hardly wallows in despair: Look for the Simpsons references—courtesy of superfan Lay—in goofy rave-up “Deconstructed.” The atmospheric jam “Sour” finds Geronimo defiantly proclaiming “This land is our land” to people in power who exploit division. The understated melodies of “W.F.L.”—short for “work for love”—sing of dirt under fingernails “to remind us why we do what we do.”
FEELS do what they do thanks to a bond that stretches back to adolescence: Geronimo, Allen, and Rudes have known each other since high school, when Rudes’ garage served as hangout and nexus for their musical projects. Lay and Rudes played in Geronimo’s solo project, Raw Geronimo, for years before it morphed into FEELS with the addition of Allen. Their shared history makes for a rare chemistry among collaborators: They refer to each other as “my crew,” “amazing people,” “my best friends in the world,” and marvel how they “couldn’t ask for a better group of people.”
After recording their acclaimed 2016 debut, FEELS, with Ty Segall in one marathon daylong session, FEELS decamped to northern California in August 2017 for a comparatively luxurious eight days with Tim Green. The former guitarist of punk iconoclasts Nation of Ulysses has worked with Corin Tucker, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Joanna Newsom, Jawbreaker, and many others. “Ty Segall’s basement is pretty cool—don’t get me wrong,” Rudes says, laughing. But living in Green’s studio was “an ideal experience to be able to go away somewhere and lock ourselves up and get in the zone.”
“I think the first one was very much like how we were live,” Lay says. “It was just this barrage of noise and energy, and then with this one we were able to give it some breath and take our time—and also just think about what we were trying to say with this record and how we didn’t necessarily want to constantly scream it at you.”
“We feel comfortable not having to power through everything,” Geronimo adds. “And also for all the more subtle things to be heard a little better instead of being glossed over with noise. Not that that’s a bad thing, but we’re doing all of these weird, interesting things—maybe we should actually hear them?”
Like the interlocking components of “Anyways,” which reveal Geronimo’s classical training. (She also happens to be the daughter of legendary Devo drummer Alan Myers.) “I wrote it to be these really specific parts that had to layer over each other exactly, which is a real sheet-music kind of bullshit thing,” she says, laughing. “Luckily everyone was down to humor me.”
But that’s the MO of FEELS:“There’s no point in being like, ‘That’s not going to work,’” Geronimo says. “Just try it—who knows?”
“Who knows?” is also the central question of Post Earth. “It’s more of a questioning than a telling kind of album,” Geronimo says. “I guess that’s the bottom line. It’s a questioning: What’s gonna happen?”
There’s no easy answer to that one. But if the good old days are over, Post Earth shows FEELS’ golden age is just beginning.