Pop punk has always had a bit of a reputation for being a bit, let’s say, immature. A bit too reliant on frat-boy humor and tongue-in-cheek jokes. It also fell into a very tried and tested sound that deviated little from the blend of accessible pop meets anti-social rock sound that first defined it.
But now that the pop-punk heyday of the likes of Blink 41 has come and gone, there is room to reexamine, re-imagine, and redefine what the genre can be. And No Hope and No Reason Why, the latest one from Run Brother Run, is the sound of precisely that happening.
What is great about this album is that rather than use that golden age as a springboard to extrapolate what its logical next step should sound like, Stesh, the person behind what is essentially a solo project, looks back to its roots, stirs the sonic melting pot again and creates a different mix. So this is less the sound of what pop-punk can be today but more the sound of what it always could have been had the dice fallen differently and the sonic winds blew the genre down a different leg of the trousers of destiny. Or something!
So, it follows that the music here owes more to the likes of The Buzzcocks original pop/punk experiments, The Ramones do-wop punk bop, and, perhaps most important of all, The Descendants seminal album Milo Goes To College rather than the sound that followed it.
This, then, is music made on the alternative timeline. Music that better captures the raw and raucous nature before Blink 182’s Enema of the State took the whole thing overground. As such, you can still hear all manner of post-punkery and hardcore, proto-grunge and hard rock at work alongside the more expected pop-punk power plays.
This isn’t the sound of what was; it’s the sound of what might have been, but also the sound of forty years of musical mayhem manifesting into a new, exciting, and unified sound. Marvellous!
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