Awesome

For anybody still convinced that Geese’s explosion in popularity was a fully botted psy-op rather than the natural byproduct of present-day digital marketing in a culture starved for new rock’n’roll saviors (and, you know, an album that’s actually good), allow me to offer Heathers as an analogue study. The solo project of one Heath Michael Thomas, a 23-year-old kid from the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Heathers until now has primarily existed as a TikTok page where Thomas performs a constellation of various crunchy covers: Big Star, Ween, Frost Children, music from Earthbound, Kings of Leon, Gram Parsons, and, naturally, Geese. His page has a respectable few thousand followers, but nothing stratospheric. Nevertheless, his debut album, Awesome, arrives to you now via none other than Warner. Apparently after posting his work-in-progress demos on [untitled], through some kind of industry word-of-mouth magic his music spent a year getting passed around by A&Rs from indies and majors alike, before finally landing him a deal on one of the big three despite barely having any IRL following. Compared to Geese, who spent years touring and releasing records before finally striking gold, Heathers has taken the sort of industry fast-track that makes conspiracy theorists start rolling out their corkboards and thumbtacks.

The thing is, when these tracks first found their way to my inbox before I had heard so much as a peep about this guy, I felt the buzz too. Thomas has a refreshingly scrappy love of scuzz: Though recorded entirely on his own, there’s a full-bodied shagginess to his rollicking, groove-heavy garage rock that recalls busted cassette decks blasting Cheap Trick and Rick Springfield, like Sheer Mag if their T. Rex worship borrowed just as much from the spliced-up school of Royal Trux circa-Accelerator. And like Royal Trux, who managed to leap onto Virgin in the wake of Nirvana’s mainstream breakthrough, I have a feeling that Thomas happens to be the right guy at the right time (his messy haircut and high-school-stoner duds could understandably turn the head of anybody looking for the next Cameron Winter). While this type of clear trend-chasing is normally the bane of an alt culture still obsessed with authenticity—or at least the appearance of it—personally I’m kind of delighted that majors are once again finding it worthwhile to throw money at random kids who meet the moment, particularly when the music is this loose and goofy.

Take “I Believe in You”: Its Kinks-y acoustic guitars have an immediacy and sweetness to them that a less confident artist might deliver with slower, more dramatic import, as if to ensure we understand this is meant to be “the emotional song.” Not Thomas, who slams out his riffs with as much funky verve as any of his more headbanging workouts, practically drooling out his “I don’t careee”s in the verse before launching us to the chorus with a perfectly timed burp. His carefree delirium captures the raucous interplay of a much more practiced band entirely on his own. On “Same Problems,” he boogies his way around a riff whose strings snap and sizzle, rhyming “Cadillac” with “biting my sack” in a fake Southern drawl as if he were a mini Mick Jagger before laconically bragging about how he’s “got a really fast car that goes really fast” over “Priveleged”’s cruising power-pop.

Aughties genres are getting dug out of the garbage left and right these days, though it’s only been fairly recently that we’ve started to see garage-rock revival getting a revival of its own. And while there are notes of the Hives, the Fratellis, and other “the” bands in the porridge here, Thomas’ sticky, up-close production doesn’t sound borne from the kind of dingy basements Ty Segall and Jay Reatard were playing as much as the insular world of his own headphones. The itch he’s scratching is more Daryl Johns-shaped, or even (dare I say it) Ariel Pink, and it’s not just because we have firsthand evidence of Thomas laying his tracks down one instrument at a time in his pajamas. His vocal performance evokes a kind of playacting, as on “Carry On,” where he rushes through his first verse as quickly as possible so he can spend the rest of the song howling through one seemingly endless pre-chorus, drawing out his snarling harmonies and using his own panted breaths to keep time.

It all makes for a surprisingly consistent ride, though Awesome does run into some Side B blues. His more Rapture-y detours in the title track and “Loving You (is the Easy Way)” sacrifice Thomas’ knack for airtight dynamics in favor of full-on dance-punk stampedes that, while energetic, end up getting lost in the fuzz (the Southern rock stomps of “High as Fuck” and “Cars” fare better at conjuring images of beer cans getting crushed in parking lots). Thomas also occasionally peppers in some cursory sociopolitical commentary that scans as punching above his weight—“Gamble it all away on DraftKings/’Cause in America, we don’t feel the sting” isn’t exactly “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” When he drills down on his meticulously sloppy sense of craft, though, it’s easy to giggle along with his freewheeling tribute to gleefully dumb rock salvation. Time will tell if he’s really ready to take the party out of his bedroom, but for a silly slice of pimply-faced riffage, Awesome’s charms are no fabrication.

Correction: Heathers’ Heath Michael Thomas is from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, not Carbondale, Illinois; this review has been updated.