Cheekface: Political, Commentary

When we meet on Zoom, the release date for Cheekface’s fifth studio album, Middle Spoon, is getting closer. The public doesn’t know this, since it’s a surprise release, just like their 2024 LP It’s Sorted was last January. As the big day nears, though, the band is preparing itself amidst difficult circumstances in the artistic landscape and the general humanity landscape. Life is hectic right now even without an album rollout. What do you do in the face of an industry that doesn’t want to pay you, a government that doesn’t want to help you and a planet that is at a breaking point of physically being able to sustain you?

“I’m thinking of getting a haircut,” says guitarist/vocalist Greg Katz.

Bassist/vocalist Amanda Tannen chimes in, “I got highlights yesterday.”

“It looks great,” Katz confirms.

It’s a funny deflection that belies the actual heaviness behind the scenes. Cheekface is good at that.

Yes, Tannen’s highlights do look nice and Katz’s hair is looking a little shaggy, maybe, so the haircut conversation is valid. But they’re sort of neglecting the multiple elephants in the room.

Tannen was evacuated from her home twice during the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January. Thankfully, she and her stuff are okay, but that’ll bump up the blood pressure a bit. Add to that personal developments like the ends of relationships, family matters and, to use a tired online cliché—*gestures broadly at everything.* Put simply by Katz, the start of 2025 “sucks shit from my ass.”

“You have [the fires] and then the current president coming into power,” Tannen says. “And it’s like …” She trails off and Katz picks things back up. “There was definitely a, ‘Fascism is rising again in America, and you guys in LA will deal with that after your shit’s not on fire anymore.’”

After It’s Sorted came out, Katz dealt with the fallout of his father having a stroke, spending months in the hospital recuperating and dealing with the US healthcare system. Shortly after, pretty much literally as the band unloaded their bags at the hotel for a UK tour, Katz got the call that his grandmother had passed away. Cheekface is the result—the answer, really—to things sucking shit from Katz’s ass during the first Trump presidency. It was an outlet to rally against the country’s worst tendencies and the cultural pitfalls of this era on their most granular level sometimes, rather than surface level political commentary that failed to hit any real target.

Discussing haircuts when asked the obvious, leading “How’s everything going?” question is pretty on-brand for Cheekface. It’s a band that started with the stated purpose of tackling difficult subjects, but doing so with humor and a smirk without watering down the message. Framing the constant wars and destabilization of the Middle East through the lens of preferring to relax and eat cheese instead of witnessing atrocities on a weekly basis. Or, as they sing in the lead-off to Middle Spoon, “Living Lo-Fi,” dealing with just how much the medical system in the U.S. sucks shit out of Katz’s ass and how expensive just surviving can be, while you’re just expected to move on with it.

Are you living lo-fi
Are you living with some chronic pain
Are you using frozen food as medical first aid
Are you calling total bullshit on the welfare state

“Damn, yeah, I am,” you think, and you might feel angry and sad for a second, but then you’re laughing at the next line, because Cheekface’s catalog brims with humor. Lines like “David was a murderer who had a problem with the tall,” and taking umbrage as a tall person. Katz thinks back on those terrible and sad days of 2024 as “hard-won or hard-experienced growth,” which clearly influenced the lead surprise single from Middle Spoon, “Growth Sux,” whose refrain reminds you that growth “only makes you worse,” and that the real trick to life is just staying exactly how you have always been. Teachable moments and opportunities for reflection typically come on the back of shitty moments anyway.

But again, as the gut punch lands, they stick-and-move to clever, absurdist, pop culture referential again, like falling victim to peer pressure and eating silica gel packets because everyone else seems to be doing it. Cheekface is funny, and there’s a clear 2010s, LA alt-comedy bit economy vibe about them, but they’re not a comedy band. With their trademark deadpan delivery, there’s an obvious crossover with bands like Cake and They Might Be Giants, but with lyrics that would bar them from any children’s cartoon appearances as it stands now. They’re not a ska band, but there are obvious vibe crossovers between ska aesthetic and Cheekface aesthetic. They’re very online. They are not too concerned with “coolness” in the traditional sense, and they say so.

And we love dust because it is so cool
So of course we can’t wait to be it
(Dust I mean, not cool)

They are not concerned with being tough in the traditional sense either, like so much other political music that rages against machines. No macho posturing; seemingly no aspirations to be played at hockey games during breaks in play to keep the crowd appropriately amped. But there is still crossover with these bands like there is crossover with so much other source material within Cheekface. “I love political music in general—anything that’s like, you know, ‘Fuck the president. Presidents are evil,’” Katz says. “I relate very strongly and enjoy it. I also feel like there are people who do that and will do it better than I will ever do it. But I do think that it’s less common to approach it with a humorous bent, and there’s such a cool tradition of that.”

There’s a definite hope about it, rather than a defeatist “the world sucks, what else can you do?” It’s a habit of Millennials to perhaps lean into that shoulder-shrugging nihilism, especially right now, but there’s more than just “hey, this sucks” to Cheekface. There’s a “Hey, this sucks, but it shouldn’t and doesn’t have to, let’s figure something out, or at least laugh about it for a second while we regroup and brush the dirt off.” There are still opportunities for haircuts amidst the despair. It’s looking for results on a micro scale like being nice to your neighbors and helping out friends in need rather than something like throwing molotov cocktails through diplomats’ windows. The band cites the likes of Jello Biafra, Gill Scott Heron and, yes, Rage Against the Machine as influences in the political music space because, duh. But, like everything, including political music, Cheekface is going to do it their own way rather than copy archetypes.

Because they’ve always done things the way they want.

Cheekface is now five albums in, each one released independently even as their profile grows. That independence has freed them from the traditional shackles of long album rollouts or having to work with people they might not want to (or not work with people they do want to work with), or sculpt their sound in a certain way to appease algorithms or something of that nature. Instead, they have the freedom to send demos to the likes of McKinley Dixon to rap a few bars over an instrumental break, or get the Catbite folks to throw in on a detour into the ska world.

They’ve seen the other side—the label suits side—before, with Katz working in A&R and Tannen having been a major label artist as part of Stellastarr (MVP Baseball 2004 players know). They didn’t want to do that for a project that was supposed to purely be based around fun—even an outlet for deep frustration and anger. “We want to release things when we want to release them—not have to wait, you know, a year or six months,” Tannen says. “When we write a song, sometimes we’ll go record it within the same month that we wrote it ’cause we’re just excited about it and we want to put it down. We want to get that excitement. And we wouldn’t be able to do that if we had a label giving us timelines and rules. Now it’s kind of up to us.”

They’re the kids in the cafeteria making each other laugh, not the attention-starved class clown who needs to make sure everyone knows how funny they are or host the school-sanctioned talent show. “Us like having been through the ringer enough times as musicians, we were just like, we don’t need that validation,” Katz says. “Like, what makes it legitimate is that we made it and we like it, and that’s all there is to it, you know?”

These indulgences are on full display on Middle Spoon. The devoted hordes of Cheek Freaks will still get the talk-singing and humor they’re used to, and the sparse instrumentals—but with plenty of “whoa, holy shit” moments that pop out of nowhere. Every band with a long enough lifespan has stretched out its sound and experimented, and often to mixed results. But when you are as difficult to pin down as Cheekface, it’s even more difficult to cry foul on a big swing.

“I doubt very much that like some record label would have been like, ‘What you guys need on this album is a rap verse,” Katz says referencing Dixon’s verse on “Military Gum,” a nod to one of the bigger names in hardcore’s renewed popularity, fellow Angelinos Militarie Gun. The Dixon verse came from a hail mary DM sent to the rapper, who turned out to be a fan of the band. “McKinley is a toweringly great artist. And anyone who knows him would put him up against any rapper as the greatest rapper working now. And it’s honestly extremely flattering that he made the time and did something really awesome for us. To me, it’s like my favorite moment on the album.”

It’s realistic to think that some labels might say, “No, you don’t need a rap verse. You’re an indie rock band.” Or maybe say, “Sure, you can get a verse, but it has to be one of our artists.” That same label might want a more traditional album release, too—one where the band announces it with a lead single and release date months in advance. “The extended album roll-outs was something that wasn’t fun.

So now, where do you go from here, I ask. When you have all of this freedom that isn’t afforded to so many, a steady build of momentum and growing community around you, and an endlessly shitty world around you to inspire the next wave of songs, what’s the plan?

Tannen laughs, and then sort of seems to apologize for laughing, so I know it’s a real laugh and it’s because of my question. “I think that’s kind of the antithesis of what I think Cheekface is,” she says. They have plans, they just don’t always tell the public. Take the surprise album drops, for instance. “The extended album rollouts was something that wasn’t fun,” Katz says. “We had done them in other bands in the past, so we were just like, ‘OK, well let’s not do that, because that’s not fun.’ Let’s just put a song out when we feel like it. If we have something we want to share, we try to keep it simple and stick to the principles.”

The principles have changed, too, though, as the band has evolved. For instance, they used to be pretty against music videos. But after linking up with the duo of Benjamin Epstein and David Combs, known collectively as Baby Pony Food, they realized they could bend their own rules if they knew they were working with kindred spirits who got the point of the band. “It became fun after it seemed like a drag for a long time,” Katz adds.

In a town like Los Angeles, where shrewd showbiz acumen reigns supreme, and everyone is trying so damn hard to appear authentic or effortless, Cheekface really doesn’t seem to have an ulterior motive to their keeping things quiet or unorthodox release schedule. If it’s fun, they do it. If it’s not fun, they don’t do it. I don’t think it goes much deeper than that, and it’s all very punk rock without having to posture or present in any way. You could argue that the thesis of Cheekface is actually, to borrow a phrase, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” They’ve said that plenty of times in their career. They just don’t usually scream it as loud.

Brendan Menapace is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Esquire, Stereogum, Vice, SPIN and more. He also has a newsletter called Snakes and Sparklers.