Vundabar Turn Back the Clock on Themselves on Surgery and Pleasure

I’ve kept up with Vundabar’s output over the years, ever since I went to a Great Grandpa gig in 2017 and wound up enchanted by Brandon Hagen’s leadership. The band got started in the early 2010s, releasing three records in five years before making my favorite album of 2020, Either Light—a collection of sugar-coated post-punk songs. For my money, the sequence of “Out of It,” “Burned Off,” “Codeine” and “Petty Crime” remains the best four-song run on any record released this decade. Their impending tour for that album was kneecapped by lockdown and, considering that their recent setlists have been very Gawk– and Surgery and Pleasure-heavy, I ache at the thought of never hearing those songs live. Hey, we’ll always have their Paste Session, right?

Either Light felt like Vundabar’s pivot away from the DIY punk that refracted through their early material, as they began the 2020s channeling the jangles of the Feelings and Orange Juice without ever fully committing to a hock-job. Using Hagen’s then-recent binging of The Sopranos to better frame the band’s usual anti-capitalist dirges, Either Light was a perfect—monolithic, even—encapsulation of Vundabar’s best motifs, performed with expiring intimacy. When the band made their last album, Devil for the Fire, in 2022, they included “Alien Blues” on it—perhaps a streaming-motivated decision inspired by the track’s online spark, but one overshadowing the greener, more exciting parts of the record, especially “Listless Blue” and “Nosferatu.” Coming off the heels of Either Light, Devil for the Fire wasn’t just a regression—it was a full-blown stifling of one of indie rock’s sharpest groups, thanks to a mix where Hagen’s vocal was so consistently doused in reverb and his guitar chains were unusually dull. By that point, Vundabar had outlived some of the bands they’d previously toured with, like the Districts and Forth Wanderers, but their first post-COVID album was wobbly.

Fast-forward three years and Vundabar have promised a back-to-basics 180 on Surgery and Pleasure, a project the band themselves have called a “fusion of old-school Vundabar energy with a newfound muscularity and slickness.” The 11 songs here are grown-up and widescreen, detached from the trendiness of “Alien Blues,” which now has nearly 657 million streams on Spotify alone (that’s more than 600 million more streams than their next biggest track, “Oulala”), but not totally rid of the restlessness that torched Vundabar’s first three studio releases. While the album doesn’t quite capture the raw, cathartic, left-behind triumphs of Gawk or Smell Smoke, the songcraft is righteously upscaled from Devil for the Fire. Some of the songs even flash like proper Either Light successors, adding much needed expanse to an already firm anchor of brassy, crushing guitar licks. “I Got Cracked” is handily one of the best Vundabar songs in years because of this, as massive wattage oozes out of Hagen’s unsettled singing about bodies collapsing through the in-betweens and into tragedy (“I got cracked so I can’t get broke no more”). It’s textbook punk bombast, a great callback to the band’s Gawk days.

Not all of Surgery and Pleasure earns its eruptions and crash-outs, but the six-minute “I Need You” moors the back-half of the album, as Hagen rhapsodizes about selling out for innocence (“I would give up getting old to keep that child alive, so the wind hits, so the knife twists, right on time”) over a diet-math rock arrangement before the melody crawls into an eruption of disorienting, jagged guitar noise. I not only love how his vocal bends into a falsetto every time it approaches punctuation, but I’m taken aback by the sprawling moments in his singing, when his voice contorts like the swirls of his guitar. “Beta Fish” is contagiously bright, as Hagen and bassist Zack Abramo take turns boosting the rhythm out of robotic monologues. Suddenly, an industrialized post-punk intro collapses into a panging capstone of dream-pop. Singing stacks on top of singing, and the chanting 90 seconds that sew up “Beta Fish” are, undoubtedly, the best 90 seconds on the album.

The harmony-breakdown-harmony formula that made “Easier” work five years ago returns on “Easy Does It,” and the head-splitting scuzz of “Spades” feels like a taste of where Vundabar might be heading next. I just wish that Hagen’s singing and the band’s machine-gun shredding coalesced better at the latter’s beginning. Instead, “Spades” doesn’t start coming together until two minutes in, when Hagen takes a hard turn away from the blast radius with a quick falsetto. The repeated “I’m watching you watching me” line grows with menace once “Spades” ignites, when it goes all-in on the loudness.

The lingering problem with Surgery and Pleasure is that it blends into itself more than it doesn’t. There are good track pairings here—“Life is a Movie”/“Beta Fish,” “I Got Cracked”/“Spades” and “I Need You”/“Easy Does It”—but the album’s uniqueness goes dormant when the momentum collapses during the strident, three-track run of “Let Me Bleed,” “Feels Like Forever” and “Hurricane.” Fortune favors the bold, but fortune doesn’t always favor the loud. The beat switches and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tempo changes on “Hurricane” sputter like a Parquet Courts B-side that should’ve been kept in the microwave longer, while “Life is a Movie” so plainly cites Interpol that I mistook its refrain and chorus for “Evil.” (It’s also not lost on me that Vundabar titled their first record Antics 12 years ago, though it may have been just a coincidence.) But “Life is a Movie” is still an enjoyable song that features one of Hagen’s more vulnerable couplets: “The days burn bright like they’re supposed to / And the phrase turns right like it’s supposed to.”

The choppy, start-stop guitar part on “Let Me Bleed” leans Talking Heads but Hagen’s playing gets drowned out by Abramo’s poorly mixed bass layer. There are also too many instances where Hagen’s singing is strangely out of focus, like on “Feels Like Forever” and “Stallion Running,” the latter of which washes the vocal out almost completely, leaving only indescribable syllables smudged by grating frequencies. It calls to mind the extra doses of reverb that plagued Devil for the Fire, and it’s clear that the spatial depth Vundabar coveted three years ago hasn’t fully surrendered. The band doesn’t feel nearly as separate or indistinct on “Why Is It So Hard to Say Goodbye?” For a closing track, it’s plucky and charming, especially when Hagen channels an affectation in the style of Liam Gallagher, stretching syllables around a closed, pumping fist. But its quiet, earthly conclusion is far too ordinary for a record like Surgery and Pleasure which, even at its patchiest, still gestures toward the same risky, erratic contortions that made Gawk so beloved a decade ago.

To Surgery and Pleasure’s credit, it’s full of Vundabar’s oft-documented talents: brilliant, angular guitar playing and odd, unpredictable vocal showings. And it’s good to hear this band try on new clothes after Devil for the Fire failed to live up to Either Light’s oneness. Hearing the loose, uneven ends of Surgery and Pleasure might raise suspicions that Vundabar was a pre-COVID anomaly, but they’re not resting on virality anymore, nor are they totally abandoning what didn’t work three years or three songs ago. The vocal imperfections that hurt “Stallion Running” are practically buzzing on “I Need You,” and the identityless instrumentation from “Life is a Movie” turns into instinctual, jovial chaos on “Easy Does It.” These 11 songs don’t illustrate a band in disarray; they point towards a renewal you can’t capture all of in just one pass.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.