Parquet Courts

Since 2010 · United States

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Wide Awake! (2018)

Wide Awake! pushes Parquet Courts' wiry post-punk toward something looser and more danceable without losing the band's referential, deadpan edge. The title track rides a funk-inflected groove into a chorus that reads as both a rallying cry and a joke at its own expense, Andrew Savage's delivery never quite settling into either register. The production, handled by Danger Mouse, gives the rhythm section more room than the band's earlier, tighter records allowed. It's the album where Parquet Courts' political directness and newfound groove lined up most completely.

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Parquet Courts

Wide Awake! · 2018

Parquet Courts formed in Brooklyn in 2010 around Texas transplants Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, building a sound that fused the loose, deadpan wit of Pavement-adjacent slacker rock with the tighter, more rhythmically insistent structures of post-punk acts like Wire and the Fall. Savage has been explicit that the resemblance to some of the band's most obvious comparisons is a matter of shared sources rather than direct lineage, tracing the band's own reference points instead to the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, and the Fall's own dense, referential songwriting.

Wide Awake! (2018), produced by Danger Mouse, pushed the band's sound toward more overtly danceable, funk-inflected territory while keeping its lyrical directness and political engagement intact, marking one of the more significant stylistic expansions in the band's catalog. The album's combination of loose-limbed groove and pointed social commentary made it one of the more widely noted post-punk-revival records of its decade, without abandoning the wiry, referential guitar interplay that had defined the band from the start.