Jeff Rosenstock - WORRY.

Pitchfork 80

If you know the feeling of being jolted awake at 3 AM by every outstanding obligation in your life, you'll recognize the paralyzing anxiety embedded in the lyrics of Jeff Rosenstock’s third solo LP. To wit: “Ignorance is bliss until the day/The things you ignored all come into focus.” When those things emerge, they will waylay you with the same nagging, needling and relentless tone that knows every single pressure point in your system. Rosenstock has always sung like this, so WORRY. isn’t a case of an artist finding his voice. Rather, it’s an artist finding his muse—it's right there in the title—and making the record of his life.

Rosenstock didn’t really need a magnum opus to solidify his reputation as one of the most important figures in modern punk music—in certain circles, he’s basically an Ian MacKaye figure, a paragon of ethics whose web-based, pay-what-you-want record label gave him legitimate reason to feel salty when Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead were called revolutionaries for doing the same thing years later. However, he was doing this as the leader of a ska-punk project called the Arrogant Sons of Bitches and, later, Bomb the Music Industry! As the names of these acts might imply, this stuff wasn’t bound for mainstream acceptance, though Rosenstock’s sonic and philosophical influence has been acknowledged by verbose and principled young acts like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, and Mitski.

WORRY. isn’t an obvious crossover attempt. Rosenstock touches on almost every intersection of pop and punk, whether or not it’s credible: there are flashes of Jawbreaker’s real-talk scene reportage, the synth-spiked sugar rushes of the Anniversary and the Get Up Kids, but also previously canonical touchstones that have become relegated to Boomerism nostalgia: the Beach Boys, the Clash, and Abbey Road. After the beer-hoisting nostalgia of “Blast Damage Days,” WORRY. unexpectedly (and hilariously) hits double time and tries to cram Rosenstock’s entire discography into a Side B medley, breathlessly running through Twista-paced spitfire punk, 30-second blasts of D-beat hardcore and an unashamedly infectious ska song.

WORRY. is rife with similarly invigorating and wildly unfashionable touches—the Reggie and the Full Effect-style electropop intro of “Festival Song,” his voice cracking on the line, “So we made out foooooor the entire ride” like drunken Rivers Cuomo karaoke. “I wanna listen to the Cribs my dear, while we make out in your car,” he sings on “Pash Rash.” Among other things, Rosenstock is mounting a rousing defense of genre—“Stop sneering at our joy like it’s some careless mistake,” he snarls on “We Begged 2 Explode,” where a swaying piano ballad erupts into a kitchen-drinking singalong at a house party.

Punk usually has to sound serious to be taken seriously, and WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here: it’s a record about New York gentrification, the internet, police brutality, liberal guilt, DIY idealism—crucial subject matter that typically inspire chin-stroking appreciation or eye-rolls because of their self-serious delivery.

Instead, WORRY. is an absolute blast and its heaviest stories are presented as some of the most devastating breakup songs of the past year. “Staring Out the Window at Your Old Apartment” plays on the “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” trope: “Someone hung a decorative surfboard up where your records and movies belong,” Rosenstock yells, but they still can’t hide the cracks in the wall that the landlord was never going to fix and the tacky renovations that followed. “You’ve got nowhere to go now,” he moans, in a lyric that exhibits scorn-free empathy for New Yorkers and the shitholes they’ve somehow been been priced out of. Rosenstock fondly reminisces over drinking tallboys by the water on “Wave Goodnight to Me,” written in memory of shuttered Death By Audio (and accompanied by a dead-on video). “I wish it didn’t hurt. I wish I didn’t care,” he brays, knowing that all DIY spaces are living on borrowed time and this one would eventually become the new Vice office: “They spent the last five years, yelling, ‘Come on! Come on! Come on! Get out of here!’”

Much of WORRY. is put in this “us vs. them” battleground, but Rosenstock isn’t a scold—he realizes you might not figure out you’re them until it’s too late. “Festival Song” takes easy licks at “dorm room” music, “sweatshop denim jackets,” “department store crust punk chic,” and, well, you name it: “They wouldn’t be your friend if it wasn’t worth it/If you didn’t have something they could take.” His ire isn’t just limited to AEG and Live Nation pumping more hot air into a bubble that already burst, or Funyuns sponsoring whatever the hell this is. WORRY. was fittingly released right in the middle of October; it began with the NFL “going pink” as a meek gesture towards women jersey-buyers while treating domestic violence cases with less gravity than touchdown celebrations, and ended with Twitter shuttering Vine, a seemingly utopian mode of expression that in reality repeatedly exploited people of color (and still didn’t make a dime).

As much as WORRY. deals in financial insecurity—the #1 worry of all—it speaks to the unshakable notion that American society is one giant game of big-bank-take-little-bank and we’re all “born as a data mine for targeted marketing,” discarded when we’re no longer in a demographic worth exploiting. Needless to say, it's become even more resonant in the past month.

If this all sounds exhausting, well—would WORRY. live up to its name if it wasn’t? But there’s something reassuring about worry, how it is inextricable from daily existence, how it can reveal what’s actually meaningful when total nihilism is always a tempting option. Dropped in the middle of Rosenstock’s surveys of urban cultural decline, “I Did Something Weird Last Night” turns out to be the neurotic punk’s answer to “It Was a Good Day”—“I made out in the van with a girl I like/We were kinda drunk but it seemed alright,” Rosenstock yelps, explaining the title and returning to his apartment, sleeping through classes the next day and wondering when he’ll ever see her again. It’s a beautifully written song about the brief moments when irrational, giddy emotion can shout down the Voice of Worry and allow good things to happen despite everything—and also about the way people can talk themselves out of good things immediately afterwards once worry returns: “if I see you soon, will you want to see me?”; “I hope I’m not reading into this too much, it’s a kiss.”

Rosenstock wrote “I Did Something Weird Last Night” about his girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife; the album’s cover art is taken from their wedding photos. But at the time, he admits, “I was preoccupied with how the magic would end/Because nothing intangible remains sustainable/Hope is a scheme.” It ties into the worry that pervades every interaction on this record, whether it’s with peers, corporations, political causes, anything—if you actually give a shit, have expectations and get your hopes up, you’re going to get played for a sucker. But later on, he shouts WORRY.’s most cathartic and reassuring line and like most others, if you’re not paying attention, you might miss what this album is really about: “Love is worry.”