Album review: Destroy Boys – FUNERAL SOUNDTRACK #4

When do you finish growing up? Do you ever? Since bursting onto the scene as teenagers, Destroy Boys have writ large their growing pains and coming-of-age feminist fury in front of an ever-expanding audience. But on album four, there’s a sea change. Now hitting their mid-twenties, they’ve come to see that a shift comes when you’ve got a fully formed frontal lobe (so says pop psychology anyway), but your sense of self is never set in stone. In fact, they’re blossoming more than ever.

We know by now that the Sacramento quartet have developed hard shells, and while they’re hardly going to soften over time, there’s vulnerability in the shadow of their fierceness. Early highlight Plucked is a powder keg of the kind of fragile rage that’s yet to take the form of words, such is the agony of being silenced – 'My days are full of material / But I can’t write anything,' singer Alexia Roditis sings. The gritty Praying burns with defiance at living for the sake of 'just appeasing the male gaze,' while they later assemble an epic punk crew with Scowl’s Kat Moss and Mannequin Pussy’s Missy Dabice for the hard-as-nails anthem You Hear Yes. Later, Boyfeel is equally visceral, and there’s no forgetting the unsparingness behind 'Maybe I'm a fag instead of a dyke / Maybe I'm both at the same time.'

When they go a little gentler, they show just how many colours they can paint with. The contemplative ode to growth that is Shedding Skin has an affable warmth to its graceful guitar lines, while the ‘90s-tinged Spanish-language track Amor divino swells with feeling and feels like a moment in itself.

At this point, Destroy Boys have got everything you want from a punk band – attitude, grit, something to say and a real sense of nuance. Ultimately, if this is a funeral soundtrack, as the name suggest, Destroy Boys want you dancing in the aisles.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Mannequin Pussy, Pinkshift, The Mysterines

FUNERAL SOUNDTRACK #4 is out August 9 via Hopeless