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Music

Stream Bent Shapes' New Record 'Wolves of Want' and Be Happy to Be Sad

The record releases on March 11 via Slumberland.

We tend to throw the word catharsis around a lot. Any record with transparently personal lyrics and a decent back story suddenly becomes an act of splurging onto the page or bleeding out in full view. Worse still, that’s supposed to make us care about an album when, really, it’s an act that is useful to the artist and not the listener. A songwriting experience might be great therapy for the person writing it, but why should anyone care?

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Honest, lyrical punk rock music should drag us out of our world or give us something to latch onto over and above this vein-cutting. On Wolves of Want, which Noisey is streaming below a week ahead of its release, Bent Shapes have done just that. They’ve crafted an immediately lovable, open record that does a lot more than just spilling guts.

That’s not to say that the band are interested in being oblique. “You've got crippling debt/ reason to be upset/ and the right to believe order/ is just around the corner,” sings Ben Potrykus on opener "New Starts In Old Dominion." Yeah, good luck removing yourself from that sentiment. But wrap that in a cripplingly seductive melody and you start to get a feel for what makes the band so joyous.

Producer Elio DeLuca of Titus Andronicus has his fingerprints all over Wolves of Want, from the emotional sprawl to the cohesive endpoint and recording the record analogue on a 16-track has given the band the perfect box to punch through. The guitars are bright, the occasional piano perfectly intrusive, but there’s no jarring deviation from the theme. It’s a record that knows what it wants to say.

Listen to Wolves of Want below ahead of its March 11 release on Slumberland.

Catch 'em on tour:

3/10/2016 Allston, MA @ Great Scott (Wolves of Want Album Release)
3/12/2016 Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool (Wolves of Want Album Release)
3/19/2016 New York, NY @ Cake Shop
4/1/2016 Albany, NY @ The Low Beat
4/2/2016 Buffalo, NY @ Curly's
4/3/2016 Pittsburgh, PA @ Howler's Cafe
4/4/2016 Cleveland, OH @ Now That's Class
4/5/2016 Columbus, OH @ Cafe Bourbon Street
4/6/2016 Detroit, MI @ UFO Factory
4/7/2016 Chicago, IL @ Subterranean
4/8/2016 Minneapolis, MN @ Memory Lanes
4/9/2016 Madison, WI @ Williamson Magnetic Recording