Many artists spent the past year trying to make sense of our toxic sociopolitical landscape, but few did a better job than a guy whose album dropped several weeks before the 2016 presidential election. The results of November 8 may have hit like an isolated, cataclysmic incident, but it increasingly appears to be the logical endpoint of the American experiment, caused by and resulting in economic and cultural panic which Jeff Rosenstock’s breakthrough solo album WORRY. tackled with righteous, frenzied eloquence. To paraphrase “Wave Goodnight To Me,” when it all came into focus—insistent police brutality, urban displacement, the bursting of the music festival bubble, Reddit’s sociopathic influence—Rosenstock was ready for it, the rare artist who managed to be both prescient and timely in 2017.

WORRY. itself was an unexpected culmination of a more encouraging decades-long process, an undersung, anti-commercial punk lifer making the record of his career and getting frighteningly close to mainstream acceptance while everyone played catch up. Hours after a cathartic, drunken New Year’s Eve show in Philly, Rosenstock surprise-released his third solo album POST-., which asks the $7500 question: Can Rosenstock’s musical and political passion withstand expectations now that the inconceivable is his new normal?

Rosenstock toured WORRY. relentlessly from the moment it dropped and he hasn’t lost his ability to read the room. "USA" announces his presence: “Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted/Trapped in my room while the house burned down to the motherfuckin’ ground.” Later, while collapsing hungover into a dream-pop breakdown, he rallies a crowd to sing in unison: “We’re tired and bored.”

View More

“USA” is a moment that could be found on Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor—a seven-minute us-against-them salvo that sees the Civil War as unprocessed national trauma, continuing and ever-evolving along culture and race lines. He’s seeing them everywhere; not just the burnouts at Midwestern gas stations that are exoticized in Red State safaris, but the patriarch of a suburban family in a crossover SUV. “I won’t hate you, I just need to know/Please be honest/Tell me was it you?” he begs, demanding to find out who exactly betrayed America and put people in power whose entire platform runs on political shitposting meant to do little except expedite the death of the disadvantaged. It all builds to a cheerleading chorus of “Et tu, USA!”, but it really sounds like “F U/USA,” already the frontrunner for the most fortuitous misheard lyric of 2018.

As an outright call to arms, “USA” is an outlier on POST-. True to its title, it takes stock of what happens after the shock subsides and a more unsettling fear arises—a world where a steady refrigerator-buzz of dull outrage becomes our emotional baseline. “Yr Throat” and “Powerlessness” touch on how invigorating it felt to finally be heard, the moments of genuine hope in seeing us finding common ground. But those songs are only briefly about hope; they’re mostly stewed in the pervasive, underlying doubt about whether any of it is sustainable or whether America is worth saving in the first place—and whether even bringing these doubts up makes you a cynic or an asshole.

“I called it positivity and congratulated myself on a job well done/But after a couple of days the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone,” he sings on “Powerlessness,” a painfully relatable self-flagellation. How much can one give of themselves before it becomes necessary to fall back on the things that bring you mindless joy? Is it so wrong to lose yourself in “first-person shooter games/Guitar tones, ELO arrangements/The differences in an MP3 and a vinyl record that you can hear”? GUILT might have been the more appropriate title for this record, as it’s often the byproduct of acting on worry and fear.

The darker, more introspective POST- inverts the festival-core unity of WORRY. with accounts of lovelorn sadsacks trying to pull themselves out of the quicksand of self-pity by leaning forward and staring at their navel. “TV Stars” and “9/10” continue to tease out the musical theatre that’s underpinned Rosenstock’s best work, Broadway pop-rock ballads that find an unforeseeable midpoint between Ted Leo and Billy Joel. But the brief victories that propel the day forward—finding lost keys, minor lotto winnings—get sucked down a void of crippling distractions, staring at the news trying to stay awake and, later, getting stoned and staring at sitcoms trying to go to sleep. “Melba” is the closest thing we get to an unequivocally happy song, and it’s only because a dream of starting over in Australia is sufficient enough to get through a shit day.

No one needs Jeff Rosenstock to tell us “it's just like Black Mirror, innit?” in 2018, but POST- never lets its righteous anger or exhaustion come at the expense of empathy and melody. Even when “Beating My Head Against a Wall” is the only way Rosenstock can resist giving an opponent a Richard Spencer, we get a brilliantly primitive Ramones homage out of the exchange. Whereas any praise of WORRY. likely mandated a retelling of his backstory as an ethical compass and consummate defender of punk’s least credible subgenres, POST- is a confirmation of Rosenstock as one of punk rock’s greatest, most effusive living songwriters. It’s his most easily accessible work yet. Compared to the genre-spanning opus of WORRY., POST- is immediate, raw, and yet more open to interpretation. It’s almost a throwback to his former band Bomb the Music Industry!’s chug-and-point Long Island shout-alongs without the whiz-bang synth effects. While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.

To hear Rosenstock tell it, we’re all gonna need it. Which brings us to closer “Let Them Win,” a preposterous 11-minute saga. In light of what came before, had it been presented with the same triumphant resilience of WORRY.’s grand finale “Perfect Sound Whatever,” “Let Them Win” could’ve come off as cheap pandering or sloganeering. Instead, Rosenstock’s band stumbles and trudges, a callback to the punchdrunk chants of “USA”—they’ve felt tired and bored and disillusioned and now, dear lord, we are exhausted. But with every bit of depleted energy Rosenstock and friends can muster, they swear there’s absolutely no way we’re gonna let them win again and concludes with five minutes of synthesizer drone. POST- could not have ended on a more appropriate note than one of sustain—whether or not Rosenstock’s prophecies once again come to pass in 2018, for now this is the sound of a cautiously optimistic new year.