2nd Grade's 'Girls and Boys' Is a Sugar-Coated Masterpiece of Economy
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: This is a close-quarters record made by three people doing nearly everything. Catherine Dwyer plays vocals, guitar, bass and synth; Peter Gill plays vocals, guitar, bass and drums; Jack Washburn plays guitar, bass and synth. Dwyer and Gill produced, Dwyer engineered, Julian Fader mixed and Ian Farmer mastered. Brendan Hay at SPIN finds the payoff on “Glacial Boys,” where a Big Star-like vocal melody rides “a fuzzy, chugging bassline.”
The Spatial Dynamics: Twenty tracks could sprawl; instead everything is compressed to the hook. Hay hears jangly guitars and gentle harmonies on “Anywhere Girls” and “Cellophane Girls” — he reaches for the dB’s and Tom Petty — and notes they move faster than you expect. On “Upstream Girls,” the male-female vocal interplay puts him in mind of Belle and Sebastian. Grace Robins-Somerville at Paste reads the gendered split as a nod to the boy-girl heartbreak tropes of teeny-bop records past, and suspects it is “secretly prescient” in an era of hyper-individualized personality categories.
Standout Performance
Dwyer, who also plays in Remember Sports, says she “really left my mark” on this one after appearing on every previous 2nd Grade record — and she calls “Anywhere Girls” “technically very tricky,” which is the whole point. Her description of Gill’s greatest trick is the best line written about this band: “disguising his complex compositions under layers of sugar and fizzy distortion.”
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Robins-Somerville: “Four albums in, they’ve turned planned obsolescence into a party trick.”
🌈 Hay calls 2nd Grade “this decade’s premiere source for power pop bops” and says every song is “a reassuringly bright and subtly dark earworm.”
🌈 On whether twenty songs is too many, Hay is unbothered: “They’re just that talented.”