Unity's 'Comes Back To You/Was There Ever Unity?' Is a Gloriously Fuzzy Masterpiece of Second Thoughts
There is a specific kind of record that sounds like it was made by people who would be making it whether or not you showed up. Comes Back To You/Was There Ever Unity? is one of those. It arrives on Smoking Room, an Oakland label operating at exactly the scale the name suggests, and it was pulled together from sessions stretching across 2017 to 2023 — which means the band on track one is not quite the band on track sixteen, and the record is better for it.
Unity is led by Jeffrey Cheung, a visual artist who founded Unity Skateboards and previously played in Meat Market. Writing that sentence explains a lot about how this thing sounds: it is built by someone who makes objects for other people to use.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The bass here is doing structural work rather than decorative work. It holds the center while the guitars wander off, which is the only reason a song like “Walk Away” can survive the noise that lands on top of it.
The Spatial Dynamics: This is the record’s real trick. The Fire Note’s Christopher Anthony put it exactly right — Unity “make distortion feel like a surprise, dropping walls of guitar noise into songs that are catchy, vulnerable, and deceptively simple.” The fuzz is not a bed. It is an event. Songs open in something close to plainness and then a wall lands, and because the arrangement was honest about being small a moment earlier, the wall actually registers.
Standout Performance
Cheung, on every front — the songs, the voice, the willingness to leave the seams showing. “Duck” opens with distortion already in progress and a chorus you can sing on a second listen. “3 Weeks,” which Stereogum’s Tom Breihan described as “a zippy, catchy fuzz-bath with proudly amateurish harmony vocals,” is the door in.
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Sixteen tracks — “Window,” “Finally,” “Dead,” “Lonely,” “Statue,” “Closer To The Time,” “Evan’s Song” — and almost none of them overstay.
🌈 The two-part title is a real structure, not a joke: The Fire Note reads the first half as outward and optimistic and the second as introspective and doubting. Records that argue with themselves tend to age well.
⚡ Nothing on it is trying to be impressive. Everything on it is trying to be true. That is a much harder setting to hit.