Since reuniting in 2005, Chicago pop-punk band the Smoking Popes have been, to put it kindly, conservative with their album output.
In fact, Lovely Stuff, their latest release, marks only their fourth release in the past two decades. Like all the efforts that have preceded it, the album is crammed with near-perfect three-minute pop-punk anthems, somehow making the wait for new material both frustrating and well worth it.
Commenting on the album, singer/songwriter Josh Caterer said it took two years to complete this album. “We went into the studio with just two songs in the summer of 2022, then I kept writing, and we’d go back every few months and record another couple songs. It was a long process because we were doing it all piecemeal, but I think the final product has a cohesive energy,” he said. “The songs all feel connected.”
And he’s right; there is a cohesiveness to not only the songs on this album but to their entire catalog. Caterer’s well-documented distinctive crooning style is as strong now as it was on their breakout 1995 album, and his band plays punk rock in their 50s just as fast (if not faster) than those first few records. While the theme of romantic love is not always the first topic you think of in punk rock, that is a theme that has remained consistent throughout the Smoking Popes catalog. It’s a theme that is also woven throughout Lovely Stuff. From the triumphant album opener, “Golden Moment” and on “Racine” (one of the best moments on the record), through to “You Will Always Have My Heart,” Caterer is one of the last great romantic songwriters, even when he’s singing about love falling apart on “Madison” and “To This Very Day,” (“I love you with all the strength in my heart to this very day”), the juxtaposition of his vulnerable heart on sleeve lyrics backed by ferocious distorted guitars and hammered drums is as fresh today as it was in the 1990s. It seems appropriate then that the album ends on a beautiful cover of “Somewhere Under The Rainbow.”
The Smoking Popes’ incongruent Sinatra meets The Ramones vibe seemed a little confounding yet impressively brilliant in the 1990s, and not much (thankfully) has changed in the following three decades. Lovely Stuff shows The Smoking Popes can still pull together an album of songs that, on paper, seems too odd to work but is simply sublime.
