New York post-punk band Patio, aka Alice Suh (drums), Lindsey-Paige McCloy (vocals, guitar) and Loren DiBlasi (vocals, bass), have been together for the last four years, but until now have only released the EP Luxury on Birdtapes back in 2016. Back then we said the record had a “decidedly Millennial mix of anxiety and apathy,” and described the unease and alienation that at the core of the band’s sound:
Patio don’t just make throwaway pop songs, their music will likely resonate with scores of people across the (Western) world. These are songs for those people who have been given a lucky draw in life and still don’t feel quite right. Those people who sometimes feel sad and bored and confused despite having friends and family and enough money to not have to worry about going hungry […] people disillusioned and struggling to find meaning in their twenty-first century lives.
But if such a description makes Patio sound super serious, then it misses the mark. The band began as a kind of sarcastic thought experiment, a Spring-hope themed imaginary outfit that was more about dreaming up colour schemes and album art than actual music. But then McCloy had an idea, as described in an interview with AdHoc, sending a text to DiBlasi that read simply: “What if Patio was real?”
Some live shows followed, then a blessing from Mitski and the debut EP, which lead to Patio becoming a fixture in New York’s DIY scene. Three years later, the band are finally ready to release their debut full-length album, Essentials—a record that sees them take all the frustration, boredom and wry humour from Luxury and run with it, dialling up both the melodies and the melodrama. The result is multifarious—a knowing smile, a bitter laugh and an angry scream, all at once.
A perfect shot of angular post-punk, ‘Endgame’ is all elbows and knees, the vocals sitting in a pocket of laid-back cool amongst the scrap. If you’re unfamiliar with Patio it’s a great introduction, tangles of wiry guitar and nervous percussion periodically smoothing out into a disarmingly catchy chorus, the lyrics partly humorously ironic and partly painfully direct.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3067963923 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=1037461396]
Many of the songs on Essentials have echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh‘s novel Year of Rest and Relaxation, sharing a glassy-eyed, stone-cold-dead-inside apathy that hides a scathing humour. Like Moshfegh’s narrator, who turns to consumerist salves for her existential woes (be they luxury goods or pharmaceutical sedatives), Patio pitch a world in which happiness and satisfaction are outside forces to be acquired, a process that strips any joy from the experience. “I went shopping the other day,” McCloy sings on ‘Boy Scout’, sounding like she’s mumbling into a phone while gazing absentmindedly from a window. “This week I can afford to feel better.” These vibes continue, the emotions flat and drained even as the song progresses into a break-up (“I think it’s me, not you. Maybe I’m just—”), no life event pointed enough to puncture the all-encompassing lethargy.
‘Scum’ sounds like The Courtneys without that west-coast, wide-eyed wonder, sharp and streetwise pop with an edge of blurry introspection. The song eventually transitions into a sluggish final third, the sonic embodiment of exhausted indifference, before threatening to accelerate again in a genuinely anxiety-inducing outro. The building momentum spits out ‘Vile Bodies’, a catchy post-punk song that comes complete with spoken word interludes, all delivered with the deadpan indifference that Patio do so well.
This piece of glass feels great
but now I can’t see straight
your skin is cracked and peeled
I’m already forgetting how you feel
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3067963923 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3134278443]
A dread worms its way through the half-paced cadence of ‘Open’, where any optimism is born of a carefully maintained system of distractions. “Anything to keep from thinking,” go the lyrics, “anything to stop what’s inside, anything to keep her brain preoccupied / Whenever she got drunk she cried / about the bad things that hadn’t happened yet.” Again, Moshfegh’s narrator comes to mind, a woman who refuses to engage with the news beyond tabloid headlines on the bodega rack. “I couldn’t stand to watch regular television,” she says, as though to acknowledge the world is to let it destroy you. “TV aroused too much in me.”
With its discordant guitars, there’s a nervous twitch to ‘New Reality’ too, channelling the contemporary disquiet so familiar to Protomartyr, where disaster lurks around every corner and forces larger than us take advantage. “Is it not real, or is it better not to know?” Patio ask. “Never over, waiting for a fall / Still scraping their plates, while they watch us crawl.” Growing into a frenetic rhythm, the track develops an intensity so-far unseen, as though dropping the cynicism and leaning into their paranoid convictions.
The tone is corrected by closer ‘Legacy Continued’, the almost-spoken vocals whip-smart and sneering, the razor-edged guitars slicing any suggestion of fuzz pop into tattered ribbons. In this way the trio evade the irony at the centre of cynical punk. That is, if you’re really all that cynical about things, would you get up on stage and sing songs about them? With their cool indifference and cutting style, Patio acknowledge this, just as Moshfegh’s tone recognises the paradox at the heart of her own solipsistic narrator. Patio are an imaginary band after all, a set of colour schemes and album art. Imaginary bands can’t challenge entrenched forces, or explore the vertiginous state that is the twenty-first century existence. Imaginary bands can’t use snark as a Trojan Horse for deep, even hopeful self-examination. But what if Patio was real?
Essentials is out now via Fire Talk Records and you can get it from their website or the Patio Bandcamp page.
