The good news is that Exam Season are back with a new EP, smol, a release they say is about “the anxiety that comes with feeling your youth slipping away… fueled by Paul McCartney interviews, emo memes and strawberry milk.” But Exam Season aren’t interested in capturing these anxieties with mumbly mope-core. Instead, they throw their gazes back to the sparkly jewel of childhood, creating pop songs with influences ranging from Modern Baseball and Snail Mail to 5SOS and Charli XCX.

Lead single ‘strawberry milk’ is a song about once finding solace in music and Yazoo, and how even that simple pleasure has been taken from us by traffic light nutritional information and the twenty-first century persecution of sugar. Of course, the song is about more than just milkshake, its comforting sickly embrace standing in for any number of former pleasures that have been snatched away. It’s more about pining for things in the past, when the answers to your problems were as simple as, you guessed it, strawberry milk.

“Life hasn’t been fine,
Since it was okay,
To drink Strawberry Milk,
Everyday”

And this is the overarching theme of the record, gazing back at simpler times with a wistful sigh as a kind of escapism from our modern woes. As Watson describes:

“It’s all about growing up, but specifically it’s about missing childhood—not adolescence and the hormonal shift period, but what came before. I miss ringing home phones and awkwardly asking friends if they want to come play. I miss cookies for breakfast. I miss 5ive. Ultimately, the EP is naively childlike in a time where everything sucks, or at least is perceived to. Really, I just want to be as smol as a puppy again, I think we all do.”

As if to prove this point, ‘Cool Beans’ is an emotive indie rock song about getting older but never quite growing up. “You personify our cuddly toys, the food on our plates, the dust on the floor,” Watson sings, “At first I couldn’t see, but now you make me weep at the sight of a lonely pea.” Closing track ‘Black Candle Flame’ is probably the EP’s most reserved moment, Watson’s modulated vocals soft and sincere over minimal percussion and quiet guitar. It’s a song that compares past fears (horror movies and Hocus Pocus) to current ones, namely that ever-present shadow of mortality.

“I fear cancer, tinnitus and dust.
And I’m told that WebMD,
Can’t cure me, immediately.
I am scared,
I’ll always be scared”

You can get smol now on LP or download from the Exam Season Bandcamp page.

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The track is called ‘Everything is Salted Caramel’, a song which sees Exam Season take the juxtaposition of the en vogue sweet treat and apply it to relationships. The message seems to be that it’s okay to take the rough with the smooth and that a dash of proverbially salty feelings is not just normal, but can make the sweet ones taste that much better.

“Everything has to be
sweet and salty”

If you’re unfamiliar with the Pin Pal Club, it’s a subscription service that sends not only a new and exclusive single each month, but also a specially designed enamel pin badge. It was planned to be a thing that ran through 2016, but if you order the year subscription now you get all the previous pins in one package, which might be more or less exciting, depending on your character. Also, the pins and corresponding singles are available for purchase individually via the Art is Hard online store.

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‘A Petty Song’ charges headlong at the strangeness of life in the 21st century, sitting on a knife edge of viewpoints. Is the world slowly sinking into a landfill of meaningless nonsense? Is the entire population becoming what the song describes as “a generation of culturally inferior types”? Or is that just a defence mechanism? Snobbery we coat our lives in to try to feel somehow better than everyone else? Whatever the answer, the track has some pretty cool verses, almost reminiscent of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Take, for example, the opening verse:

“We roam around department stores
Searching for things we can’t afford.
Getting lost in a world of cultural beigeness
And other futile things like avocado holders”

‘TV Routines’ and ‘Megabus’ are ironic and funny but bathed in a persistent melancholy that the smirks can’t quite shake. “My best friend is called Megabus,” Watson sings on the latter with disarming sincerity, “He texts me all the time / Even though they’re always just a bunch of digits and letters / intertwined.” Following jabs at the rival coach service competitors (“Fuck you National Express / For your unequivocally, awful service”) the song falls into a a sadder place, the vocals pleading for reprieve from a fast-approaching future.

‘Constantly Ignored’, which opens with a quote from Portlandia to sum up the Exam Season vibe, sounds like the lonely echoes of a disillusioned cynic, his thoughts rattling around inside the blank vacuum which belies the superficial skin of mass media. The title track closes things with more nostalgia and sadness, the only two emotions left standing as the technology-induced razing continues unabated:

“We’re swiftly approaching a great sense of numbness everyday,
Colour has leaked from the walls to reveal a desolate grey.
I cling onto hope that something at the shady bower might change,
Still I’ve got no desire to leave, and no desire to stay.

I call it home.
It’s all I’ve ever known”

With its references to Eggheads and Flog It! and headers & volleys, Mostly Homely is a delightfully British record addressing an unquestionably global malaise. It’s music for those of us who spent our youth swapping Merlin stickers and naively thinking life could only get better and more meaningful, only to find ourselves over-educated and unemployed and wondering if this is really all there is. You can buy it now from the Exam Season Bandcamp page.

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