
On January 1, the 2010s-era pop-punk band Fireworks released their first album in nearly a decade, the brooding and expansive Higher Lonely Power. Alongside Parannoul’s otherworldly pop opus After the Magic, Higher Lonely Power has been sitting in the back of my head as an early-year list-topper for months. These days, I am trying to think less in terms of ranking and winning and number ones and all that stuff, but you see what tends to happen is people will ask me what my favorite album of the year so far is (or, more likely, what records I’ve liked recently) and if I don’t have a list in my head somewhere I will forget the literally dozens of records that I have poured hours and hours into enjoying over the last six months, and end up answering with some band I’m not even sure I like much.
I have been listening to Higher Lonely Power pretty consistently this year, but I’ve come back to it in a bigger, bolder way last week after the band announced a physical release of the record on Run For Cover. Sometimes I wonder if I love a vinyl mock-up image more than the actual thing itself. Something about a pretty variant. What can I say, I love things and having them in my possession. And when they are green — all bets are off. Boy oh boy. Anyway.

I am repeatedly amazed by Higher Lonely Power, a record I thought — after a three-year series of delays — we might never get to hear. Following the trail of the darker, more cynical tone of their pre-hiatus album Oh, Common Life, Higher Lonely Power does a more thorough job of infusing the snotty, miraculously catchy spirit of their pop-punk roots with a grander, more ambitious aesthetic. Everything here reaches for the rafters — like the lush, cavernous synth-pop of “I Want to Start a Religion With You” or the booming, sinister echo of “Jerking Off the Sky.” Back in the day, it made sense for an album like Gospel to get that pointed, airtight treatment from producer Brian McTernan, pushing the vocals up to the front and making the band sound like perfectly turning gears. These were pop songs, excellent ones, but they had a certain flatness, like the scratched pen drawings that adorned the covers of Gospel and Oh, Common Life.
Higher Lonely Power resists those limited dimensions. Opener “God Approved Insurance Plan” imagines a much louder, more abrasive version of the band, pausing between shouts and screams to lower the tempo, let David Mackinder’s familiar nasal vocals let in some air, bring the drama. “Megachurch” is a full, sweeping post-rock anthem that recasts the band’s penchant for gang vocals (see: textbook buddy anthem “The Wild Bunch”) as a dazzling, mournful choir. “Machines Kept You Alive” turns a lonely, elegiac ballad into an abrupt blitz of glitching sound. Fireworks pull off all of these moves and more on Higher Lonely Power. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s earnest and obvious and maybe even a little bit too much, but it works.
Part of this new maximalism extends to the band’s preoccupation with institutional power, particularly that which comes from a conservative weaponization of Christianity in America. The world of Higher Lonely Power is swarming with reminders of these forces — crosses outside school buildings, babies on billboards, homophobic slogans on bumper stickers. The record functions on the tension between this omnipresent power, supposedly working to connect us all and give us comfort, and the ways in which it pushes us away from each other (“Religious freedom won't be touched / We'll keep the gays from our children / Hurts to know we're on our own / Sad to know we're in control”).