Charly Bliss embrace pop glory on Forever

This is the album the Brooklyn-based band were always capable of, each song shimmering with hooks, enticing vocals, and lyrics that fete the complexities of love, desire, and ambition.

“Calling You Out” has all the requirements to be a singalong hit on the beach, in the club, or in the car – with windows down while cruising the west coast’s Highway 1 or blasting the AC during a northeast traffic jam. A hyper-catchy tale about not wanting to be a negative person who’s always on the look-out for betrayal (and therefore almost always finds it), the song highlights the band’s streamlined sound. The fuzzy guitars of 2017’s Guppy and 2019’s Young Enough are mostly sidelined (but not entirely), replaced by big-pop, synthy, stringy sounds. “No one has more fun than us,” guitarist Spencer Fox said recently. Forever makes this abundantly clear.

Which doesn’t mean that the band aren’t dead serious about their song-craft. To the contrary, you might call Forever 2024’s ear worm central. “Tragic” is a bouncy, well-oiled, unshakeable take that glorifies recklessness and impulsivity (“Once you let me drive the car / you know I’m gonna crash it”), Eva Hendricks’ voice merging train-wreck confidence and adrenalised self-deprecation. “Back There Now” reconfigures 80s synth-riffs, yielding a sound that could be as energizing in the corporate boardroom as the coffee shop, at the heads-down sock-hop as the eyes-and-hands-to-the-sky ecstasy-fueled dance floor.

“Nineteen” stands as a potent and moving elegy to youth (“fluorescent lights”, “sidewalks in the summer heat”) as Hendricks dives into nostalgia. She borrows from, then abandons Lorde’s Pure Heroine-era cadence and timbre, by the song’s end expressing curiosity and semi-equanimity (“What were you thinking back when you met me?”). On “Waiting for You”, Hendricks’ vocal is as nuanced as ever, her verses and choruses equally compelling, the band moving between new-wave-y rhythms and melodic transitions.

“In Your Bed”, meanwhile, spotlights the band as they flirt with dreampop templates a la the mercurial Girlpool while never plunging fully into that genre’s melancholy signature. To the contrary, as the song progresses, a distinct buoyancy grows more prominent, the chorus launching irresistibly, even as Hendricks describes a relationship that didn’t end particularly well.

“I Don’t Know Anything” breaks down how we might aspire to encountering life without agendas or expectations (“I don’t know anything about anything”), though such good intentions often morph into seeking the next high and lamenting the way it quickly fades (“I guess I live for the greed and the vanity”). The song blends pop uplift with a gothy drift toward nihilism (“you bet on yourself and you lose every day”), prickly dejection transformed into a feel-good anthem. “Here Comes the Darkness” returns to the ruptured-romance motif even as Hendricks’ chorus similarly soars, celestial and troubling at the same time.

On “Last First Kiss”, Henricks juxtaposes wallflower verses and showboat choruses, voicing a desire for romance packed with emotional intensity (“I would never be full if you didn’t exist”, “let’s fight like Italians”), the band offering crystalline rhythms and slinky accents. In this way, the rousing Forever resolves, Charly Bliss actualizing their potential, embracing pop glory.