Cheekface are growing, but staying the same

That’s how we ended up with the song “Noodles” from their 2022 album Too Much To Ask. It has only two lyrics chanted over and over, first in monotone, and then screamed: “A big cup of noodles. A giant cup of noodles. A BIG CUP OF NOODLES. A GIANT CUP OF NOODLES.” At 57 seconds, it’s their shortest song. So naturally, by the end of their 2024 spring tour, they were playing it six times a night.

“You start to get tour brain, and things that do not make sense outside of tour start to make perfect sense,” says singer/guitarist Greg Katz. “15, 20 shows into tour, I was like, ‘What if we played ‘Noodles’ twice in a row?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ It kind of snowballed from there: ‘We did it twice and that was great. Let’s do it three times. Maybe we’ll do it four times. Maybe we’ll just keep going until we feel like we’ve done it enough.’”

The terminally cheeky, staunchly independent Los Angeles trio (Katz, bassist Amanda Tannen, and drummer Mark “Echo” Edwards) have a long-standing friends-with-benefits relationship with repetition. From their 2019 debut LP Therapy Island to their latest, Middle Spoon, they’ve recorded and released five albums in only six years, and you can set your watch by their touring schedule. In song, Katz once summarised their ethos as “take a good idea and do it too much.” But with repetition comes rhythm; with each release, they further solidify an aesthetic built on puns, one-liners, and witty observations all worked into starchy hooks and simmered in a salty, bubbly talk-rock broth. For inspiration, Katz cites their LA punk predecessors Bad Religion – who kept an album-per-year pace and founded their own label between 1988 and 1994 – but Cheekface also owes their consistency to their talent for amusing themselves.

“I will write songs whenever we’re not doing something else for Cheekface, and by the time we get home from tour for whatever album it is, we already have half of another album written, so we just keep writing,” says Tannen. “There is no, ‘Okay, we’re gonna take a couple months off,’ because we enjoy doing it. You’re like, ‘Oh, yay, I love hanging with my friends. I love making music. Why would I wanna stop?’”

Of course, no amount of wanting can stop real life from intruding on tour logic. Amid the by-now-familiar songs about coffee, niche art scenes, and the ever-escalating joke of American culture, Middle Spoon chronicles a difficult year in the life of its players (“I like learning, just not the hard way,” Katz chirps on a song called “Hard Mode”). On the album opener, they use “Living Lo-Fi” as a metaphor for feeling like the lossiest version of yourself (“Are you living in a mess you made? / Are you saving money crashing at the practice space? / Are you saving cigarette butts out of stale ashtrays?”).

As always, bits of absurdism sprout from grains of autobiographical truth; after the release of Cheeface’s last album, It’s Sorted, Katz’s father suffered a stroke, leading to months of hospital stays and complications. His grandmother passed away just as Cheekface set off on the UK leg of their spring tour. The struggle seeped into Katz’s songwriting – most directly on the album’s frustrated centrepiece, “Growth Sux.”

“I felt like I was being forced by forces external to me into this really awkward and painful and just-fucking-sucky period of growth that I wasn’t looking for, or looking forward to, and feeling like, ‘I wanna dig my heels in and stop it,’ which… whether it’s a good way to confront those kinds of things or a bad way is kind of immaterial. It’s just an instinctual thing, or it was for me.”

By unfortunate coincidence, his bandmates can relate. Also in the past year, Edwards’ father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and Tannen endured the dissolution of a 13-year relationship. She says she used Cheekface to get through it; after It’s Sorted, she quit her day job to pursue the band full-time (in addition to supplying the bass lines and peppy backing vocals, she crafts all the album art, fliers, and merchandise).

“Everything that I knew of being stable in life and knowing what to expect from your day got pulled out from under my feet all at once,” Tannen says. “I was doing all the things that a grown-up is supposed to do, and it didn’t matter. The world just decided to slap me and be like, ‘You’re not supposed to grow up! Duh. Go back to your roots. Do what you’re talented at doing instead of doing the things that are considered responsible or what are the life goals of the majority of people my age.’ It was basically like, ‘You’re not like everyone else, and that’s okay.’”

None of this dislodges the proverbial tongue from the band’s collective cheek; a Cheekface album is still a Cheekface album, and you’d have to stretch to call Middle Spoon their most personal yet™ – even as Katz sings about shuttling between Sweetgreen and urgent care. But you can’t spend six years recording and touring without growing up some, especially as musicians and arrangers.

Like every previous album, Cheekface recorded Middle Spoon with producer Greg Cortez at New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys (the former personal studio of Elliott Smith). But where they might previously have deployed samples or MIDI keyboard imitations of their ideal parts, they now have the flexibility to bring in new hardware and enlist expert collaborators. With horns by Jer Hunter (Skatune Network) and Jeff Rosenstock, plus backup vocals by Brittany Luna and Tim Hildebrand (Catbite), Middle Spoon flexes serious ska cred.

It also has a few secret ingredients, like the instant coffee and dark chocolate that can elevate a pot of curry, even if they shouldn’t work on paper. “Growth Sux” features Cheekface’s first drum machine rhythm composed on a genuine LinnDrum. On “Military Gum”, surprise Cheekface fan McKinley Dixon skates by to bestow the band’s first ever rap verse (on what Katz calls a “‘Give-It-Away’-type beat”). “To work with them was an honour,” says Dixon. “I approached it how one does, with the same keen eye and attention to detail, akin to a leopard hunting a gazelle or other animal from the Bovidae family. I knew what must be done – as simple as a brick to a cop’s car.”

“One thing we have learned through this project is that it is rubbery enough that it can expand to include some sounds that are not its core sounds, for the sole reason that we like those sounds, and it makes sense in the internal logic of how a Cheekface record works,” says Katz. He compares the evolution to a growing ball of rubber bands: “You just wrap another rubber band around it, and now the ball is bigger.”

Maybe surprisingly (given their live proclivities) Middle Spoon features Cheekface’s first-ever recorded reprise: before the album’s final song comes “Living Lo-Fi (Lo-Fi Version)”, a shorter, softer take on the opener. Repetition can be comforting, as in “I Know What’s Gonna Happen” (a paean to TV reruns), but it can also be iterative. On the second performance of “Lo-Fi”, they take it slower, bringing out the sincere concern and commiseration in its chorus (“Are you living with some chronic pain? / Are you using frozen food as medical first aid? / Are you calling total bullshit on the welfare state?”) and nodding to the nonlinearity of growth. Life is long, like a CVS receipt, and we all live a lot of it lo-fi. For Katz, one of the suckiest parts of growth is knowing more of it lies ahead.

“I was just thinking this morning about being up at 4:00 a.m. in a little shitty airport motel in London, and getting the call from my mom that my grandma died, and then getting up the next day and getting ready for tour,” he says. “How fast that flew by, and how little processing I still have done. My dad, thankfully, lives, but that’s not tidy because after you have major, major, major medical trauma in later age, it’s not like, ‘Oh, now there’s a bow on it and everything’s a-okay.’ You just have to accept what has happened and welcome the time available for those relationships while those relationships can still exist.”

What about growth as a trio? Katz says Cheekface has grown “hotter and smarter,” and nearly leaves it at that, but goes on to say how proud he is of “Living Lo-Fi”, which feels at once like the guitar-driven indie rock they’ve always loved and like a new frontier in its keyboard groove and unusual rant of a bridge. Edwards agrees:

“The longer we do this, the more we get comfortable with who we are as a musical collective. It’s really cool to sit back and listen to the final project and be like, ‘Holy shit, we tried some wild stuff, but it really does still sound like Cheekface.’ It’s a cool confidence to have, to know that that worked – growing, but staying the same.”

When you’ve finished a project like that, there’s only one thing to do, and it just so happens to be the last line on the album: “play it again.”