Hey Pizza! / Mom's Basement / MBNH Tapes, 21 Apr 2023
Portland, Maine's Borderlines is slated to release their debut full-length, Keep Pretending, in the summer of 2023. I'm relatively new to the band, only hearing a song or two previously. However, I like the pedigree – Hey Pizza!, Mom's Basement, and MBNH are pretty reliably great with their releases. Now, the band has dropped a new single and video.
“How Many Hours” is a pop punk song in the truest sense. It feels like a sentimental and catchy song and it has no real traces of angst or snot to it. It's cleanly produced and motors along at a deliberately uptempo pace, guitars with a slight distortion and jumping out to lead for a moment. But the real pop honors go to the vocals. The lead vocals sing a sort of melancholy melody that is sticking with me and the backing vocals set everything off just right. This is reminding me of recent stuff from The Young Hasselhoffs. With that band, I struggled to appreciate the heavy-on-pop overtures and sentimental songwriting initially before coming around when I heard the full album. I'm sort of in the same place on this one. On first try, this isn't exactly my typical listening, but I'm not sleeping on this one and I'll say that it's a catchy pop rock song that has a chance to win me over as I listen to it more and more.
- Song Comes From: Keep Pretending
- Album Release Date: “Summer” 2023
- Purchase/Pre-Order/Pre-Save: coming soon (song stream, purchase at Bandcamp)
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ryan is a reviewer and news editor for TGEFM. He's very secretive, he might be an alien.