Review: Talk Me Off – “Abyss”

Smartpunk / Swamp Cabbage – 20 April 2021

Cliff notes: This record is really good!

Abyss, the new EP from Talk Me Off, is not to be missed. My guess is that Talk Me Off is poised for bigger things so I highly recommend jumping on that train right now. At its core the band is pretty firmly rooted in that world of snotty pop punk that takes a few cues from hardcore. They’re a great Fest band (I don’t know if they’ve actually played Fest). They’re a more aggressive Lillingtons. I ordered Abyss on vinyl after listening for this review, and then ordered their other two records as well. That should say enough about my feelings?

But even a description like that minimizes what Talk Me Off is doing. There are enough left turns in just about every track that keep me guessing what’s going to come next. Talk Me Off is particularly good at writing really genre specific songs without anything losing its energy. At the lowest moments of Abyss, it’s still a very exciting record. 

“Counting Digits” is a great opener and really demonstrates everything that the band can do. There’s a lot of catchy hooks, there’s screaming, a fair number of stops and starts. It’s fast, it’s loud. But it does all these things without it sounding like “another punk band.” Whoever in this band is the primary songwriter has a strong sense of form. For a release that at its surface is a fairly simple punk record there are a lot of delicate nuances that kept me engaged. 

Holly Herzog, the band’s vocalist and guitarist, has a really great voice that lives in a gray area between screaming and melodic. The band describes themselves as “snotty,” which is a term that works, but I think it’s also reductive, because they’re exploring so many more nuances than the snotty pop punk genre typically allows for. Holly is backed up often by the bands bassist Ryan Cacophony, who has a great delivery as well. Talk Me Off is at their best when their vocalists are trading off a lot, but Abyss is pretty Holly centric. She’s great but hearing just a little bit more from Ryan would be great too.

The EP ends with a great cover of Youth Brigade’s “I Hate My Life.” Covers often either ape the source material so much that I wonder why I’m not just listening to the original, or they become so unique that I wish the band had just written their own lyrics and called it a day. Talk Me Off carefully walks the line between these two modes and it really pays off. They pay homage to the original track but its performance is really consistent with the rest of the record.

Talk Me Off’s Abyss is great! Especially if you’re already a fan of gruff pop punk stuff, but even if you’re not you should go listen anyway. As I said above, my money’s on Talk Me Off getting a lot bigger, so at the very least you should buy a copy of their record so you can inflate its value on Discogs in a few years.