Adult Mom - Driver

“And the only thing that I’ve done / this month is drink beer and masturbate / and ignore phone calls from you.” That’s a critical line from ‘Sober’, the emotional and literal centrepiece of this third Adult Mom full-length, and is the sort of line that looks deliciously witty written down and yet, when delivered in something close to deadpan by Stevie Knipe, both retains that sense and also feels quietly devastating. In that respect, ‘Sober’ is ‘Driver’ in microcosm; turning the plain into the plaintive, with sparse instrumentation and tastefully-restrained arrangements leaving Stevie’s matter-of-fact vocals - which frequently invoke the memory of The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan - to do much of the heavy lifting.

The song’s key theme, meanwhile, calls to mind the most obvious frame of reference for ‘Driver’; Waxahatchee’s ‘Saint Cloud’, which it recalls in both composition and in how confidently it wears its emotional fragility. Anybody drawn in by their sharply funny Twitter presence will delight in the fact that the same sense of humour is written into the record’s DNA, as is Stevie’s own queer experience. ‘Berlin’, in referencing dorm-room screamalongs to Hole’s ‘Violet’, perfectly encapsulates the sense of post-collegiate longing for something you’ve barely even left behind that is at the emotional heart of the album, matched neatly by the breezy melancholy that it exudes sonically. Records like this always sound deceptively simple when done properly; if it were as easy as Adult Mom makes it sound to write pop gems this endearing in their honesty, everybody would be doing it.