City Club

"City Club" represents a departure point — The Growlers already occupied a strange, murky corner of the map they called beach goth, but working with Julian Casablancas pushed that sound somewhere more nocturnal and kinetic. The production on this track is thick and metropolitan, layered synths pressing against guitars, the whole thing pulsing with a kind of amphetamine gait that makes it feel less like a song than a city at night rendered in sound. The beat is insistent, almost mechanically so, and it creates a momentum that the other instruments are constantly straining against and surrendering to in equal measure. Brooks Nielsen's voice is a remarkable instrument here — nasal, slack, simultaneously detached and emotive, delivering lines with the cadence of someone muttering to themselves in a way that somehow becomes magnetic over the course of the song. The lyrical world is urban and slightly seedy, populated by people who are up too late for reasons they'd rather not examine closely, finding their own kind of communion in the fact of being awake together. This is the aesthetic territory of the New York City disco-punk continuum that Casablancas has been mining for years, but The Growlers bring a California looseness that keeps it from tipping into irony. It's a song for 1 AM when the bar is still full and the night feels like it could extend indefinitely, a little wrecked, a little exhilarated.