Buttercup

"Buttercup" opens Landmark with the sound of a band that grew up on math rock and decided to be joyful about it — interlocking clean guitar lines that dart around each other, a bass that walks rather than roots, and Whistler Allen's drums shifting accents constantly so the groove keeps ducking out from under you. Nathan Stocker and Jake Luppen trade guitar figures like a conversation neither wants to end. Luppen's voice is the counterweight: high, elastic, and slightly strained at the top, delivering lines with a nervy urgency that keeps the brightness from turning saccharine. Lyrically it's about the moment youth stops being automatic — a friend changing, a certainty dissolving, the panic underneath a still-sunny surface. The Minneapolis band recorded Landmark in Wisconsin with BJ Burton, whose production adds a subtle synthetic sheen and unexpected drops of silence, giving these songs more air than their frenetic parts would suggest. It arrived in 2017 as a defining record for the college-radio indie of that moment, when technical playing and pop hooks briefly stopped being opposed. Best heard walking fast somewhere with a deadline, or with friends in a car in early spring when everything feels possible and slightly precarious.