Pleaser - 2023 Danish Part Time Records Label 9-track LP

“Dark, cute and cool” has always been a mantra for Pleaser, starting as an inside joke on how the members come across in everyday life but perhaps also being a fitting description for their iconoclastic tendencies and aesthetics.

On their debut album, Pleaser manifests themselves as a punk band in both a strict and a loose sense of the term. Their musicality, ethics and community are undeniably punk, but their expression is vast and more personal than sub-genre-bound.
The band projects the heart-on-the-sleeve of early emo, the catchy viciousness associated with original punk rock, a dark convolutedness of certain kinds of metal - and yet an earthiness and willingness to explore that harkens back to earlier forms of rock music and all the way up to a current experimental music scene. Songs are both catchy and impenetrable at the same time, appreciating a pop hook just as much as a labyrinthine song structure.

Pleaser’s self-titled debut album is the result of a combination of hard rehearsal space labour, playfulness and increasingly sharp band-instincts. Lyrically, the songs contemplate themes of life/death, subconscious patterns, internal search for hope and love, demons, fear and desperation but also growth, playfulness and the shaping of new pathways.
Songs dating back to the formation of the band 3-4 years ago have built in vigor from the band’s growing stage experience and willingness to treat songs like football tackles. Harmony, dissonance, riffs and rhythmic shifts are jumbled together and allowed to remain tumultuous and imperfect, just as a debut album should be. 

Tracklisting.

1. Full Collapse 02:17
2. Plunge 01:41 
3. Join The Strings 02:28
4. Crawl 01:48
5. The World Says Its Name 03:19
6. Drive Of Distress 03:10
7. Light And Fire 01:45
8. The Dream 01:46
9. This Is How I Die 02:10