Hunchback’s 2019 album Heavens Above describes Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper as “…an outsider because of how together he has it.” Cooper, the album argues, opposes our notion of the outsider. The archetype is a tortured Sisyphean, perpetually reliving their own failures. Cooper is, for the most part, exactly when and where he needs to be; a duck whose feet invisibly massage the current.
It’s been made no secret of—we live in a fraught and divided time. Our general response has tended to “oh dearism”; an acceptance that something is vaguely wrong, and an accompanying inability to qualify causes or formulate solutions. Ubiquity fathers absence, though. The more pervasive this depressive artistic mode is, the easier (and more necessary) it’s become to ignore.
Nada Surf’s Never Not Together crystallises a worrying fact. Cooper has company—the outsiders are now the happy ones.
On first listen, Never Not Together feels confrontationally uncool; espousing platitudinal lines like, “live and learn and forget”, and smashing out feelgood riffs straight from the Dinosaur Jr. songbook. But this speaks more to a cultural phenomenon than it typifyies Nada Surf’s songwriting. The 70s were, or so I’ve been told, an almost unspeakably difficult decade to live though. Yet those years brought us disco, funk, and afrobeat; genres which approached hardship and social injustice with a defiant spirit; a call for unity, for love, for healing. It’s what Idles more recently called Joy as an Act of Resistance.
Happiness is increasingly conflated with cheese. The world’s moneymen profit off kid misery. But Nada Surf present an opportunity to give the powers that be the finger, listen to something shamelessly chintzy, and fucking enjoy yourself for once. We’re all in this together—that shouldn’t be such a lonely admission to make.
Never Not Together is released on 7th of February. Pre-order available here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe