Citizen – “Black And Red”

Citizen – “Black And Red”

Later this month, the Midwestern post-hardcore trio Citizen will drop their new album Life In Your Glass World. The album is literal garage rock; the band recorded the LP in a studio that frontman Mat Kerekes built in his Toledo garage. But the follow-up to 2017’s As You Please doesn’t sound anything like the kind of music that we generally associate with garages. Instead, Citizen have gone big on this one, landing on a grand and hooky and expansive rock sound.

Thus far, Citizen have shared the early singles “I Want To Kill You” and “Blue Sunday,” both of which have fun music videos about cultish rituals. Today, they’ve shared the new joint “Black And Red,” which doesn’t have a video and which sadly doesn’t seem to be inspired by the NWO Wolfpac. Instead, in a press release, Kerekes says that the song is “about someone who leeches off of your efforts and turns out to be a bad friend on top of that.” Citizen don’t really sound like a hardcore band, but that is some real hardcore-band subject matter.

Like “I Want To Kill You” and “Blue Sunday,” “Black And Red” reaches back to the sound of mid-’90s alt-rock. There’s also some mid-’00s blog-rock in there, too. In the combination of muscular guitar and searching melody, I hear at least a few echoes of Bloc Party. Check out the song below.

Life In Your Glass World is out 3/26 on Run For Cover.

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