Pretty Rude confront themselves on theatrical, slacker-rock-tinged single ‘The Caller’
With a flair for the cerebral and the cathartic, Pretty Rude’s new single ‘The Caller’ arrives as a striking opening statement from their debut album ‘Ripe’, out now via SideOneDummy.
Channelling the grandiosity of ‘This Is Hardcore’-era Pulp and the off-kilter charm of The Rentals, ‘The Caller’ is a sonic reckoning with self-deception. Over theatrical choruses and slacker-rock verses peppered with fuzzed-out dropouts, frontman James Palko trades lines with a past version of himself—the inner voice that once sold him dreams of musical stardom, only to vanish when things get hard.
“It’s a conversation with your past self,” says Palko, “the one that convinced you to stick with music on false hope.”
That theme (confronting the romantic lies we tell ourselves) threads throughout ‘Ripe’. But while the ideas run deep, Pretty Rude keep the delivery sharp, hooky, and unashamedly alive with big emotion and bigger guitars.