Hi, everyone. Vrrrrthony Vrrrrtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of the new Guerilla Toss album, You're Weird Now.

Here we have a brand new LP from the New York band Guerilla Toss. I've covered them several times on the channel at this point, and I've been following their work to some degree for over 10 years. Their evolution has been interesting, to say the least, seeing them go from this abrasive combination of noise rock and post-punk with a touch of prog to something else now that contains a lot of those elements still, but has become a lot more psychedelic and sweeter on the ears, bringing in more synthesizers and electronics, as well as a lot of ideas from the weirdest segments of the new wave era, be it Devo or Oingo Boingo or Split Enz, so on and so forth.

If you get less nerdy about it, imagine that one TikTok of the band My Son The Hurricane, the one where they're locked in and dancing and looking real zany. Yeah, I suppose you could say the vibes of this new Guerilla Toss record are somewhere along those lines, but on way more LSD.

Then in addition to that, imagine all the members either being an alien from another planet, or a Saturday morning cartoon villain that was turned into a mutant because of a nuclear waste spill. That's a quality I would say has been going through Guerilla Toss's music for at least a minute now, but they have always been experimenting with each new record, and sometimes it has mixed results. I mean, after all, I wasn't that crazy about their last album, but they're always keeping it interesting to some degree with a series of challenging and creative ideas that push the band out of its comfort zone with each album cycle.

And that tradition very much continues on with You're Weird Now, a record that I think is simultaneously the band's boldest and most ambitious yet, but also the catchiest and most instantly enjoyable work they have put out, too. Now, I haven't really loved a Guerilla Toss album since their 2017 record, GT Ultra, which was quite raw, explosive, dancy. And I think You're Weird Now nails that down as with more detailed, immersive song structures and instrumental layers, too. I'm also just massively impressed with the amount of variety across this record as well, while simultaneously being able to forge a very coherent and recognizable sound that I am able to pick up on regardless of what styles or influences the band seems to be embarking upon on a given track.

Guerilla Toss, I wouldn't say, sound anything like Gorillaz – the virtual band Gorillaz – but they are similar in that they seemingly they exist in their own little cartoony, isolated, trendless world, where the only sound that truly matters is their own specific idiosyncratic, weird-ass sound.

Take, for example, the very fun single off of this record, "Psychosis is Just a Number", which features very groovy bass lines, dance party synth chords, psychedelic freak out guitars as well. The vocals, per usual with Guerrilla Toss, are layered up with these strange chorus effects, which give them very odd ball quality. The track, more or less lyrically, reads as about mental instability, not just in a way to where it's just like writing from the point of view of somebody going crazy, but even diving into the verse lyrics themselves. I feel like I'm having a stroke or some mental break.

Deeper into the record, we also get a bit of synthy psychedelic pop with "The CEO of Personal and Pleasure", a track that's in a very odd time signature. I've yet to fully map out. All I know is that it definitely tingles the brain. It's a track that simultaneously is joyous, is colorful, is blissful, but it also brings a heaping helping of existential dread in the lyrics, with a lot of bars about feeling sickly, feeling like you have a lack of identity, just generally feeling strange.

The song "Life's a Zoo" features all these wild and rapid changes across the progression of the song that. I feel like. come across like you're just flipping through channels or going rapidly through a bunch of TikToks short form content. Going from "Life's a Zoo / You're so uncool", to later in the middle of the track, this very dreamy, jazzy instrumental break. Again, there's just a very well-executed, eclectic vibe to this album that I just find so exciting and stimulating.

This is also highlighted very well on the track "Red Flag to Angry Bull", which aesthetically does have this neon-colored aura to it, like many a track on this album. But at the core of this song still, I feel like we're hearing this very lazy, chill, indie, slacker rock cut, that really feels like the spirit at the core of this song. And what makes that even more apparent is the fact that apparently Stephen Malkmus of Pavement fame had a hand in the production on this album, which like, okay, sick. That's epic.

To further add to the weird combination of musical DNA strains going into this record, apparently Trey Anastasio of Phish fame is in the mix, too. A connection that, in my opinion, actually makes quite a bit of sense when you look into just how jammy and trippy and occasionally improvisational, some sections of this record are. That is very much exemplified on the longest track of the record, "Panglossian Mannequin", which is a track that is a part buzz rock barn burner, part synth prog epic, part Talking Heads spoken word dance number, part digital mushroom trip. If I didn't say it, again, longest track on the record, and the band just makes great use of that run time. Every second really counts and matters in terms of either presenting a new idea, transitioning from one section to the next, building up to the next break or change in a thrilling and exciting way.

Going deeper in the record, we have bangers like "Deep Sight". Following that, the very slow "When Dogs Bark", which features this lengthy display of slow booming chords. I do really enjoy this particular progression of chords. There's a lot of tension not only in that, but also the way that some of the vocals and synthesizer layers build up throughout the track. The punky screams during certain sections of "Crocodile Cloud" are certainly a surprise, too.

And as far as the bookends of this album are concerned, you have the opener, "Crystal Ball", which I think is pretty much the perfect cut to open the listener up to the party of sounds and wackiness this album represents. And then you also have the closer, which I don't think is my favorite track on the record, but it does function pretty well as an odyssey-type cut, as a multi-phased moment that really does lean more into just how much jam-type chemistry there is.

I walked away from this record loving it and feeling pretty strongly that this is Guerilla Toss's best work thus far, because not only is it, again, holding true to those noisy, dancy, punky aspects of their sound that made a lot of their early work exciting to begin with. But then on top of that, you're building in the left field new wave elements, the prog elements, the psychedelic elements, and getting this very unique soup of ideas and influences that I feel like so few bands out there embody right now, especially not as well as Gurilla Toss currently is. Which is why I'm feeling a strong 8 to a light 9 on You're Weird Now.

Anthony Fantano, Guerilla Toss, forever.