Yeah, this new The Voidz album, it's not good.

Here we have the third and latest full-length project from New York, Experimental Rock and Pop Outfit, The Voidz, which was formed in the early 2010s by singer and songwriter, Mr. Julian Casablancas, and the many musicians he was recording and performing with around the release of his first solo album, Phrases for the Young.

And if it wasn't clear, yes, I am talking about that Julian Casablancas, the one from the Strokes, who presumably started the Voidz as an adventurous and eclectic foil to his main band, whose output over the years had grown scant and bland and uninspired. I mean, after what was easily The Strokes' worst album at the time in 2013, Come Down Machine, The Voidz dropped two incredibly fun, raw, wild records that honestly had me looking forward more to their future as a band than The Strokes.

However, that expectation for me would get flipped on its head with the release of the latest Strokes' album, The New Abnormal, an album that despite its handful of flaws and messy Rick Rubin production, was handily one of the best Strokes records in years and years and years, really their weirdest and coolest full length to date.

So cool, awesome, fantastic, epic, faith in The Strokes restored. But at what cost?

Because I have a feeling that Julian Casablancas made a deal with the devil to make that album as good as it was. And the trade-off with Satan himself was that the next Voidz album had to completely stink because what is this? Because this was one of my most anticipated albums for the year. And now that it's out and I'm hearing the whole thing, I'm sitting here wondering, why was I even excited in the first place?

I mean, I guess with the long dodgy album rollout that this record had, it was difficult to get a grasp of what exactly we were in for. I mean, some of the singles on this thing date back to last year. Even the one minute intro overture track was released as a single for some reason. And one of the biggest weeks of press this record got was in covering the controversy around its apparently AI generated album art.

All of that is neither here nor there, though. All that I can tell you is that now that I'm hearing the entire thing, it is very much, apparently, a massive step down in terms of creativity and overall quality from the last Voidz record, which was excellent, mind you, one of my favorite albums of that year, incredibly fun and vibrant and quirky record, really proved what made the Voidz special as a band.

But now with the release of this album, whatever viability the Voidz had as a band has apparently just gone out the window because what we have here instead sounds like just Julian Casablancas dicking around on a bunch of indulgent homespun demos where creatively he just has no filter whatsoever because I think a thorough self-editing process would have prevented tracks like "When Will the Time of these Bastards End?" from seeing the light of day. As the mix is horrible, you can barely make out anything that's going on vocally or instrumentally. The playing is sloppy. It sounds flat. All of the bits of instrumentation separately from what I can make out of it, it all just sounds very artificial. The singing is so bad that even the autotune can't compensate for it sometimes. And the singing delivery that Casablancas employs on this track is less reminiscent of anything good that he typically would do on a song and seems more like a novelty Halloween music.

Yeah, this is embarrassingly bad, considering this is the same artist who is at least in part responsible for songs that are as expansive and odd and interesting as "Human Sadness".

And look, honestly, while that is one of the worst tracks on the LP, the rest of the record is not that much better. The song "Square Wave" is like a song written by some cut-rate, reverb-addicted indie rock band with just a fraction of the talent of the Voidz or the Strokes based off of their earlier records. The track "Prophecy of the Dragon" just sounds like more Godawful zany Halloween rock, but this time with some crunchy metal riffs. And while I think the track "Seven Horses" means well, for the most part, it just feels like Julian crooning over some oddly crafted warped reggae groups. That is until we are hit with this very thick, muddy mix of guitars and autotune runs that reads as awful on paper, but it's somehow more nightmarish in practice.

Then the second half of the record fails to pick things up at all as you get aimless moaning over ambient pianos. A track that sounds like a demo the band New Order would have written back in the day if they habitually drank cough syrup. There's also "Perseverance-1C2S", which is maybe the most demo-quality sounding song on the entire record. And again, while I know that the Voidz have had a tendency to sound a little rough around the edges, I would still say that the performances in the production generally sounded at least put together or intentional in some way. The nastiness and the harshness and the looseness felt very performative, whereas this not as much.

And then to top it off, the song "All the Same". It sounds like Julian trying to just fail, utterly fail at writing a Vampire Weekend song with really no structure or plan outside of just letting the main riffs and groups of the repeat with a few variations here and there, and then it just gets stale and finishes.

But yeah, this thing was a wash. How did we have a fall from grace this hard? So yeah, this record is maybe my biggest disappointment of 2024. And after records like Tyranny and The New Abnormal, there was really no reason for this record not to be fire. The streak was there, the momentum was there. Julian could have easily built on all of the weird and catchy experimental rock sounds that he's been dabbling in as of late. But instead, he put together a bunch of tracks on this record that just feel like drafts he didn't go over again and didn't go back to hone or refine in any way whatsoever - get a first pass on them and then it's done.

I really have no choice but to presume exactly that because this is not the attention to detail that we're used to getting on anything he's typically involved with, which is why, again, this Voidz record, it's not good.