📸 Kyle Dehn
Arizona indie rock group Breakup Shoes has returned with its newest studio album, Standing Still. Formed in 2015, the band—Nick Zawisa on vocals and guitar, Matthew Witsoe on drums, Michael Montiel on bass, and Michael Cully on guitar—has continued to evolve their alt-indie sound for this record, where Zawisa explores the things that have him “feeling unhappy and complacent” as time passes us by.
It’s an all-too-relatable feeling, isn’t it?
One of the album’s greatest strengths is the isolation Zawisa talks about, stemming from not wanting to conform to society’s desires and expectations, yet also not wanting to be alone with oneself in the process. This sentiment is most evident in songs like “Anti-Social Socialite,” where the band’s powerful guitar work matches the intensity of the emotions depicted in the song.
Zawisa delivers a memorable line in “The Suburbs” where he talks about his age and the monotony of it, saying, “keep getting older, same day over and over.” The band attempts a similar idea on “Universal,” which I didn’t feel worked quite as well. With the chorus’s more playful sound, the powerful guitar coming in doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the song.
I did love Witsoe on drums all the way through; his quick, precise drum fills inject a burst of energy that never lets up, like on “Brainwash” and “Malaise”. On “Midwest Goodbye,” he switches up the drumming past your average indie drumming and uses the song’s tempo to elevate the sound and add emotional weight to the track.
My favorite section of the album was towards its conclusion, starting with “Infinitely Sweet,” which has a softer, acoustic tone that was very nice to hear. The layers of instrumentation with its strings and guitar were very gentle and sounded as infinitely sweet as its title suggests. I also really like how the band chose to conclude the album thematically with the lyric “Moving on is hard but so is standing still,” fading out as the album comes to a close.
Indie music has always nailed a comfortable sound that’s fun on the ears, but talking about themes of isolation and the feelings that us young people get and struggle with as we get older with the world constantly changing around us. Through this album, Breakup Shoes shows they’re another band that gets that feeling so well.
They’re definitely not standing still any longer.
