Microwave released their new album, Let’s Start Degeneracy, on Apr. 26, 2024, about a week before starting their U.S. tour. This album marks a shift for the band from post-hardcore to a refined and eclectic pop sound, a change that accompanies the band’s attempt to put some things to bed.
The album’s title seems to have been taken from the former Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger, who, during a panel discussion for Playboy in 1970, said, “If we want to take [Timothy] Leary literally, we should call LSD ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy.’”
From the tone of ironic defiance that the title strikes, one might expect music on the order of Microwave’s previous album, Death is a Warm Blanket, the last song of which has these cheery lines: “In your perfect world, I don’t think I would sing/ My voice would shrink in peaceful atrophy/ No I don’t want to spend eternity/ Wandering around some distant cloud in a victor’s crown/ That sounds like hell to me.”
In light of that, it’s somewhat surprising that Let’s Start Degeneracy opens with “Portals,” a reharmonization of William Lamartine Thompson’s hymn ‘Softly and Tenderly.’ This song has serenaded countless altar calls in tent meetings and church services for various denominations. The Microwave song keeps the first verse (adding a second of their own) and even gets its title from the line, “See on the portals he’s waiting and watching.”
Almost certainly, the band does not intend this to be in keeping with the song’s use over the past century and a half, but it’s also hard to hear it as a mockery (Hardy’s position as a lapsed Mormon notwithstanding). Their treatment of the song resides in a soft swirl of ambient noise that collides gently with a chuckle, turning Jesus into a kind of psychedelic stand-in for generic reconciliation in the face of death.
As frontman Nathan Hardy puts it, Let’s Start Degeneracy is “about letting go of attachments and behaviors that aren’t serving you and . . . learning to be happy and take care of yourself.” The single “Bored with Being Sad” takes the album’s only reference to their aggressive sound in the 2010s and harnesses it to pop-punk bliss as Hardy sings, “If you romanticize misery/ Brother, you’re gonna be miserable.” Can I get an Amen?
In the background of Degeneracy are Hardy and Timothy’ Tito’ Pittard’s experiments with Ayahuasca in Peru. For decades, the plant-based psychedelic has been sought after by artists and writers as diverse as Allen Ginsberg and Sting. Recently, evidence suggests it is an effective treatment for depression (among other mental health conditions), so it may be at least partly responsible for the album’s urgency to plot a new emotional course. As Hardy sings in the gorgeous and ironic “Ferrari” (the album’s second tune), “I refuse to act on fear, no thank you/I’ve been down that road.” Throughout the album, Hardy’s wit is cynical (“A new self-help book for each year”) but weary as he teases out a verdict on self-induced misery that is less than happy-clappy but somewhat more than miserable.
As such, Degeneracy traces different points of revelation, like the aesthetic trap in the total depravity of the music business in “‘Bored”’ or the quirky motions of emotional intimacy in the acoustic guitar-driven” ‘Straw Hat”’ or the impetus to move on to a new stage in life in the grinding pulse of” ‘Strangers.”’ All through, Microwave has created a pristine pop album mixing up psychedelia, dreamy dance-scapes, whimsical self-deprecation, and, above all, a pervasive melancholy. If Degeneracy is about learning to be happy, the final track, “‘Huperzine,”’ marks it in one sense as a sublime failure. Even the faint, brief whistle at the end sounds sad (I imagine adding hand claps would have somehow made it morose).
The album’s tone never entirely leaves what “‘Ferarri”’ starts. But not for nothing, Hardy sings in “Huperzine,” “What if everything’s as perfect as we suspected it would be?/ What if we dropped the catastrophic fatalist philosophy/ And looked at what’s around us as lucid as our dreams.”
In contrast to the end of their previous album, this also makes Let’s Start Degeneracy, in another sense, a triumph for miserable people everywhere.