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I bet you played it twice. The first time I heard Aluminum‘s “Behind My Mouth” I played it about four times in a row. That super groovy bassline, the huge drums, the samples, the weird lyrics and vocal delivery. Can’t get enough, and I still run it back when it finishes, weeks after the first listen. It’s car-chase music, it’s a Holmes and Soderbergh jam, it’s Luscious Jackson
Just ridiculously addictive. So then on one leg of my long drive this weekend, I threw on the record it’s from: Fully Beat, released in May of 2024. Just like Fever In Fever Out, it’s a surprising record that it wasn’t what I expected — it’s so much different than expected, and so much better.
So let’s back up a bit — Aluminum is a band from San Francisco, and they’ve been releasing music as Aluminum since 2020. Fully Beat is their first full-length, and there’s enough range on this thing to suggest they’ve got a lot of great stuff still to come. Forget Lucious Jackson, this is Mass Romantic. The songs range from that trippy, psychedelic goove of “Behind my Mouth” (with Torrey‘s Ryann Gonsalves on bass and vocals) to straight-ahead ’90s guitar alt-rock of “Beat”, featuring a different vocalist (Marc Leyda, with Gonsalves moving to backup vocal):
Nearly every song on here could have a different album built around it. Here’s another one with Gonsalves on vocal, a perfect piece of radio-friendly indie-pop, perfect for whatever teen drama is big at the moment:
The band moves so effortlessly between these styles, and it’s hard to tell what’s live instrumentation and what’s sampled or looped (not that it matters, it’s great).
Their first release, a two-track single from called Spinning Backwards b/w As Big As You Are, is almost the blueprint for Fully Beat. The first track, “Spinning Backwards” has the looped electronic drums and funkiness, and the b-side “As Big As You Are” is another sparkly guitar pop gem:
Their 2022 EP Windowpane is worth digging into as well. The four full-length tracks are still catchy and melodic, leaning more toward organic-sounding indie rock.
It’s surprising that this record hasn’t received more acclaim — or at the very least, that it took this long to cross my radar. “Behind My Mouth” is guaranteed to be in my top-ten most played songs of 2024, and the rest of the album will be a winding-road, windows-down staple for a long time.
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