Jeff Rosenstock: HELLMODE review – punk’s golden boy plays it safe

Billed as both his most chaotic and “solid” record so far, Jeff Rosenstock’s seventh full-length is neither, but still provides its fair share of satisfying if familiar punk rock hits.

There are few acts in rock today that can depict this era’s lingering sense of apocalypse (the broken machinations of late-stage capitalism, the corrosion of American democracy, the imminent decay of the whole planet above all) quite as sharply as Jeff Rosenstock. The veteran New York punk who started his career in an unhinged DIY collective called Bomb the Music Industry! (exclamation mark mandatory) has now spent over ten years dissecting his converging personal and global worries in the form of an increasingly lauded and hit-dense discography, peaking perhaps with the smooth-flowing masterpiece of angst WORRY., an album so definitive it deserved a full stop in the title.

This year’s promisingly titled HELLMODE was hailed by promoters and early reviewers as his most chaotic, anarchic and, in Rosenstock’s own words, “solid” record yet, so it’s something of a disappointment that it ends up sounding more or less like the six albums that preceded it. The good news is that any Jeff Rosenstock album is a good one, and his knack for sticky hooks and pithy distillations of a very millennial form of pessimism isn’t going anywhere. HELLMODE is front loaded with tightly written numbers. Exhilarating opener WILL U STILL U is packed with instrumental left turns and belting gang vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place next to the 40-year-old’s very best. Lead single LIKED U BETTER winningly pairs a jaunty keyboard earworm with that sinking feeling of being able to escape your own anxieties. DOUBT follows suit, nurturing a false sense of ease before erupting into a screechy, cathartic polemic. Oftentimes Rosenstock’s dismay at the state of the world – the climate crisis in particular looms over this record – veers towards a relatable defeatism. “The world doesn’t owe you,” he concludes powerfully in standout FUTURE IS DUMB, thus summarising ten years of intense creative output in a single harsh truth.

It’s a shame that Rosenstock couldn’t quite maintain his momentum, especially when it comes to album centrepiece HEALMODE, which does away with the rest of the record’s nuance and undermines the prevailing sense of gloom with the tired, sickly sweet message that love alone can save us from unmitigated disaster. It doesn’t help that the clichéd lyrics are delivered with a cautious softness by Rosenstock, whose voice is much better suited to angry ragers about the constitution than cutesy love songs with an acoustic guitar. Hookless LIFE ADMIN follows, which stands out as one of the limpest tracks Rosenstock has released in years.

As is customary for a Rosenstock album, it all ends in a somewhat theatrical seven minute epic, although there’s very little in 3 SUMMERS that can outdo the much more memorable closing numbers in Rosenstock albums of years gone by. Above all, that’s the key limitation of HELLMODE: with the exception of flawed moment of calm HEALMODE, there’s little invention to be found here, and this distinctive form of volatile rock is better served by most of Rosenstock’s previous releases. True, this is a competently delivered album by an artist who clearly knows how to set a room alight with blaring guitars and verbalised deep-seated dread. It just helps if you don’t know what you’re missing out from the rest of Rosenstock’s oeuvre.

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