There’s this band that I’ve been following for a while, We Are The In Crowd. They’re another pop-punk group, which is apparently my current thing. Anyway, I got their first album, Best Intentions, some time last year and thought it was pretty rad. Truth be told though, I dug their EP, Guaranteed to Disagree, even more.
Weird Kids is their second studio album, which just released last Tuesday. First thing I did when I woke up that morning was to boot up iTunes and get that sucker downloading. It’s not too often that I pay enough attention to the music world to get really excited about an upcoming album, but I was almost unreasonably hyped for Weird Kids. In the weeks leading up to its release, I found myself constantly checking iTunes to see if it was out yet even though I was well aware of the release date.
And I guess that’s really the best thing I can say about social media. I kind of hate it in general, but I do appreciate how easy social media makes it to keep abreast of what my favourite bands are working on. I kept seeing WATIC on my Facebook feed promoting Weird Kids, and it absolutely worked on me. Twitter is still a horrible mess of stupid, meaningless garbage posts, though.
Back to the album in question, Weird Kids is absolutely the ideal sophomore album. A little deeper, a little rougher, a little more varied. I could probably say all the same nice things about it that I said about Tonight Alive’s The Other Side last year. There’s a notable amount of growth on display here, and I really love the direction that WATIC went with it. It’s got much less of a pop vibe than their previous works, and veers more towards a punk/alternative style. At the very least, it’s a more refined kind of pop, working hard not to be mindless radio trash.
If I had to knock it for one thing, it’s that there’s way less back-and-forth between Tay and Jordan’s vocals than in their previous works. It’s one of the things that really defined WATIC to me, so I miss it, but Tay is definitely a stong enough singer to carry the bulk of the vocal work on her own.
I won’t bother to give “detailed” breakdowns of songs or anything, because I’m pretty terrible at that. I will say that I’m super happy with Weird Kids. Like Tonight Alive and Go Radio, We Are The In Crowd is one of those bands that I’m really into that nobody I know has ever heard of, so I’m making it my mission to spread the word as much as I can. So here, have a music video.