Sweet Pill’s sophomore release comes four years after their debut album ‘Where the Heart Is’. These four years have seen the band tour alongside La Dispute and The Wonder Years, head out on their own headline tour, and pick up acclaim from artists across the board. The burnout of constant touring, in the band’s own words, made the writing process for ‘Still There’s A Glow’ a challenge; though it’s a challenge that they’ve overcome successfully enough, as the end result feels deceptively effortless.
With a blend of pop-punk, math rock, and grunge revivalism, ‘Still There’s A Glow’ achieves a coherency even across songs like ‘Sunblind’ and ‘Rotten’, which respectively bring a lightness and a darkness to the album in equal measure. This isn’t a case of songs existing on a single spectrum, alternating between two poles – songs like ‘Tough Love’ and ‘Heading On’ sit on a different pole entirely.
The album opens with the brightness that the title ‘Sunblind’ suggests – upbeat and bouncy, with mathy fills and life-affirming lyrics. Zayna Youssef’s vocals fly over the instrumentals with confidence and introspection, often reminiscent of Hayley Williams in her sincerity. ‘Shameless’ follows ‘Sunblind’ and delivers a complementary flavour, retaining a musical lightness while introducing a darker lyrical element – “Glass half full, or is it really empty? I change the glass completely, shameless”.
That balance of light and dark ripples thoughout the album. The motif of fire in titles like ‘Sunblind’, ‘Glow’, ‘Smoke Screen’ and ‘Slow Burn’, alongside lyrics like “I feel flammable” (‘Smoke Screen’) and “Burning the house I grew up in” (‘Letting Go’), all hit at the album’s central theme. Fire destroys, but it cleans. It resets, allowing space for fresh growth. Youssef’s lyrics, whatever tone they strike in the moment, are all about moving forward and pushing through emotional and creative burnout.
‘Glow’, the single that lends the album its name, is filled with open sonic spaces that are uncrushed and confident in their dynamic changes. It rises and falls as guitars speak to each other while Youssef floats over everything. It’s a song that glows and luxuriates, only to be followed by ‘Slow Burn’, which sees the album at its most frantic. Balance and contrast, mirrored meanings, flickering and changing like flames.
The darkest song on the album is ‘Rotten’, with a filthy bass tone, screams layered into the mix like a pillow of broken glass, and an alternating tone between urgency and the doom-laden inversion of the open warmth of ‘Glow’. It’s a personal highlight, though perhaps one that is informed by the diversity of sounds that allow each song to remain distinct.
‘Still There’s A Glow’ is an album about overcoming the sophomore slump, and dealing with exhaustion and defeat while refusing to be overwhelmed by either. The sweet, sing-song guitars of closer ‘Letting Go’, a song about moving on from the past, signal a hopeful conclusion to the album’s emotional conflicts – hope, not born out of naïvety, but out of struggle and growth. That is the message that Sweet Pill have delivered here, both lyrically and musically – a confident growth into a newer and more mature style of songwriting and album composition.
Will Bright
