Declan McKenna’s new album What Happened to the Beach? dropped on February 9th, and since Pitchfork (RIP) has not had a chance to get their claws on it, I’m here to replace them (I’m also beating Anthony Fantano to it).
Sometimes it’s hard to remember McKenna is only twenty-five years old, since his name has been familiar in the indie-rock scene for almost ten years. At sixteen, he wrote and released “Brazil,” a song that aims to call out the corruption and poverty in the country perpetuated by Sepp Blatter and other FIFA officials. At seventeen, he released his debut album What Do You Think About the Car, which features songs like “Isombard”’ and “Paracetamol” that discuss issues from the public’s idolization of politicians to the mental health crisis among LGBTQ+ youth. The album radiates feelings of teen angst and generational misunderstanding under a blanket of perky guitar riffs and catchy melodies.
His second studio album was dropped just shy of his twenty-second birthday. Zeros, while still political in many ways, is also an ode to glam rock and the music of the 1970s.
McKenna is often criticized for being unoriginal. Bowie; The Strokes; Cage the Elephant; comparison to these musicians has been used to argue that McKenna was simply an immature artist. His vocals were supposedly nothing outstanding, the production decent, and even though his songwriting was unique, some didn’t think it wasn’t enough to distinguish himself on the scene because of the “generic” indie-rock packaging his words came in.
McKenna’s third studio album, What Happened to the Beach, feels a bit like a fever dream, or a really strange daze. Songs like “Mezzanine” and “Wobble” have an ethereal tingle to them, with echoes that swallow the listener. Others are delightfully upbeat and fun, like “Phantom Buzz” and “Elevator Hum,” with melodies that are as whimsical as the song’s titles.
The record showcases a vulnerability that McKenna has not previously expressed in his music. Rather than singing about the mass atrocities that his government has caused, McKenna has a song completely devoted to how sometimes “Nothing Works”, singing, “What’s the point running? Not like I’m up and coming anymore.” reiterating the sentiment with lyrics like “I try to fix myself but nothing works.” “It’s an Act” showcases feelings of life being an entire performance, both as someone who does it for a living and as just another person on this Earth, “You call it a dream when it’s hell, It’s not like me to flunk the show and tell.”
This album is Declan McKenna through a new, psychedelic lens. He is growing up, falling into the pitfalls of apathy and burnout as an artist, and above all, embracing that art does not have to always be so deliberately deep (in fact, “Four More Years” is simply a 40-second song about England losing the World Cup in 2022). Sometimes, you just have to wonder what ever happened to the beach.
