by Emma Ingrisani
Within a few years, Nashville’s Snōōper has gone from a self-produced multimedia project—bedroom punk garnished with Web 1.0 music videos and paper-mache puppets—to a tight, five-person band. They’ve played around the country and elsewhere (supporting GEE TEE, they recently toured Australia), leaving delirious new fans in their wake. At a Brooklyn show last year, the crowd was wildly, kinetically all-in: the slam-dancing mass up front kept growing, and bystanders merrily tossed the ice from their drinks into the fray.
The music that night, unsurprisingly, was very loud and very fast, but there was something else about it animating those giddy, ice-flecked attendees. It was a sensibility that was eccentric and arty, openly goofy, quite cheerful—and yet somehow essentially enigmatic. The band’s new full-length Super Snōōper, out via Third Man Records, neatly bottles that contradictory energy, reworking songs from the band’s scattered earlier releases and giving them studio polish and a grander, heavier feel.
Since Blair Tramel and Connor Cummins formed Snōōper in 2020, they’ve put out a half-dozen or so singles and EPs, all with delightfully scuzzy recording values. On these early releases, Tramel’s engagingly chirpy, talking-on-pitch vocals can sound distorted and tinny, almost Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks-esque; found-audio clips are patched in and accompanied by static-y whooshes and blips. These lo-fi effects are clearly an aesthetic choice as well as a DIY byproduct. They complement songs that briefly—sometimes in less than a minute—skip through sketches of grubbiness (“Bed Bugs,” “Fruit Fly”), mild body horror (“Fitness”), and general anomie (“Pod”).
Super Snōōper cleans up much of these audio effects, and instead toughens up the band’s sound. The recording lends depth and metallic sharpness for maximum wallop; Tramel’s voice is brought more to the front of the mix, and gains range and power. With this more straightforward sonic palette, an array of Snōōper’s best material holds up: taut, funny, and ribboned through with moody, dramatic instrumentation.
Lyrically, these songs tap into present-day malaise, yet seem to favor references from a couple of decades back. The result is sort of existential DIY: cut-and-pasting modern anxieties onto an old calendar page, and seeing how it looks. “Powerball” finds the lottery game beaming through the television, rather than a computer or smartphone: “Tune in to see powerball/Guess I’m left with nothing at all,” Tramel blurts robotically. “Defect” also has a backward glance, viewing the menace of the internet in its early, ’90s incarnation, through the home phone line: “Dial up and connect/My mind will reset.” This off-kilter engagement with the past reaches nervy brilliance with “Xerox,” as galloping guitars meet tangy dismissals of posers and/or digital evanescence: “Easy to compare/When you’re full of hot air/You’re a Xerox candy bar . . . Delete, repeat/Talk, talk, talk, talk.”
While it primarily showcases existing material, Super Snōōper also nudges the band slightly out of its comfort zone. A cover of Suburban Lawns’ spare and halting “Unable” is among the best tracks on the album, reimagining the song as a lean, sardonic slice of hardcore. Most impressive, though, is the closer “Running,” first recorded as a fragmentary ode to aimlessness on the 2020 EP Music for Spies. Here, it rolls almost unbelievably past the five-minute mark, cruising on a juddering riff, Tramel snarling “Get down/I get around,” like a Beach Boy on the lam. “Don’t know—just where I wanna be!” she cries as Krautrock-y synth, guitar, and drums collide. It’s a rare moment of unfixed meaning for Snōōper, yet they sound surer than ever.