Faith Crisis Pt 1

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  2024 Top 20

  Adam Wood

  Middle Kids’ debut, Lost Friends, took eighth spot for me in 2018, and the follow-up, Today We’re The Greatest (2021), also narrowly missed inclusion. Of the former, I wrote ‘This is a sweet record, but one with bruises. Its heart is on its sleeve, and it wants to link arms with you and sing together.’ That open-hearted appeal to vulnerable emotionality is also the core of Faith Crisis Pt 1, a record on which the average song’s runtime is about three minutes, but on which each track conjures a powerful sense of wonder or yearning. Not that everything takes place in a heightened, high-key state. As the title may be taken to indicate, these are dispatches from a place of considered interrogation of one’s feelings.

  We know by now that Middle Kids drop one track on each album that spends a healthy portion of the year stuck in my head. In 2018 it was (possible best song of the year) ‘Mistake’; in 2021 the role was played by the raucous ‘I Don’t Care’; here in 2024 we’ve got ‘Dramamine’, displaying the band’s talent for mixing sweet pop melodies with earnest vocals—each reaching directly for the heart: ‘You are the only reason I believe in anything / I hope you don’t take this the wrong way’. To my mind, its partner on the album is the slower, less forthright, hope-filled ‘Bootleg Firecracker’. Middle Kids operate well in both gears, and it makes for another polished collection of sing-along pop without a dud track in the bunch.