BOTTLED UP

For the logged-on and the attention-addled, Grand Bizarre will feel familiar. It’s got the dizzy bottomlessness of being on the internet all the time. You know the feeling -- from meme to hot take to daily dispatch from friend or foe -- it’s all vertigo-inducing, crazy-making stuff. But Bottled Up metabolizes this infinite scroll into the waves their work gets to boogie board on.

Their debut release on Misra Records - Bottled Up’s Grand Bizarre takes the idea of punk and makes it global, digital, and online in 2022. From finding meaning in a world riddled with climate change, playing love’s supernatural mindgames, or, as frontman Niko Rao puts it, the daily act of "subconsciously submitting and surrendering to death" -- Bottled Up’s back-and-forth with the "Big Stuff" makes for an utterly danceable album of as-the-world-burns Italo, funk, and new wave.

The album brings soft, curvilinear dub to the edges and corners of David Byrne’s art-pop. The synth-forward mixing (by D.C.-based D Saperstein and Rao himself) is as indebted to the PC Music collective and Charli XCX’s hyperpop as it is to the sophisti-pop of Destroyer. This is rock, reworked. House flair, glam intonations, disco four-on-the-floors - each genre gets a good whir in the Bottled Up machine to make a hot, entropic mass. Lyrically, Bottled Up not so much sings as decants. Rao and his crew love the texture of vowel sounds and the way that words can puddle together -- they’re fans the dashed-off non-sequitur (not unlike Dry Cleaning’s recent debut), as much as they are for spoken-word tracts on being, on living, on loving in the digital age.