The last time listeners heard from
Deerhoof, they were fighting the good fight with 2017's
Mountain Moves, a celebration of people uniting joyously and righteously in the name of solidarity. On
Future Teenage Cave Artists, they explore what happens when that fight is lost. As
Deerhoof dives into the messes that younger generations have to clean up, and art's role in the process, they sound rawer than they have in years. These songs are filled with intentionally frayed edges and jarring edits, as if they were created with whatever broken equipment the band could find after society collapsed. It's an approach that's both timely and familiar, echoing the fraught state of the world in the early 2020s as well as the relatively crude sound quality of
Deerhoof's first album, 1997's
The Man, the King, the Girl.