The Walleye Magazine

Pretending We’re Surviving

Forever Dead!

- Justin Allec

You can read the title of Forever Dead!’s compilation as a comment on the futility of modern life, or you can see it as a revised slogan for punks aging gracefully. “Of course we’re still making peace with this bullshit,” Forever Dead! say as they crack a tall boy too early in the day. “Nothing’s really changed, has it?” I can’t argue with that, and I definitely don’t want to get in the way of a raging good time. Compiling 10 years of Thunder Bay punk rock fury over 18 tracks, Pretending We’re Surviving is a roadmap of the band’s history and how they won their way into our hearts. The long-awaited followup to 2015’s EpicDemic, Pretending shows the band older, smarter, and just as volatile. Eighteen tracks may seem like a lot, but each song—be they about love, life, death, sobriety, or false teeth—quickly becomes required listening after the first play-through. Offering oodles of that loveable skate punk sound with biting riffs, barreling drums, and sneering vocals that charge into fist-pumping choruses, the album also has slight touches of psychobilly and hardcore to darken the corners and keep the intensity redlined. Pretending is Forever Dead!’s latest giant, knowing middle finger to all the silver-lined promises we know aren’t true but still have to live with. Thanks to music like this, we’ll get by.

Off The Wall

en-ca

2021-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thewalleye.pressreader.com/article/284086324477289

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