Text: Florian Baudouin

Maybe the name of Bearings doesn’t ring any bell for you, yet this band already has earned the respect of their peers by being invited on State Champs’ and Less Than Jake’s tours. This Ontario-based pop-punk band releases their second album “Hello, It’s You” today. It follows “Blue In The Dark”, released in 2018, which was back then already hailed by Alternative Press as one of the best albums of the year. What does the quintet have in store for us this time? 

We can first of all see that the predilection pop-punk style is utterly perceptible, which is not surprising with Courtney Ballard (Good Charlotte, Waterparks) as a producer. Thus, the two first tracks “Better Yesterday” and “Sway”, the album’s main single, will take you right away on a Californian beach on a summer afternoon. These tracks, faithful to the quintet’s influences, are those that best define their style: frontman Doug Cousins’ efficient and undeniably catchy vocals, Ryan Culligan’s and Ryan Fitz’s guitars working together perfectly between a sharpened rhythmic and an aerial accompaniment, Colin Hane’s basslines and Mike McKerracher’s energetic drums. However, we are quickly going to notice that the band has decided to explore new horizons on this album, notably with bluesy ballad “Lovely Lovely” or “Dreams”, falling within the new emo-rap movement. The last track, “Transient Colours”, opens and closes with a vocal line shouted in choir, to end the album as it began, in a pop-punk range.

As a common thread in the album, we can see the theme of breaking up, as well as overpassing simply the sad feeling linked to the end of the relationship, but also exploring mixed-up feelings such as the bitter happiness to be better off outside of this relationship. Thus, as explains Cousins himself, the album is rather to be perceived as a whole.

We can say that the band’s explorations to new horizons are successfully done and remain utterly consistent with the rest of the album. We are looking forward to seeing what they’re gonna do next!

Pure Noise Records