Los Angeles band Cheekface have put out a new track, ‘Hard Mode’. It follows October’s ‘Flies’ featuring Jeff Rosenstock. Check it out below.
“This song is about growth and how fucking awkward it is, and it’s about growth’s younger sibling self-awareness, which is not the same as growth, and twice as awkward,” vocalist/guitarist Greg Katz said in a statement. “The phrase ‘living life on hard mode’ is something our touring keyboard player AJ likes to say when he does something that makes a routine task needlessly difficult, like reaching for something in a clumsy way when you could just ask someone to hand it to you.”
Katz continued:
I guess being in a band is a pretty hard-mode activity in general. I think the start of this musical idea was us wanting to do a dance song with a skittering hi-hat beat. Mandy came up with the super syncopated bassline and then I added the chunky guitar riff that became the chorus. It started as a really short song idea, maybe just 2 minutes long. But once the three of us started to learn it, we were having fun with the groove and wanted it to just keep going, so we stretched it out with the instrumental section.
This song also has an outro, which I don’t know if we’ve ever had in a song before–usually they just end. But we were touring this year with Yungatita and their song ‘Pick at Your Face’ has a really nifty outro. After hearing it every night for a month we were duly inspired.
Earlier this year, Cheekface surprise-released a new LP, It’s Sorted.