Album Review: Chief State: Keep Your Friends Closer

In a genre often defined by nostalgia, Vancouver-based pop-punk band Chief State delivers sophomore experience, Keeping Your Friends Closer, an experience that feels refreshingly present about the uncomfortable, beautiful, terrifying process of becoming who you are now.

Since the release of Waiting For Your Colours, pop-punk band Chief State has always written from a place of constantly being on the edge of something: loss, change, the transition to adulthood, and that quiet, nostalgic ache that comes with growing out of the dreams and life one thought they would have. For their latest release, Keep Your Friends Closer, Chief State looks inward and captures the gravity of a band in transition, both external and internal, within their young careers. Their most vulnerable and most self-aware record, Chief State, embraces a very human side of emotional chaos that exists within that transition. While Waiting For Your Colours was very youthful and restless, Keep Your Friends Closer looks deeper into the storm. When the adrenaline fades with age, the room goes quiet from the loss of innocence, and one is left alone with the truth that settles in after confronting them.

The title of this album itself opens this book of transition rather eloquently: Keep your friends close because life has a way of taking everything else away when you least expect it. From the start of this record, its first experience, “No Brakes," "Resonate," and “April Showers” set the stage for the emotional fallout that comes with distance: geographical, relational, and internal. There is this sense of internal pain that accompanies longing born of such separation. But the way they process this isn’t filled with the over-the-top drama one often associates with such emotions. It’s real and earned from their own life experiences. The kind that often comes when we all grow up, when we are watching the world shift, and all we can do is watch it in real time, powerless to stop it from moving forward.

“DAMN!,” “Metaphors,” and “Can’t Let Go" continue to lean into these themes of friendships stretched thin from growing older; the fear of becoming someone different from what one imagines oneself to be; outgrowing the past; and this dim, fleeting hope that connection can still save us from the darkness that comes with aging and losing one’s sense of youth. From the bouncy riffs and melodic and vulnerable vocals within “DAMN!” to the bruised honesty that exists within the silvery guitar strings sewn into energetic drums and brave, nostalgic lyricism in “Metaphors” and “Can’t Let Go,” this is true pop-punk. But it's pop-punk that comes with venerable times that have led to this point.

"Paranoid" (featuring Stu Ross), “Over It,” and “Falling” come in swinging with some of the album's best balance of melody and melancholy, but it is here that this balance becomes sharper and more realized. Chief State’s continued use of ever-evolving shimmery, subtly edged guitars brings in a sort of wistful brilliance to these tracks. The vocals stand out as the emotional core of these tracks. Raw, pensive, yet dulcet at times, the work conveys a sense of sincerity that makes even the most common emotions of age feel powerful.

The album closes with “Loser,” album highlight “Somebody,” and the final track, aptly titled “Keep Your Friends Closer.” Bringing together a sound they have beautifully built within the album's late 2010’s melodic pop-punk, modern emo revival textures, and the emotional clarity of post-hardcore without its aggression, these last moments feel polished without losing their emotional edge or slipping into cliché. Ending with the album's most heartfelt, resonant tracks, Keep Your Friends Closer closes a very strong album that refuses to hide behind metaphors and embraces the truth we all avoid telling ourselves as we age.

Keep Your Friends Closer is lyrical honesty built without armor. While this kind of vulnerability is new, what helps is their willingness to admit their fear, regret, and the unexpressed uncertainty that comes with the battle that is time. Overall, Keeping Your Friends Closer is a great next step for the band, underscoring an evocative message: Growing up means losing those you thought would be around forever and learning to love and keep close those who are still around and have stuck with you.