ALBUM REVIEW: Neck Deep – ‘Neck Deep’

Poor Neck Deep—first they’re thrust in as captains of a pop-punk ship that’s already riddled with holes; now, they’re not even the most famous people associated with Wrexham anymore. Maybe they too could do with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney to lead a Cinderella story for them, because Neck Deep haven’t been riding so high lately.

To paint in broader strokes first, pop-punk isn’t in a good place in general at the minute. It suffers from genre seasonality more than most, jabbed further by the mass exodus of clout-chasers proliferating its last major wave, as proof that it was, indeed, just a phase. Neck Deep at least managed to sit the brunt of that out, though maybe that was calculated damaged control after their last album All Distortions Are Intentional was a bit of a bomb. Relatively speaking, anyway, but in the world of big-time rock exports, relativism can be everything. Thus, an audience enamoured by some of the most propulsive, full-throttle throwback pop-punk this side of State Champs’ The Finer Things didn’t take too warmly to an album with very little of that to be found. A mushy emo-pop sound and Neck Deep’s dwindling recognition for what makes them special means it’s only become more of a dud in the years since.

Maybe it’s not a life-or-death situation—Neck Deep are big and stable enough now to withstand an unimpressive album—but this new one seems convinced it is. With almost a complete mulligan of everything outside of the ordinary from last time, Neck Deep’s desire to recalibrate as quickly and efficiently as possible is searing. No mushy overdubs slathered on to an almost opaque degree; no ill-conceived desire to turn tail into emo; and look, Seb Barlow’s back on production, on his own for the first time since their early EPs! Everything is back to normal, in the exact state to rack up brownie points from the disillusioned and win them back with prejudice. And you know what? It is a lot better for that.

Not that that’s a revelation of any kind. It’s a well-known fact that Neck Deep’s best comes from them essentially making a New Found Glory album, to wit this self-titled effort reads like that band’s later efforts to swing back from some poppier misadventures. The difference is that it’s more needed here, and thus lands as deftly as anyone could hope. If anything, there’s some of the older British feel sneaking back in, to really emphasise Neck Deep’s determination to get back into those good graces. Production will err on a chunkiness that’s not precisely conducive with hardcore, but could certainly have some legs there on a song like We Need More Bricks. The critical piece of that conversation rests more on an eternally sunny, Americanised demeanour having a lot less prevalence, without hurting the album quite as much as you might believe. After all, the approach at the core hasn’t changed—bounding, electrically-charged pop-punk on a universally colossal scale, in line with the genre’s best features.

That’s not to say these are specifically Neck Deep’s best songs, but they’re absolutely a palette-cleanser when the preceding collection proved a little harder to down. It speaks to that higher average when This Is All My Fault and Go Outside! are the weak links, as songs that are more interchangeable across the wider pop-punk spectrum. They aren’t indicative of Neck Deep as a whole on this album, who’ve regained so much of their old exuberance with startlingly little time wasted. More accurately, no time wasted at all, when the one-two knockout of Dumbstruck Dumbfuck and Sort Yourself Out lands as such an invigorated opening salvo. Both sound huge and commanding in size, fashioned from a mountainous wall of riffs to be as good as Neck Deep’s reassertion could be. Even when they do drift back into poppier climes on It Won’t Be Like This Forever, it too is lodged in the familiarity of Neck Deep’s locker that has space for a softer-focused, mid-tempo bouncer to rest more comfortably.

Honestly, it’s quite nice to see the implied preconception of a self-titled album—to lay out the defining characteristics of an act’s repertoire and excel at them—actually being done to a high standard. Yes, this album is pretty low on surprises, but clearly Neck Deep have been around the block enough times to know what to do with them. Boiled down to its purest essences, you could indeed assert the ‘generic pop-punk’ branding that followed Neck Deep for their earliest years is back in power. But time has clearly been beneficial, and experience can work wonders on even a decade-old meme. Even the touches of double-time drums, 2010s’ pop-punk’s favourite crutch, come a bit more ‘artfully’ on Sort Yourself Out and Take Me With You, not for presumed bravado as an unconvincing hardcore mirror, but to ramp some blood-pumping excitement in a tangible, effective way.

And yeah, it is kind of generic. As a rule, pop-punk tends to be. And while it’s true that there’s definitely a line between being successful within that and shameless around it, credit to Neck Deep for displaying how much elasticity is in the former camp. At play is a band who clearly know what they’re doing to keep pop-punk feeling fresh and well-maintained, to where a concept as flanderised within the genre as “parents suck” is interpolated with Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse on They May Not Mean To (But They Do), as such an obvious but insanely sharp move.

And that’s kind of Neck Deep’s MO on this album—doing the usual, but in a good way. The tired convergence of ‘messy breakup’ and ‘perfunctory self-deprecation’ gets its facelift on Dumbstruck Dumbfuck and Sort Yourself Out, and Heartbreak Of The Century with some more snarky, sarcastic subtext that doesn’t go amiss either. Elsewhere, Neck Deep’s taste for scoping out the end times is back, either making proactive calls for revolution on We Need More Bricks, or stoking pop-punk’s kinship with aliens to escape the calamity altogether on Take Me With You. Finally, there’s the gentler, affirming pairing of It Won’t Be Like This Forever and Moody Weirdo to close the loop of pop-punk themes, albeit in a way that’s nice rather than overly workmanlike. You could easily be stopped by the gears grinding the composite parts of an album like this into place, but it’s not the case the here. For as hard as Neck Deep are leaning into their rollback and selling it at full force, it’s all exceptionally natural.

Most of all, it’s just nice to have something like this to fall back on again. Pop-punk has been in such dire straits recently, with speckles of hope from either new or established names being few and far between. So to have Neck Deep lay down their best qualities and produce one of the genre’s better albums in some time…let’s not say nature is healing just yet, but there’s certainly something blooming. That’s even while acknowledging that this won’t square up with Neck Deep’s best quite handily, but a solid, high-effort body of work that actively wants to do the style justice is worth its flowers. Maybe they don’t need Deadpool in their corner after all; Neck Deep appear to be doing just fine on their own.

For fans of: New Found Glory, State Champs, Knuckle Puck

‘Neck Deep’ by Neck Deep is released on 19th January on Hopeless Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall