“I slit my wrists to see holograms of Nic Cage.”
Do you remember the year 2009? I Set My Friends on Fire were all over Warped Tour supporting their brand new release, You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter. Heavy Heavy Low Low was off promoting their off-kilter Turtle Nipple and the Toxic Shock. Arsonists Get All The Girls just dropped Portals. You are starting to discover the brand new wave of something called “crabcore”, with bands like Attack Attack!, Asking Alexandria, and I See Stars all dropping debut albums. Everyone’s having fun filling out their top eight on MySpace and trying to dress like Audrey Kitching and Alex Evans. The world is good!
Now, let’s teleport to 2025. We are now introduced to a world where cybergrind, an umbrella term for electronic tinged alternative music to include everything from fallingwithscissors and Blind Equation to CPU Buddha and I’m letting unseen forces take the wheel, is in full effect. But now, you’re missing the satirical vitality from back when you were a teen. Where are the jokes about women having STIs and how everyone’s constantly partying? Where are our electronic ballad interludes? This is where Turtle Tea Party comes into play. This is cybergrind’s answer and love letter to the mid-to-late 2000s sasscore, electronicore, and metalcore.
Play Hard, Fuck Harder by Turtle Tea Party is nearly eighteen minutes of pure and unrelenting energy. But with song titles such as “28,000 PIGEON FEET”, “Jared’s Journey To The Cave Of Well Lubing”, and “WE R TTP ND WE LIEKS 2 FUUUUUUUUUUCK xDDDDD!!!!!!!!”, what else did you expect? The hyper neon colored album cover (drawn by Curly Art) has frowning volcanoes shooting out rainbows and dinosaurs vomiting intestines and varying pills. If you don’t know EXACTLY what you’re getting into, you’re lying to yourself. And with both Al Boltz and Cory Swope mastering their crafts with their own respective projects (A Scent Like Wolves, ZOMBIESHARK!), they know exactly how to write 2025’s Everything’s Watched, Everyone’s Watching, or The Mechanical Hand.
But enough about the background, let’s get right into the music. Play Hard, Fuck Harder truly is an amalgamation of different sounds. It’s got everything you’d enjoy in a heavier electronic metalcore album. Post hardcore pop choruses? Check. Mathy sass parts? Check. Incoherent noise? Check. A completely out-of-the-blue jazz section? Surprisingly, check. This album has it all, while somehow making each song completely coherent and easy to follow. A lot of bands talk about “making the heavy parts heavier and the poppy parts poppier”, but Turtle Tea Party truly is the band to do that. Look at a song like “Jared’s Journey To The Cave Of Well Lubing”. Right off the bat, you’re hit with absolute chaos, fitting in some southern rock licks reminiscent of bands like Every Time I Die. While they sneak in little video game effects, they also hit you with the most sing-along moment on the entire record. Boltz’s cleans absolutely melt you while he sings “You’re so pretty but you might have STIs”. The song ends with one clean last guitar riff, and for those last twenty to thirty seconds, you feel like you just listened to a song right off Kingdoms by Broadway. Moments like this are what make Turtle Tea Party stick out from the rest. And we’re only on track one!
We also get beautiful features from Robbie Smith (of Heavy Heavy Low Low) and Sean Richmond (of Arsonists Get All The Girls), which cannot go unnoticed. It truly feels like Turtle Tea Party got the perfect features for the story they’re trying to tell, as each song fits each person wonderfully. Richmond sounds like he absolutely shredded his vocal cords on “Bullet Train To Smartsville“, and Smith perfected his part on “28,000 PIGEON FEET“.
The album’s interlude track, “π In The Sky”, is everything you could ask for. Boltz’s vocals peak on this track as he cries out, “Am I your favorite toy?”, while Swope’s synth work melds with the melodies to certainly try to get the waterworks going. The album reaches its climax on the song “Slow Pony to the Rubber Forest”. Swope delivers his best screams here, as he pulverizes his vocals over the greatest breakdown on the album. This is when we fade into the most unexpected moment on Play Hard, Fuck Harder, the very tasteful jazz break. This is where their love for acts like Horse The Band really comes into play. Moments like these show that they are masters of their craft, and their work in their respective acts leads us to this moment, before hitting us with one more pummeling breakdown and a pop-rock style guitar lick. This track and “Jared’s Journey To The Cave Of Well Lubing” are the pinnacle of what Turtle Tea Party has to offer, and they certainly offer a lot.
As mentioned before, this album is a love letter and homage to the weird and offbeat electronic heavy music of their youth, but sometimes Turtle Tea Party should have left some of these tropes in the past. Some titles like “WE R TTP ND WE LIEKS 2 FUUUUUUUUUUCK xDDDDD!!!!!!!!” and “Toe Jam Towers of Detroit” are a little too on the nose, and the lyrical aspects about women having STIs as well as drinking and drugging are perhaps tropes that should have stayed in 2009. But again, with an album called Play Hard, Fuck Harder, it is fully something to be expected. And if they are satirizing these clichés, then power to them! It’s a fine line between satire and aged platitudes, and at times it gets a bit blurred. Luckily, this is something that can easily be fixed in their next project.
All that being said, there is a treasure trove of different styles, genres, riffs, and breakdowns to dig into here. And with Play Hard, Fuck Harder only being just shy of eighteen minutes, you will definitely not feel bored or weary by its sheer density. There is not a single moment throughout the album that drags or plays out for a bit too long. Turtle Tea Party is constantly switching things up for the listener’s benefit. And whether you are a thirty-something wanting to grasp onto something new yet familiar, or a fan of the new cybergrind wave, there will absolutely be something for you. Turtle Tea Party will only go up from here, and hopefully, Play Hard, Fuck Harder will certainly propel them in whatever direction they so choose.
9/10
Play Hard, Fuck Harder has independently released as of today, October 31st, and can be purchased here.