Drug Church reimagines ’90s alt-rock with a hardcore edge on the earnest and ass-kicking Hygiene

They heyday of Alternative Nation gave us a lot of good things, but a preponderance of fierce and declamatory hardcore singers on the radio and MTV wasn’t one of them. If you were listening to fuzzed-out alt-rock hooks on guitars, odds are the vocals were either grunge-baritone soulful, shoegaze soft, or classic cock-rock dude yelpings. The kind of earnest, clear, yet aggressive singing you would hear from someone like, say, Down By Law’s Dave Smalley was in short supply when it came to the distorted rock songs that ruled indie and mainstream charts. If you wanted vocals like Henry Rollins, you best prepare for music that sounds like Rollins Band.

Still, it’s something of a minor miracle that Drug Church’s new album, Hygiene, sounds as fresh and ferocious as it does, simply by taking those two different ingredients—mid-’90s alt-rock and anthemic hardcore vocals—and simply putting them together. It’s been done before, but rarely with such artful elan. Yes, there’s elements of hardcore and punk running through the arrangements found on the band’s fourth full-length, but by and large, the instrumentation here isn’t anything you wouldn’t have heard blaring from alternative rock radio, or an episode of 120 Minutes, in 1995. Yet Drug Church sort of sounds like it’s reinvented the wheel—songs so addictive, it doesn’t really matter how much they resemble those that came more than two decades prior.

There’s a formula here, to be sure, but it works. Take the most overdriven and anthemic elements of grunge, apply a killer hook, and pour on singer Patrick Kindlon’s exhortatory, provocative hardcore vocals. The five-piece band has been moving in this direction for awhile; its last record, 2018’s Cheer, was already ladling on the catchy grunge-rock riffs with shimmering, spritely melodies, leavened with the odd punk and metal momentum. But here, it has coalesced into a perfect storm of fist-in-the-air stompers, all competing with each other to be the most addictive.

Here’s a comparison the band would probably fucking hate: Imagine if Bush was really good, albeit with a completely different singer. That’s the vibe delivered by songs like “Super Saturated” and “Detective Lieutenant”—arena rock of the most bombastic kind, aided by the kinds of shout-along refrains you’d find at a DIY punk house show. Or take tracks like “Plucked” and “Piss & Quiet”; these are hard-charging numbers that incorporate the faster and darker aspects of punk, yet still sound as accessible as something like Sponge. Purists familiar with such names might cringe, but it’s true. And really, isn’t that what great punk music has always done—taken what seems at first glance like garbage, and made it awesome?

And there are plenty of other ’90s touchstones that pop up, for those who are listening. Opener “Fun’s Over” is a midtempo stomper of the post-Pixies variety, a manifesto of anti-commercialism that’s ironically one of the most accessible songs on the album. Kindlon has a way with biting turns of phrase (“Blanket statements from dying patients / coughing blood all over your house”), occasionally sounding like a world-weary Craig Finn (is there any other kind?). “Million Miles Of Fun” weds heavy shoegaze with guitar guitar licks, as though a highly caffeinated Presidents Of The USA were covering Smashing Pumpkins. And “Tiresome” boasts a driving, four-on-the-floor rhythm matched with the hardest riff Superdrag never wrote. Want something even heavier? “World Impact” trades off its Rollins-meets-L7 verses with refrains straight from Dig’s playbook.

But for all the comparisons that abound—a Hole riff here, a Nada Surf bridge there—the bulk of the fun comes from how Drug Church recycles these alt-rock sounds in ways that make them sound appealing all over again. Some of this can be chalked up to Kindlon’s vocals; he knows how to create catharsis with statements like, “News flash: I need news less,” or “We don’t toss away what we love.” On “Piss & Quiet,” he sings, “I’m not one for anthems, slogans, or tricks,” which is a funny line coming from a song that traffics in two out of the three.

But the rest of the joy stems from the band’s obvious zeal for the material, attacking their instruments as though daring one another to stomp on yet another distortion pedal and push the wall of sound even higher into the stratosphere. Hygiene is a record wholly unconcerned about how derivative it sounds, or with how it fits into the wider rock landscape—happy instead to carve out its own niche, straddling genres with aplomb. That it’s so much damn fun to boot is the good part: Once more, everything old is new again.