Smirk – Speculative Fiction
When Nick Vicario released Smirk’s debut LP in 2021, the band seemed to occupy a middle ground between two of his other projects (not counting his many touring gigs)—the jittery clean-tone jangle pop of Public Eye and the frantic aggression of Crisis Man, the hardcore band he plays in with Ceremony‘s Ross Farrar. But these three projects are all connected by a sense of irrepressible energy, a drive that fueled by youthful recklessness and hedonism. And you can take that literally; “When this band started in L.A., it was a crazy time in my life,” Vicario said of Smirk in a statement, “I was crashing cars, doing drugs—I was doing horrible things and destroying my life.”
That wasn’t all that long ago, but it may well be a lifetime for Vicario, who looks back on his more self-destructive past tendencies through an older, wiser, but still vulnerable lens on Smirk’s third album Speculative Fiction. That introspective maturity comes paired with a more melodic and dynamic approach that eases up on the BPMs for the sake of allowing its nuances to shimmer under the spotlight. Yet while the energy level on Speculative Fiction is a bit more tempered, the album finds Vicario honing his craft into a richly rewarding set of songs that reveal themselves over repeated listens, steeped in the bright harmonies of power pop more than chaos and aggression.
Smirk retain much of their scrappy, lo-fi aesthetic on Speculative Fiction, but the raw scruff of their previous two records is one accent in a broader spectrum of shades and hues. Opener “Greetings” layers on a chorus effect in a more brooding take on vintage new wave through a Stiff Records lens, but its grit still manages to punch through the brighter exterior, particularly in its bass-driven coda. The glossy arpeggios of “Cheap Greed” open up Smirk’s sound even further, while the dense sheets of guitar and psychedelic swirl of “Sistine Junk” provides the kind of rich headphone candy it takes a few listens to fully unravel.
Vicario’s more layered approach to songwriting is necessarily tangled up with the demons of his youth that continue to follow him, even if his coping methods are less destructive now. The chugging power chords of “Going Off to Die” underscore a morbid introspection (“Like an animal going off to die/Every day I leave something else behind“), while the first single, “Dog Years,” juxtaposes blazing riffs with even bleaker meditations: “Time and again/Think about how it will end/By my own hand?” It’s not all quite so dark, as evident in a song like “Abide,” wherein a youthful impulsiveness rears its head again for the sake of more romantic ends, Vicario singing in a climactic moment, “From sounds so deafening that no one hears/From this collapsing dream/We’ll sell it off, everything/Under the moonlight/Come dance with me.”
Lest anyone get the wrong idea that Smirk have left their scrappiest, snottiest tendencies aside, Vicario invites them back in with a vengeance on penultimate ripper “Shit Song,” opening with the line, “I wrote a shit song and nobody will sing along.” Cleverly ironic, then, that such a top-notch piece of hostility is so sing-along-able. It’s the most immediate reminder that, on an album rife with both darker corridors and more sophisticated arrangements, Smirk are still making some of the most fun punk around.
Label: Smoking Room
Year: 2026
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