Charly Bliss Fall Short of a Triumphant Comeback on Forever
On their first album in five years, the Brooklyn band sounds bigger (and blander) than ever.
In over a decade of hatching earworms, Charly Bliss have never pandered to expectations. Their debut album, Guppy, was a glitter bomb of guitar-pop drenched with distortion, innuendo and a rainbow of bodily fluids. For their more introspective follow-up Young Enough, they picked up synthesizers and started name-checking Lorde in interviews. Superficially, it looked like a full-on pop pivot, but even if it wasn’t what you wanted—yes, I mean you, the dude who got into Charly Bliss after you saw the “Ruby” video on Reddit—it built on the originality of Guppy. The arrangements still felt organic, and bandleader Eva Hendricks was still the kind of writer who would shove a word like “desecrated” into a bright, shimmering chorus without warning.
Charly Bliss’ singular spirit starts to slip away on Forever—their first album in five years, and also their biggest and most generic. Through 12 love songs co-produced by Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus and featuring a few new co-writers (K. Flay, Jennifer Decilveo and others), the former power-pop band mostly drops the power and doubles down on the pop. Sometimes it pays off; the band still have hooks for days, and the best songs are synthy summer jams reminiscent of indie-fave pop acts like CHVRCHES or Carly Rae Jepson (okay, mostly Carly Rae Jepson). But Forever is also the first Charly Bliss album with some real clunkers on the tracklist—moments where the band’s self-conscious evolution compromises the quality of their work.
Even if you—this time I mean I—miss Guppy’s Weezer-y crunch, “Calling You Out” could be fun enough to win you over. Imagine Carly Rae’s “Run Away With Me” with a glam guitar solo and a little dose of the romantic messiness that made Hendricks’s songwriting so sticky and endearing in the past. ”Hard to believe that you need me / Maybe I’ll force you to leave me,” she sings on the pre-chorus, building to a jump-up-and-down climax more euphoric than anything else in the band’s discography. It would’ve been a killer lead single, and the same goes for “Waiting For You,” a touching, guitar-driven tribute to the bond between band members built over years in their tour van. Instead, Charly Bliss opted to lead with “Nineteen,” a meandering piano ballad that sounds like Taylor Swift at her most complacent. It builds to nothing but a bizarrely misplaced, Bleachers-esque saxophone solo.
Other parts of the album suffer from the same mismanagement of tension. The mid-tempo opener “Tragic” half slaps, but it doesn’t quite take off (“Once you let me drive the car, you know I’m gonna crash it,” Hendricks teases, never making good on the threat). Forever’s signature drum sound—punchy like a confetti cannon blast—boosts uptempo tunes like “How Do You Do It,” but it’s strangely absent on “Here Comes the Darkness,” another ballad dulled by a chorus that sounds like a pre-chorus failing to launch. Since Hendricks moved to Australia in 2020, Forever was written piecemeal and at a distance. You can hear the thousands of miles between band members at the end of “Here Comes the Darkness,” where an overblown key-change feels like a desperate attempt to force the track into a satisfying conclusion.