Charly Bliss Fall Short of a Triumphant Comeback on Forever

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.

It’s like the band had a checklist of pop devices to work through when concocting Forever. A chant goes here to break up the rhythm (on “Back There Now,” one of the good ones), some “ahhs” go here to fill in a verse (on “In Your Bed,” one of the really good ones), a key-change goes there to elevate the drama (it works spectacularly on “Calling You Out”). From another band, that predictability wouldn’t even register, but this is Charly Bliss, who used to be alive and effortlessly surprising on every song. In an indie rock context, Hendricks’s voice was one in a million, bubbly and edgy and spontaneous. Here, she often sounds like just another pop singer. It doesn’t help that her lyrics have increasingly traded shock details, sneaky burns and provocations for clichés; “Let’s fight like Italians” is the album’s one really out-of-pocket line, and it isn’t enough to elevate a track called “Last First Kiss.”

The songs get less clever as they get more personal. On “Capacity,” the stellar lead single from Young Enough, Hendricks made her struggle with burnout compelling. On Forever, she’s more inclined to shrug. “I Don’t Know Anything” reflects on her teenage dream of a career in music with ambivalence: “Now that we’re here I just feel sort of vacant / Come way too far to feel vaguely complacent,” she sings. Hendricks goes on to list frustrations with the industry grind: taking meetings with businesspeople, worrying about selling out, balancing band life with family life, etc. This is a fashionable form of oversharing (see also Charli xcx wondering whether she deserves to be more successful, or Porter Robinson indulging his critical anxiety by referencing a famously pissy Pitchfork review). It’s still oversharing, and in the absence of a transcendent chorus, it comes off as a preemptive deflection of criticism—the lyrical equivalent of a notes app vent post, more interesting to write features and think-pieces about than to actually listen to.

“Keep my head down and have faith in the songs / I lied, yeah my fear of rejection is strong,” Hendricks sings on the last verse of “I Don’t Know Anything.” It’s vulnerable, sure, but it also complicates any narrative of Forever as Charly Bliss’s triumphant return—even if their current bio insists they’re having more fun than ever. Elsewhere, Hendricks makes it clear she’s no longer the person who used to write about blood in her hair and pissing on trampolines. Fair enough—I guess this is growing up. It’s just a drag to have to wonder whether everyone’s heart is in this. “I Don’t Know Anything” gestures at the band’s old guitar-first aesthetic, and it rises to a peak where Hendricks once might have let loose with a scream. This time, her voice just fades out.

Read our recent feature on Charly Bliss here.

Taylor Ruckle is an Arlington, Virginia-based music writer for publications like Post-Trash, FLOOD Magazine, and Washington City Paper. Find him at @TaylorRuckle on Twitter, or on the balcony at the 9:30 Club.