Cold War Kids Adapt to Changing Times with New Age Norms 3

17 years. That’s a long time for any band to stick around, much less one named “kids.” The members of Cold War Kids, California’s pop-rock, alt-rock, blues-rock outfit, are now middle-aged men, not children, and they’ve closed out their ninth album, New Age Norms 3. That’s no small achievement. It’s too late to change their appellation, of course, and “Cold War 40-somethings” doesn’t roll off the tongue, so they’ll have to let the record speak for them, which it does: with soul, longing, joy and the same vigor that’s key to their music dating back to Robbers & Cowards.

New Age Norms 3 caps off the trilogy that Cold War Kids started in 2019 with New Age Norms 1 and continued in 2020 with New Age Norms 2, each a chapter in an overarching projected connected loosely through aesthetics and motifs: As the title suggests, the guys have their minds on the ebb and flow of social mores forming in American culture, both over the last few years and since they got their start in 2006. The world looks different now than it did then. For one, we didn’t have to worry about a plague. For another, America’s coasts were neither engulfed in flames, nor submerged underwater. We weren’t as shitty to each other in the mid-2000s, either, which isn’t to say that we were nice, but that we weren’t yet inured to being harassed and threatened by strangers through social media.

Frontman Nathan Willett appears keenly aware of America ‘21’s toxic atmosphere. “I can’t hear one more sad story / Can’t watch a depressing movie / When this world is too cruel to me / I just wanna scream,” he exhales on the opening lines of “Underground,” a song that, put kindly, is about disappearing and, put bluntly, is about stuffing one’s head into the sand and shutting out the noise of the world beyond the bedroom door. New Age Norms 3 fluctuates between crooning and swooning, and lively, echoing tracks driven by thumping bass and percussion; “Underground” is depressing on the page but, if you tune out the lyrics, makes for good grooving through uptempo drumming. It’s a banger, as the youths say.

It’s also one of the stronger expressions of the album’s themes, being implicit instead of explicit. Memeified, “Underground” works perfectly in the “Tell Me Without Telling Me” format: Tell me how times have changed without telling me that times have changed. It’s a letdown that New Age Norms 3 follows that personalized representation of its thesis by saying exactly that on “Times Have Changed.” To his credit, Willett acknowledges exactly how far he and the band have come. “Kids growing up / But I won’t live in yesterday,” he hums as the song bursts into its exultant chorus, buzzing with earnest reflections about the Cold War Kids’ identities in 2021.