Exclusive: Pretty Rude Announce New Album Ripe

Today, Pretty Rude—one of many projects from prolific NYC musician James Palko—has announced its debut album, Ripe. Palko has infiltrated Paste‘s taste over the last two years, first with his band Taking Meds’ Dial M For Meds LP and then, in 2024, his breakout record as Jimmy Montague, Tomorrow’s Coffee, which landed on our year-end list of the best albums of 2024. Pretty Rude is a idiosyncratic, back-to-basics detour from Palko’s previous haunts, as he ups the ante on his own eclecticism by stretching into a deviously provocative rock sound.

If you’ve been clued in to his social media over the last month or two, you might know about his obsession with AC/DC. This record so clearly spawned out of that love, with a power-pop twist, and new single “Things I Do” sounds like somebody let young Elvis Costello fool around with distortion pedals. It’s aces work, filled with lush, Queen-like harmonies and in-your-face, tectonic-plate-shifting riffage. If the guitars on “Things I Do” don’t split your head in two, you won’t be able to forget it.

Palko says of “Things I Do”: “I was listening to a lot of ‘One Way Ticket To Hell And Back’ by The Darkness, a song I consider to be one of those perfect ‘form, tempo, arrangement all in one bag’ songs, and I realized what was sticking out to me so much was the acoustic guitar underneath in the second verse. I got so hung up on the way that I felt that I pretty much set out to make ‘Things I Do’ accomplish that same energy.” There’s a Cars influence, and a nod to the distorted guitars from Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak.”