The Hold Steady Get Adventurous on The Price of Progress

It should be readily apparent by now that The Hold Steady are capable of peeling off songs packed with adrenalizing guitar riffs pretty much whenever they want to—they’ve been doing it in one form or another for nearly 20 years, since the band’s first album, Almost Killed Me, in 2004. It’s also become evident that there’s more to the group musically than just riffs. The Hold Steady’s 2020 album Open Door Policy changed up the pattern, putting more piano up front and playing with different guitar textures on songs that tended to be less frenetic, but just as hard hitting, as the stuff on the band’s excellent first four albums.

The group continues down that path on The Price of Progress, their ninth LP. It’s The Hold Steady’s most musically adventurous collection of songs so far, pairing singer Craig Finn’s vivid storytelling with arrangements that go in some unexpected directions. That’s not to say that Tad Kubler has forsaken guitar riffs: the lead single, “Sideways Skull,” is full of guitars that thrum like a glasspack muffler at a stoplight, while opening track “Grand Junction” unfolds over a loping, guttural guitar line, with punctuation from horns.

Elsewhere, though, things are pretty different—two songs even feature congas, a first for the band. Perhaps the biggest departure is “Understudies,” which offers a call-and-response between Kubler’s guitar and Franz Nicolay’s piano near the beginning before sashaying along on a beat rooted in disco, the same way that Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2,” has a disco edge. Later, “Distortions of Faith” is a waltz-time song built around cocktail piano and noodling guitar fills that give the song a casual vibe enhanced by Finn’s ruminative vocals—which describe a singer who has to make a run for the airport after performing at a music festival in a nation that has recently come under the sway of a dictator.

There aren’t a lot of lyricists who could make that work as the subject of a song, but Finn pulls it off. He’s in fine form overall on these 10 tracks. His lyrics are as evocative as ever, and though the characters in these songs have problems, they aren’t all as desperate or druggy as some of the ne’er-do-wells on previous Hold Steady albums. There are flashes of his humor here, particularly on “Sideways Skull,” where one rock ’n’ roller with constricted movements observes, “It’s hard to fully rock in a halfway house.” A few tracks later, the woman at the center of “Sixers” breaks out of a self-imposed exile in her apartment to spend a weekend partying with her upstairs neighbor before retreating when there’s no spark. Along with tight guitar harmonies from Kubler and Steve Selvidge, the song is a marvel of lyrical symmetry as Finn repeats turns of phrase from verse to verse, but shifts the meaning and the impact.

That he keeps finding new ways to sing thoughtfully about people facing challenges is a testament to his skill as a storyteller, and to his empathy as a narrator. The fact that Finn fronts a group of musicians who are as keen as he is to rethink and refine what they do seems almost too good to be true, and yet each album reaches a little further than the one before. The Price of Progress is progress indeed.

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. Follow him on Mastodon or visit his website.