Album Review: Neck Deep – “Neck Deep” (Pop-Punk)

Written by Ellis

It’s not often we do pop-punk on Noob Heavy but if ever there was a band worth making an exception for, it’s Neck Deep. The Welsh five-piece are inarguably behind some of the genre’s best efforts of the past decade – if you ask the right people 2015’s Life’s Not Out to Get You might just be the best pop-punk album ever made by anyone not called Blink-182 or Green Day – and after going for a bit more of an indie/alt-rock thing on 2020’s All Distortions Are Intentional the band are back to doing what they do best with their self-titled fifth album.

Immediately the fact that the band have decided to self-title a record at this stage in their career brings with it certain expectations, and maybe even a few eye-rolls from those who’ve heard a few too many of these that have gone the wrong way over the years. Fortunately, Neck Deep is exactly what any non-debut self-titled record should be: the sound of a band embracing who they are and who they want to be. It was written, recorded and produced in their own warehouse just a few miles from where they all grew up and it sacks off the excessive use of stuff like synths and drum machines and heavy-handed autotune that seem to have become the norm in the genre in recent years to instead stand as a proper old school, feel-good, guitar-driven pop-punk record.

It’s not complicated really; sing about break-ups or being a loser or a constant letdown or something and stick it to a load of catchy choruses and those octave guitar chords or whatever they’re called and you’ll essentially have half a generation rolling over to let you tickle their belly. Neck Deep have had that formula nailed for years now and in the opening run of “Dumbstruck Dumbf**k”, “Sort Yourself Out”, and “This Is All My Fault” they prove it again with three cuts from the very top drawer. Every single one has an absolutely massive chorus, the energy relentlessly infectious as the band round out a near-perfect first half with the politically-charged recent single “We Need More Bricks” (“Just because it’s not on your own doorstep doesn’t make it right”) followed by the already classic “Heartbreak of the Century” which seems to have been given a little sparkle up in the mastering process since its release last Valentine’s Day.

More than anything you can feel the life and joy in this record. People say stuff like “the band are clearly having fun” in reviews like this all the time which is a little annoying because it can be quite hard to quantify what that means and presumably it’s true of pretty much anyone who’s ever made music, but there is something about Neck Deep – like plenty of other great pop-punk records, including some made by this band themselves – that just feels so light and lively and exuberant even when it is singing about heartbreak and screwing up and all the other stuff one would usually expect a pop-punk band to sing about. The band’s own production is fantastic, too; crisp and bright and punchy in all the ways it needs to be to match the kind of industry standard that hasn’t really needed changing since Blink-182 released Enema of the State back in 1999. 

If there is a nitpick it might be that the second half of the record doesn’t quite hit the same heights as the first. “They May Not Mean To (But They Do)” is proper cheesy with its chorus of “They fuck you up your parents do / They may not mean to but they do”, although it will probably still really connect with some listeners, and there are definitely some great tracks either side of it. “Take Me With You” is probably the best of the album’s latter half and it’s nice to see that Tom DeLonge’s obsession with aliens has been passed onto the next pop-punk generation (“I’d be down to see inside your UFO / Take me with you when you go”), while “It Won’t Be Like This Forever” is another strong single even if it does see vocalist Ben Barlow getting the thesaurus out with words like “solipsistic” and a bit of an overdone line about rain and petrichor.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Obviously all the positives in this review come with one important proviso: you do have to like pop-punk in the first place. Neck Deep have never pretended to reinvent the genre and here especially they’ve fully committed to the “generic pop-punk” tag they’ve worn as a badge of honour for years. An album doesn’t have to change the game to be good, but it is also important to emphasise that a band going back to their old sound isn’t always the win some people like to claim it is (*cough* In Flames *cough*). In Neck Deep’s case though some things really are just meant to be and it is hard to imagine that any fan of the band will argue that this isn’t a fantastic return to form.