Review: On debut album ‘Pleasure’s All Yours,’ Atlanta’s Ultra Lights compress Pavement and Strokes DNA into 11 hook-loaded indie rock songs
The great lie of the band-to-watch industrial complex is that potential is the product. Ultra Lights have no patience for that arrangement. Pleasure’s All Yours, the Atlanta quartet’s debut full-length, out July 10 on Chunklet Industries, arrives with eleven songs, no interludes, no ambient throat-clearing, and a hit rate that borders on statistically suspicious. It is a record about exhaustion, disappointment, and the grind of modern living that plays like a party.
The band is frontman John Robinson’s third act. He spent years in Atlanta bands Turf War and Illegal Drugs before the pandemic pushed him into a homemade studio, where he taught himself to record and stockpiled songs. The lineup that emerged in 2023 is a family affair with a great origin story: Robinson’s wife, illustrator Leela Hoehn, had never played an instrument before he gave her a Squier Mustang for Christmas, and her droning second guitar is now essential to the band’s squall.
Bassist Alex Wharton and drummer Gus Fernandez complete a rhythm section that plays with the stripped-down muscle of a bar band that knows it’s better than the bar. Chunklet founder Henry Owings caught their second show ever and became their one-man promo machine, an old-school scene patronage that feels as anachronistic as the songs themselves.
Slacker Melodies, Zero Slack
The reference points are legible and proudly worn: Pavement, the Strokes, Archers of Loaf, Wipers. Robinson sings in that indifferent-but-secretly-wounded register that Stephen Malkmus patented, occasionally tightening into a Julian Casablancas bark, and the songs split the difference between slacker jangle and garage-rock drive. What separates Ultra Lights from the legion of bands mining this territory is compression. Producer Kris Sampson, whose credits include Omni and the Coathangers, keeps everything sinewy and dry, and Mikey Young’s mastering gives the record the crisp, unfussy punch he brings to Australia’s best trash rock. Nothing overstays. Choruses arrive early and often.
Lead single “Bad Feeling” is the thesis statement, opening with a deadpan crack about a lovely day for a kick in the face before locking into a groove that turns despair into a sock-hop. Robinson reportedly wrote it the morning after a bout of feeling washed up, which is the album’s engine in miniature: existential frustration converted directly into hooks. “Good Enough” chases enlightenment through bottomless human appetite, sneaking in a reference to TikTok’s beef tallow skincare craze, while the title track opens the record and sets its dominoes falling, one earworm knocking into the next through “Diamond Dreams,” “Nightmare” and the closing one-two of “Easy Does It” and “Got Damage.”
The Case for the Working Schlub
What lingers is the record’s stance. Robinson writes from the perspective of the working artist schlub, skeptical of everyone including himself, and the band frames collective head-bobbing as a small act of communal survival. Hoehn has described the goal as music that hits without demanding you take a stance, and that modesty is the point. In a moment when indie rock’s revivalists tend toward either theory-brained detachment or costume-party nostalgia, Ultra Lights simply write songs, the way their heroes did, and trust the melodies to carry the dread.
The band’s rise has been swift by underground standards. Last year’s self-titled EP, compiling their early 7-inch singles, earned them opening slots for the Hold Steady and Les Savy Fav and a Stereogum Band to Watch nod, and the debut’s first vinyl pressing runs a scarce 300 copies with a handwritten lyric sheet. That scarcity feels temporary. Pleasure’s All Yours is the sound of a band arriving fully formed, and records this immediate have a way of finding the bigger rooms on their own.
