On ‘Podium,’ Cheekface turn deadpan wit on a collapsing America, proving their sixth LP is more than a punchline
Cheekface have always sounded like a band daring you to find them annoying, and on Podium, their sixth album, they finally weaponize that dare. Released July 28 via the band’s own Middle Spoon operation, the record arrives as a self-described Trump 2 era statement, thirteen songs that stare down the sick and absurd state of America in 2026 while asking what it costs to remain a well-meaning weirdo inside it. The Los Angeles trio (Greg Katz, Amanda Tannen, and Mark Echo Edwards) have not softened their approach so much as tightened it, and the result is their most focused collision of dread and deadpan yet.
Part of that focus feels like a response to their critics. Last year, a podcaster reportedly branded them “the most irritating band in indie rock right now,” and rather than flinch, Cheekface swallowed the insult whole and made it a launchpad. Opener “Hostile Street” turns self-erasure into a hook, with Katz repeating “I wanna be reduced” over bass-popping, synth-streaked rock that samples vocals from McKinley Dixon and, in a very Cheekface flourish, credits a dog named Stubbs with barking. It is a mission statement disguised as a shrug.
Jokes as Load-Bearing Structure
The band’s signature has always been the talk-sung non sequitur, and Podium is stacked with lines built to be quoted back on a group chat. “A calendar is great if you care what day it is,” Katz offers on “There Is a God,” before the song spirals into witches and a dog in a sweatshirt. The trick, and it is a real trick, is that the jokes are load-bearing. Cheekface use absurdity the way other bands use distortion, as texture that keeps the whole thing from tipping into lecture.
“Peanut Butter Prawns” bounces on handclaps and a wandering bassline, an alt-rock cousin to the B-52s, while a small horn section (tenor sax from Emily Williams, brass from Jer Hunter) lends the album a looseness that earlier Cheekface records sometimes withheld.
What separates Podium from being a simple joke-rock exercise is its willingness to name what it is afraid of. Track titles like “Black Site,” “No Fly Zone,” “EBT,” and “I Don’t Work Here” read like a scattered index of American precarity, surveillance, poverty, and the gig-economy dissociation of not belonging anywhere you clock in. “Black Site” hides its politics inside a Killers-nodding hook (“I got soul, but I’m not Korea”), which is exactly how Cheekface prefer to operate. They rarely raise their voice. They let the punchline carry the payload.
A Caring Person in an Uncaring Society
The thematic spine here, a caring person in an uncaring society, could easily curdle into smugness. It mostly does not, because the band keeps turning the lens on itself. When Katz sings “You can destroy me, you can reduce me,” the target is not just a hostile world but his own appetite for capitulation. Produced and mixed by longtime collaborator Eric Palmquist at his Los Angeles studio, the album sounds crisp and unfussy, all wiry guitars and elastic rhythm, which lets the words do the heavy lifting they were built for.
Podium will not convert the skeptics who already decided Cheekface’s shtick wears thin, and the band clearly knows this. That awareness is the point. Six albums into a run that has quietly made them one of indie rock’s most reliable songwriting units, Cheekface have stopped apologizing for being a lot. Instead they have built an entire record around the idea that being a lot might be the only honest response to a moment this overwhelming. On the closer “I Decline,” the refusal reads less like a punchline than a survival strategy. It is the sound of a band standing at the podium, microphone in hand, choosing to keep talking precisely because the world would rather they shut up.
