Team Dresch

Thirty years after their last full-length release, Team Dresch are back with Furthermore—and it’s exactly the album we need right now. While other bands might drop and add members after a 30-year hiatus, Furthermore’s personnel includes everyone who played on the band’s first two LPs. Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson share vocal duties, Marcéo Martinez and Melissa York rotate on drums, and Bleyle, Wilson, and Donna Dresch all take turns on guitar and bass. You can sense the intuitive collaboration and shared musical language in the band’s distinctive blend of emo-queercore-indie-punk-grunge, at times calling to mind Fugazi’s dime-turning tautness, at others Versus’s melodic sway. As ever, the power of Team Dresch’s songs is in their alchemy of heavy riffs and pop sugar, the earworms and understories. There’s hope in the sludge and defiance in the hookiest chorus. Team Dresch knows when to whisper a story and when to scream a chorus, when to make a listener feel like they’re the only person in the room and when to evoke a crowd of beautiful outsiders celebrating and fighting for the lives they’ve made.