Nic McNamara’s father’s Johannesburg studio became his first musical education. Lucky Dube recorded there, Ladysmith Black Mambazo held sessions, South African musical tradition permeated the walls of the control room where the future Summer Colds grew up. McNamara absorbed this atmosphere of professionalism, technical rigor, an understanding of how sound behaves in space. Decades later, he releases “Missing Out“ — eight tracks of grunge that ignore the genre’s main commandment. Distorted guitars here cease to be synonymous with existential anguish. Sonic heaviness becomes a form of assertion. Riffs serve optimism.

Decade-old recording techniques merge with the production aesthetics of 2025. McNamara spent years searching for his own voice, discarding past folk rock experiments, moving toward a sound he could call his own. “Missing Out” shows where this path led, and it’s quite an interesting path: grunge power and positive charge amplify each other, creating a tension that holds attention for all thirty minutes of the record.

McNamara divides vocals and instruments into emotional registers. Guitars attack, bass crushes, drums push forward. The voice hovers somewhere above this, almost relaxed, ignoring the heaviness happening below. In the hands of a less confident musician, this technique would fall apart, turn into an aesthetic mismatch. With Summer Colds, the contrast becomes method. Nirvana and Soundgarden submerged vocals in instrumental mass; McNamara keeps distance, allows the voice to breathe separately from the guitar wall. He returns to the ’90s technically, emotionally goes in the opposite direction. Alienation stays overboard. Apathy too. Instead — the energy of movement, felt physically.

“Something’s Coming” opens the album with background conversations and laughter — a fragment of reality lasting several seconds. A guitar strike shatters this domestic scene. The music begins. McNamara builds the track around a dense guitar wave, where riffs are clearly defined, without effects for effects’ sake. The vocal line enters weightlessly, almost ignoring the instrumental heaviness beneath it. The dissonance between sonic massiveness and vocal delivery lightness defines the entire record. McNamara avoids theatricality. Guitars demand attention through their intensity, doing so without the posturing that plagues many contemporary attempts to resuscitate grunge.

“All Time High” increases aggression in the guitar part. McNamara’s vocals remain in the same relaxed tonality. The conscious refusal to match instrumental fury with vocal delivery is Summer Colds’ central decision. The musician ignores the unspoken rule of heavy music, where voice must reflect instrumental energy. Vocals become a point of stability amid the guitar storm. The track moves on the contrast of sharp rhythm and an almost dreamy singing manner, creating a sense of controlled chaos. Everything balances on the edge, held deliberately.

“Say It Back” reaches the peak of instrumental density on the record. Bass lines get more space in the mix. Guitars sound fuller, heavier. McNamara takes ’90s grunge technique, refuses its narratives of isolation and alienation. The track transmits the energy of overcoming, determination to move forward, an almost athletic purposefulness. Production emphasizes the metallic coldness of sound.

“If You Know” shifts focus to raw bass energy. McNamara addresses early grunge directly, filtering it through modern sound processing. The relaxed vocal manner becomes even more noticeable against the backdrop of increased instrumental pressure. The track moves with inexorability, returns to the best moments of early ’90s Sub Pop, when grunge bands knew how to find points of contact between melodicism and heaviness, between accessibility and experiment. McNamara proves the applicability of this formula now, provided there’s understanding of why to turn to it.

“The Moon” plays with internal dynamics. The intro is deceptively soft, almost acoustic, creating a false sense of intimacy. Guitars burst in with full force, destroying this illusion of calm. McNamara demonstrates the ability to work with contrasts within a single track, allows the music to breathe before the next wave of sound. The vocal line here is more experimental, less tied to traditional melodic structures, permits itself deviations and unexpected turns. The track shows Summer Colds’ ability to go beyond straightforward grunge, while maintaining the record’s central idea.

“Dear Life” brings necessary variety, adding indie rock elements to the overall sound. The track is more playful, lighter than its predecessors, retaining the same instrumental confidence, the same sense of control over the material. McNamara shows the ability to work with different shades of rock sound while maintaining the record’s overall atmosphere. Here his studio background shows through — he understands perfectly that the album needs a change of pace, a moment that allows the listener to catch their breath before the finale, and he provides it.

“Weak Hands” closes the album with a minimalist intro — voice and guitar, almost acoustic intimacy. The calm before the final storm: gradually a full instrumental tempest unfolds, guitar riffs building into the culmination of everything said on the record. McNamara completes “Missing Out” with a track that summarizes the central idea: the contrast of lightness and heaviness, optimism and metallic aggression, modern production and classic grunge techniques.

The problem with most contemporary grunge revivalists is that they copy the form, missing the moment of its birth. Musicians reproduce distortion, the loud-quiet-loud dynamic, Cobain or Cornell’s vocal delivery, forgetting that these techniques arose from a specific time. Summer Colds is interesting precisely for refusing such an archaeological approach. McNamara understood a simple thing: if grunge technique is still functional, it can be used for other emotions, other tasks.

“Missing Out,” for all its instrumental conviction, remains a safe album. Eight tracks hold the set line, McNamara never truly breaks himself, content with variations on one theme. “The Moon” hints at readiness for experiment, the rest of the material plays by established rules. This can be considered consistency of vision, or lack of interest in experimentation. Probably the truth is in the middle. McNamara found a formula, worked it through carefully; now the question is whether he’s ready to go beyond its limits.

The album convinces technically. Production is clean, guitar parts are competently constructed, vocal lines sit precisely in the mix. His father’s Johannesburg school gave McNamara the tools for such work. Emotionally, though, the record bets on one idea — optimism through heaviness — and wins it eight times in a row. Is this enough for an album claiming to reconceptualize the genre? A difficult question. Summer Colds proved his approach works, created a cohesive statement thirty minutes long. The next step will show whether this was revelation or simply a successful find stretched across eight tracks.

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