Okay so I’ve had “Carolina” on loop since yesterday and I think it’s because it doesn’t try to be clever. NYC band, guitars turned up just enough to feel a little dirty, drums that sound like an actual room instead of a plugin — this is a live band’s song, full stop.
You get the sense they’ve played it a hundred times in front of actual humans before anyone bothered recording it, and honestly that’s rare these days. Most bands sound like they wrote the chorus for streaming numbers. This one sounds like it was written for the back of a bar, sweaty, everyone a little too close together.
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Anyway — the chorus hits different once it opens up. Verse stays kind of tucked in, almost shy, and then boom, it widens out into this big singalong thing that I can already picture forty people yelling back at a show. That’s the whole appeal with The Coux, honestly: nothing here is overworked. It sounds like a band that knows exactly how a song needs to land in a room, which, again, feels increasingly rare. Keeping tabs on these guys. “Carolina” is a good sign of where they’re headed and I want to hear the next one.
