To fully dig the manifold charms of This Stupid World, it’s best to take a single step back into Yo La Tengo’s 38 years-and-counting catalog. In July 2020, amid that first summer of extreme pandemic disorientation, the trio surprised devotees not only with a new Bandcamp page but also with a fresh album, captured at their Hoboken practice space just weeks earlier and offered up like a timely postcard from a friend you’ve missed—we’re OK, and we hope you’re OK, too.
Still, this wasn’t some coddling batch of covers or a soporific balm for the common weal. Instead, We Have Amnesia Sometimes gathered five casually beautiful improvisations, set decidedly on edge: a snapshot of listless and helpless terror. Really, Yo La Tengo’s entire enviable path owes to that impulse to put their shared moment to tape. Whether triumphantly covering Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” after 9/11 or dreaming of the stars and baseball from somewhere in suburbia, they have always played what they felt, sans commercial master plan or artistic safety net. Yo La Tengo are, after all, a band that would rather write new music for commercials than cash in on past glories.
On This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo are ready to sing again, to shake free of Amnesia’s uneasy torpor and charge ahead by reimagining and recharging some of the best parts of their history. Their mass of albums have collectively done a little of almost everything, from samba and soul to raw noise and regal country. For these nine tracks, they key on two specialties: Mostly there are the ironclad, soft but steely rippers that perhaps no band does better. And then, at just the right time, Yo La Tengo deliver extended astral jams that feel like invitations to disappear. Where other Yo La Tengo albums have often felt discursive, This Stupid World feels focused and lean, the work of a band that needs to tell you something now.
Yo La Tengo begin with that electrifying first category of rock songs, slicing straight into a galvanizing romp about the ruin that is sure to come. At the start of “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” Georgia Hubley and James McNew lock into a rubbery motorik throb, pushing against or easing off the accelerator as if navigating freeway traffic. Hubley and husband Ira Kaplan coo over the rhythm, their tuneful near-whispers fluttering like pillowcases on a clothesline.
But then there’s Kaplan’s scabrous guitar, which spends all seven minutes turning the nice little melody inside out and upside down, until all that’s left is a pile of rusted scrap metal. When he reaches the mid-song solo, he lunges at a few ragged chords, gives up, and then lashes out at individual notes, as if trying to remember how they fit together. He finally finds the riff and crawls back toward the song, resolving this riveting little melodrama. “Until we all break/Until we all break down,” Kaplan and Hubley harmonize again toward the end, the pieces of this anthem of oblivion slowly drifting apart.