We Are The In Crowd are a band who seem on the cusp of great things. Having already amassed a sizeable fanbase in their five years as a band with their début album Best Intentions and through relentless touring on both sides of the Atlantic, Tay Jardine and the boys released the notoriously difficult second album, Weird Kids, a couple of months back. Is it an album that’s likely to take them onto the next level?
The answer is “maybe”. The album starts in excellent fashion with the slow building opener Long Live The Kids with Tay showcasing different sides of her very enjoyable voice before the insanely catchy first single from the album The Best Thing (That Never Happened) takes over. This is a song that will lodge itself within your brain for weeks and months to come, and is a slice of US pop punk at it’s absolute best.
Having given themselves the perfect start, We Are The In Crowd are just not quite able to maintain the high early standards throughout Weird Kids. The toe tap and head nodding inducing Attention revives the positive vibes of the start of the album, whilst Dreaming Out Loud sees the band adopt a slightly more straight up rock approach, which combined with Tay and Jordan Eckes dual vocals is very effective. Reflections is another fun mid tempo number while Perfect Reason is a three minute blast of enjoyable spiky pop punk. In between the highlighted songs the quality isn’t always as high, so the album does have something of an uneven feel.
Weird Kids is slightly inconsistent, but there are enough enjoyable songs to class this as a successful second album for We Are The In Crowd. While comparisons with Paramore are inevitable (not least because Tay’s voice isn’t a million miles away from the tone of Hayley Williams’), We Are The In Crowd are forging their own path. Still at an early stage of their musical journey, there’s no reason to think that We Are The In Crowd won’t one day ascend to the same level of stardom as their Tennessee contemporaries. If they can maintain the quality of The Best Thing and Long Live The Kids on album number three that ascent may come sooner than later, but both they and their fans should enjoy the here and now with Weird Kids. If pop punk is your thing definitely give it a look and a listen.
Weird Kids is out now on Hopeless Records.
