Bad Year’s Living is Rad! is a lofi paradox. It’s recorded terribly, but it sounds good. I can’t tell what I’m actually hearing and what my mind is contributing, whether I’m picking out melodies or if my imagination is inserting them. Without knowing what went into this record, it’s impossible to know how much of what succeeds on this album, and there’s a lot, does so on purpose, and what’s an accident. Or if it matters.

Bad Year seems intentional about keeping things at a distance. No profile pic on their Bandcamp page, little-to-no personal information, no posts on their IG, no videos on YouTube. Minimalist cover art that appears to have taken minimal effort, etc. It’s an ethos that translates to their music. We know Eric from Texas wrote, performed, and recorded every aspect of Living is Rad!, yet it sounds like someone set a single mic in the corner of a practice space and recorded these songs spontaneously. Most of the lyrics are unintelligible, and other than “lots of guitars and drums” the actual instrumentation blurs and swirls and layers into a frothy batter of sound.

Opening track “no girls” starts off with electric guitars and drum machines, lightly sung with strong melodies. It gives a little bit of Water From Your Eyes with thin production, but less experimentation rhythmically and structurally. Live (though distorted) drums do pick up, and carry most of the rest of the record, which settles into a slacker sludge by turns melodic and cathartic, like a shoegaze Wavves. The album takes a tender turn on “All I See are Bees,” a trend continued by the first half of “Bl00dy Teeth.” This track, a lynchpin in the album, builds and progresses to one of the most impressively huge releases I’ve ever heard, fidelity be damned. Like Mogwai and Hum and Engine Kid and Mineral and Deftones and Death Cab crammed into a blender and jamming all the buttons down, then leaving the house with the door wide open and just walking into the dawn without a plan. Unreal.

Acoustic ballad “JCS” strips down to what sounds like a voice memo recorded on a phone. The stripped-down instrumentation render the performances distinguishable – you can actually hear the lyrics and the timbre of the vocals, rather than just the notes. It’s welcome moment of intimacy before the song layers back up with haphazard percussion and drippy synths. The droney penultimate track “evil (stupid)” is followed by “living is bad,” a peppy electronic number that hints at broader ambitions than the emo-gaze this record mostly explores.

My impulse is to wish this was better recorded, but if the inaccessibility of the recording is so much of the charm, an improved recording might detract from the enjoyability. Based on the melodic impulses and dynamic catharsis represented across these songs, Bad Year shouldn’t be worried about stepping into a cleaner recording moving forward. At the same time, Living is Rad! stands on its own sounds, whatever they are, as a curious and impressive piece of work.