Spectreview: Adult Mom – Driver

Released: March 5, 2021

Indie Rock
(Alternative)
(Singer-Songwriter)

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“I thought about the first girl I kissed
Was a girl I wanted to kiss
But not the first girl I wanted to kiss
Ya know?”

Good music is transportive; the best music can make you live a life you’ve never lived, or replay a misremembered memory. Adult Mom’s Driver achieves this feat handily. Its widescreen rockers and vivid imagery constantly threatens to throw you back into your turbulent early-twenties (if you’re not currently living them), when infinite possibilities also mean infinite chances to love and lose.

The coming-of-age tales that anchored the band’s previous releases hit even harder here, not just because of the new production values but because of Stevie Knipe’s heightened songwriting. Knipe’s already proven themself a talented writer over nearly a decade of EPs and albums, but Driver almost feels like another beast entirely. Hallmarks of young adulthood – cars, beer, kisses, texts – bifurcate and clash between songs in ways that feel almost literary, all the while while maintaining an emotional plaintiveness that’s easy to feel. There’s no more effective coming-of-age trope than the dichotomy between driver and passenger, but Knipe makes that classic theme central to the record with a series of surging rock numbers that add to its roadtrip feel. Some of those songs – “Wisconsin” and “Berlin” among them – are easily among the band’s historical best. 

Knipe, as usual, provides the record’s beating heart. Agile and cutting, their voice recalls that of Katie Crutchfield’s (on tender opener “Passenger” and the brief, self-assured “Adam”) or, at times, the late Dolores O’Riordan’s (especially on the glimmering “Breathing”). Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, in particular, feels like an easy reference point for how warm and inviting Driver feels; listen to how the slow, sunlit strums and slide guitar of “Regret It” compares to the chiller air of 2015’s Momentary Lapse of Happy.

In sound, in words and in voice, Driver feels like a complete maturation of a band eternally trapped in adolescence. Odds are you won’t find much indie rock coming out this year that outclasses it.

Recommended from New England to Westchester.