AJR - Neotheater

AJR staged Neotheater like a Broadway show written in a bedroom, and this eco vinyl pressing gives the brothers' 2019 coming-of-age album a fresh spin.

The third album from Adam, Jack and Ryan Met followed The Click and found the trio wrestling with the awkward business of growing up in their twenties. Ryan produced it, pairing bubbly, lightly orchestrated pop with lyrics about anxiety, naivety and the search for integrity. It became their first top 10 album in the US, a sign that their homemade, theatrical approach had found a huge audience well beyond the internet fans who first championed them.

100 Bad Days turns a pile of everyday disasters into a buoyant anthem about finding the good story in a bad week, while Birthday Party samples In Heaven, the eerie song from Eraserhead, for a wonderfully strange twist on a party track. Don't Throw Out My Legos captures the bittersweet fear of leaving childhood behind, and Dear Winter, written by Ryan alone, offers the most tender moment on the record before the grand Finale ties everything together.

Twelve tracks long and bursting with ideas, it captures AJR at their most ambitious and personal, and every theatrical flourish sounds wonderfully big on a turntable.