Coaster

It’s been four years since L.A. indie-pop mainstays Massage last released new music. Now, they return with Coaster, a masterful 10-track album that finds the band facing the upheaval and uncertainty of adulthood the only way they know how: together, five longtime friends, turning out one Perfect Pop Song after another.

The wait was worth it. Massage have always seen themselves as music fans rather than proper “musicians,” and Coaster — their third LP after 2018’s Oh Boy and 2021’s Still Life — still conjures memories of other eras: the braided rumble of The Cure’s “Pictures of You”; the radiant clang of Big Star’s “September Gurls”; the strobe-light sheen of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses”; the hazy strum of David Kilgour’s “Shivering”; even the post-Madchester swagger of prime Oasis, if you squint hard enough.

Yet while facets of Coaster might feel familiar, here they add up to something greater, and rarer — a band that finally sounds more like itself than its influences. 

“We’ve been labeled ‘jangle pop’ and lumped in with ‘fog pop,’” says Andrew Romano, guitarist and vocalist. “We even called ourselves ‘college rock.’ But we never really fit in anywhere. I think Coaster is where we embrace that in-betweenness. We’re a pop group, plain and simple. We don’t want to just remind you of some other band. We want to write songs you can’t shake.”

The result is Massage’s finest full-length — a collection that can’t help but reflect how much its members have been through since Still Life. Bassist David Rager nearly lost his home in L.A.’s devastating Eaton Fire; he and his family have yet to move back. Romano’s father survived a serious cancer scare. Keyboardist and vocalist Gabi Ferrer married her partner Thaddeus Ruzicka, Massage’s resident photographer and video director, then had a baby boy last June. Alex Naidus (guitar, vocals) and Natalie de Almeida (drums) had a son of their own a few months later. Neither pregnancy came easily, or went exactly as planned.

“I guess that’s what growing up is — accepting you aren’t the center of the universe,” says Ferrer, who also created the album art. “That kind of became the theme of the record."