#113, “We Need More Bricks,” Neck Deep (2024)

150 Favorite Songs: #113, “We Need More Bricks,” Neck Deep (2024)

I can’t say with any certainty whether I’ll love “We Need More Bricks” six years from now, six months from now, even six weeks. It’ll definitely be a favorite six days from now, though. The song is brand new, came off of a record that was released last Friday.

Here is a thing that is true, I think, for most people who are passionate about music when they’re young: Their love of music and their ability to form intense connections to songs tends to work on a bell curve, where the peak is somewhere around the age of 23 or so. By sheer coincidence, that’s when music was at its very best.

I realized at some point years ago that I was not an exception to that rule, and I tried to find ways to listen to music the way I did when I was that age again—to spend hours and hours with the same record, to listen to the things I loved dozens and dozens of times, instead of blasting whatever playlist Spotify or Apple Music’s algorithm generated for me in the hope that something on it might stick.

So lately, it’s been this punchy little pop-punk song from this band called Neck Deep, who I didn’t know existed until last week, but who are apparently on their sixth album! I’ve never listened to a ton of pop-punk, even when I was a suburban teenager and pop-punk was being made specifically for me, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it—the brattiness of a singer trying to match a frenetic rhythm section and crunchy guitars, lyrics that are probably both dumb and also resonant with some deeper (still dumb) truth. I find it charming despite myself.

“We Need More Bricks” is dumb, for sure, but it’s also sincere and impassioned in the way that punk rock songs have been for—I’m so sorry—fifty years now (the first Ramones album came out in 1974, I really am so sorry). It’s a non-specific rebellion song, aggressive but not bespoke—it could be about Donald Trump or a mean high school principal or your stepdad or Joe Biden, whatever machine you want to rage against. I think it’s important to have music that expresses those feelings without having to get into the details—the universality of the sentiment of “hey, fuck that” is important, and being non-specific at least spares us the indignity of watching, say, Paul Ryan do dumbbell curls while blasting a song about the injustice perpetrated upon the Zapatistas.

Here, the band rails against injustice—“just because it’s not on your own doorstep doesn’t make it right,” the bratty singer declares during the bridge, correctly noting that “we gotta make it right”—while thrashing about with big, meaty guitar hooks that it seems unbelievable that it was possible for a pop-punk band to discover in 2024, that it seems like somebody should have previously unearthed over the past fifty years. It gets dumb during the chorus, which I’ve caught myself earnestly singing along with at least a half-dozen times in the past week: “it could be so tight / it could be so sick / it just ain’t right and it just ain’t this,” he sings, before getting to the part that, god damn it, gives me chills despite having heard similar sentiments expressed a million times by a million bands in my million years of listening to punk rock on the planet earth. (Back then, the band members were all dinosaurs!) “We need more fight and we need more grit,” he continues. “We need more punks and we need more bricks.” Are the bricks for building or throwing? Yes. You get it. Punk rock! Excellent!

If I’d written this part of the list six months ago, I might have included “Younger and Dumber” by Indigo De Souza, or maybe “Miami” by Caroline Rose. Those are both great songs that I love, and if this were a list of my 152 favorite songs, they’d both be strong contenders. That’s the point—understanding the way our relationship to music changes as we get older, as the way we listen to it changes, as the artists we grew up idolizing start to get fuzzy through hindsight, the way it looks when we try to remember our grandparents, as we realize that there are 800 records that are all genuinely great that come out every year and we can not fall in love with all of them—all of these things are very interesting to me.

But sometimes, those questions aren’t as much fun as playing air guitar while some kid (or grown adult man? I really don’t know much about this band yet) in a pop-punk band screams “there’s a spark, there’s a light, there’s a will, there’s a way out.” “We Need More Bricks” is the song that I’ve found right now, at this moment, that reminds me of how important music can still be when you make time for it in your life, but it’s not a cipher, not a stand-in for some song by boygenius or Denzel Curry that I’ll hear in six months and decide is that week’s Best Song Ever. It’s of the moment, but the moment isn’t what’s great—what’s great is that there are still people who can catch your ear, no matter when it is, if you keep your ear open to being caught.

And if you can't do that? If you've decided that all of the great songs came out when you were in college, or when you had time to do nothing but aimlessly comb through endless Spotify playlists or What.cd or Napster or the Sam Goody at the mall, and today's music doesn't resonate with you because there's just nobody great exploring the ideas that were all fresh and original when you just happened to be 23? If you've decided that music is all old and stale now, and you're waiting around for somebody to record something that can actually do the work of making you feel 23 again? If that's the relationship to music you’ve built for yourself right now?

Well, I guess you need more bricks.