KennyHooplaโs how will i rest in peace if iโm buried by a highway?// is a short, electrified work, feverish and vibrant with both cultural memory and contemporary unrest. It evokes, almost uncannily, the wiry, adrenal pulse of early 2000s post-punk revival, particularly Silent Alarmโera Bloc Party with their clipped rhythms and almost ascetic guitar lines, but overlays that now-archived energy with something rawer, more unstable, and perhaps more anxious. This is not imitation. It is a kind of musical palimpsest in which the outlines of the old are visible, but constantly overwritten by digital interference, abrupt tempo shifts, and a vocal style that slips between accusation, imploration, and something more childlike and broken.
The title track opens without ceremony: a staccato, jagged riff, urgent percussion, and Kennyโs voice, breathless and raw-edged. One might say it feels accidental, caught mid-thought, like a tape already running when the subject enters the room. The comparison to Bloc Party is apt but also limiting. Though both artists convey a certain jittery emotional intelligence, KennyHoopla’s music is less angular and restrained. It threatens collapse at every turn. Where Bloc Party turned emotional fragmentation into sleek design, Kenny leans into noise, mess, and interruption. The result is exhilarating.
Throughout the EP, he demonstrates a curious synthesis: glitchy, garage-inflected production laid atop melodies that, in another context, might feel almost anthemic. plastic door// is a prime example. It opens with a rhythm that suggests a kind of architectural instability, each beat a floorboard groaning under weight it was never built to hold. The hook arrives sideways, almost obscured, and just as it coheres into something graspable, it dissipates. The charm lies in this refusal to settle. The music never allows you to inhabit it fully. Instead, it forces the listener to chase it, breathless, always just behind.
Lyrically, Kenny is both cryptic and intimate. Lines such as โCulture is so claustrophobic / Claws to prove it hurts so goodโ strike an uneasy balance between adolescent theatricality and something more poetically resonant. These words might feel overwrought in another voice, but his deliveryโa wavering, half-shouted cadence reminiscent at times of early emo and at others of punk declamationโtransforms the sentiment into a sincere articulation of unease. His is a language of discomfort and fragmentation, of a self aware it is being watched, stylized, and consumed.
The production bears mentioning for its unrefined power. It sounds, at times, as if it were composed in a series of late-night frenzies, wires tangled, equipment humming in protest. This gives the EP an urgent, DIY sensibility, reminiscent of early Death Grips in its deliberate refusal of polish, or the aggressive fidelity of a demo never intended for public release. Such rawness is not a flaw but a statement of intent.
The final track, the world is flat and this is the edge//, is elegiac without being slow. It carries its own contradictions: soaring melody paired with percussive panic, a tone of resignation nestled in the propulsive beat. The title suggests a kind of postmodern exhaustion, a deliberate fall into the absurdity of flattened meaning. Yet the music strives upward, almost heroic in its defiance. It does not resolve. Nor does it collapse. Instead, it hovers in a liminal space, as if waiting to be rewritten or replayed from the beginning.
What KennyHoopla has created here is not merely a pastiche of genre tropes, nor even a thoughtful homage. Rather, it is a record of collapse and reassembly, a young artist picking through the ruins of indie, emo, punk, and garage rock, searching for fragments that still glow. His music is urgent, not only in tempo but in purpose. It insists on being heard, even as it disassembles itself in real time. It speaks, perhaps, to a generation who no longer believes in the myth of cohesion, but still clings, fiercely and furiously, to the ecstatic moments before disintegration.
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