In less than a decade, Citizen have come a long way. The Ohio band began in the early 2010s by playing a form of grungey, emo-y, post-hardcore that was cut from the same cloth as contemporaries like Tigers Jaw, Turnover, Basement, and Title Fight. On their 2013 debut Youth, arguably their most beloved release, they dialed back the gang vocals and straightforward punk parts to craft a style of pop-punk that felt refreshingly mature and artful compared to their Warped Tour-adjacent peers of the time. However, instead of fine-tuning that sound, the band chose to deconstruct themselves and rebuild with every subsequent release. On 2015's Everybody Is Going To Heaven and 2017's As You Please, Citizen traded all traces of pop-punk for elements of indie-rock and shoegaze, and their long-awaited follow-up, Life In Your Glass World, deviates even further.
Citizen's main weapon has always been the voice of their frontman, Mat Kerekes, whose full-bodied delivery is far more powerful and ascending than his nasally peers. His pained croon has been the focal point over the instrumentation, an approach that worked for a few songs on the last two albums, but quickly grew stale in the slow-burning song format. Life in Your Glass World attempts to rectify that. Save for their early EPs, the record contains the most energetic and driving songs Citizen have ever written, meeting at the crossroads of hazy alt-rock and the department store pep of Phoenix and The Killers. The buzzing guitar in opener "Death Dance Approximately" and the snappy chants of "I Want To Kill You" have the propulsive movement of a cycling class playlist, and hearing Kerekes howl over genuinely invigorating arrangements is an extremely welcomed changeup after the monotonous tempo of As You Please. Other tracks like the shimmering "Glass World" and the fluttery "Blue Sunday" aren't quite as fast-paced, but they have a bright spryness that sounds like the band let themselves have fun for the first time in years. It's likely that the ever-restless group will swerve once again on whatever comes next, but this might be their most appealing iteration yet. © Eli Enis/Qobuz