Unlike the titular place PUP speak of, this EP does not suck ass. Quite the opposite, and its six tracks of high-octane nihilism are oddly fitting to such a suckfest as the time we are currently in. The EP’s opener, ‘Rot,’ exemplifies this wonderfully as the band’s frontman Stefan Babcock sings ‘maybe I’ve been rotting on the inside / all alone with my negative thoughts’ and later sarcastically thanking ‘the academy’ and explaining ‘I’m doing something productive with my self-destruction / it’s the one thing keeping me sane.’ These immediately hit the main themes of the EP: production and distraction, using your passions as a mental refuge away from the bad times. The likes of ‘Rot’ is PUP’s bread and butter, painting vivid (and gruesome in this case) imagery to deal with emotional turmoil, sometimes to a worrying degree that forces the listener to wonder if the band are just voicing a generational sense of endless suffering (whether it be relative or more extreme) and getting it out cathartically, or should someone ask Babcock if he’s okay?

should someone ask Babcock if he’s okay?

This imagery continues on ‘Anaphylaxis,’ the first single from the project, in which Babcock tells a story of a bee sting gone wrong (a story actually belonging to his partner’s cousin) and the panic of experiencing the eponymous condition, accompanied by fast drums and told thoroughly mildly disturbing Claymation in the music video. The physical anaphylaxis in the song is an analogy for not only physical but emotional hypochondria Babcock told Kerrang, and the idea of looking back on overreactions with a sense of comedy is evident in the lyricism through couplets such as ‘this isn’t a game / my face is aflame,’ that describe perfectly how difficult, how futile it is to convince others of your own panic especially when, in hindsight, it is kind of funny.

PUP are criminally underrated for their breakup songs

Next on the track list is ‘A.M. 180,’ a good cover of a Grandaddy song from 1997 that keeps the romantic vibe of the original but just makes it a little noisier. It feels almost like a mid-EP palette cleanser, simple and cute, and just in time for the highlight of the project, ‘Nothing Changes.’ PUP are criminally underrated for their breakup songs, whether it be this or the likes of ‘See You at Your Funeral’ on their 2019 album Morbid Stuff which told of wanting to the world to explode because the singer saw their ex at the supermarket. In the opening lines of ‘Nothing Changes’ the typical post-breakup activities of replacing and buying anything that might serve as a bitter reminder (including the infamous heartbreak haircut) are documented ‘a new coat of paint / a new set of locks / a new mattress’ only to circle back to ‘the same old bitter thoughts.’ The futility is back, and while this song along with ‘Anaphylaxis,’ ‘Floodgates,’ and ‘Edmonton’ were all recorded at the same time as their last album, long before the pandemic, it’s easy to replace a breakup with the pandemic as the world’s current crisis shoo-in. ‘Nothing Changes’ as a concept and as a song isn’t necessarily depressing though as it adopts PUP’s particular brand of optimistic, nihilism when Babcock half sings, half shouts in the bridge ‘I’ll get through the night / then I’ll begin again.’ It’s a catharsis, a release, a reminder that we’re all in the same boat of over-using ‘books and alcohol’ to keep ourselves entertained over the past seven months. This hits even harder in the outro after a soft-spoken bridge that proves PUP are not a band to misuse volume and instrumental layering, employing one prolonged guitar chord and gently increasing drums in the bridge to amplify Babcock’s voice and message.

full of guilt and frustration screamed into a microphone that can’t quite by hidden by the relentless guitars and percussion

It would be easy to say that the band has a tendency to bash certain pessimistic themes and topics over the head as the subject matter of ‘Floodgates’ has been tackled before, but it makes the music a lot harder to fault when it sounds this good, this easy to sing along to at top volume. The final seconds of ‘Floodgates’ leads flawlessly into ‘Edmonton,’ a one-minute-and-change long closer full of guilt and frustration screamed into a microphone that can’t quite by hidden by the relentless guitars and percussion that sounds like it’s thrashing through the same emotions.

This Place Sucks Ass is an exorcism, 17 minutes and change of playing through panic and unpleasantness, coming out the other side in a place that still sucks ass, but maybe a little less.

Rating 7/10

This Place Sucks Ass is available now via BMG 

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