Bub – Can’t Even (13th Floor Album Review)
Can’t Even, the debut album from Tāmaki Makaurau’s Bub, stages a whole inner world. Across ten tracks, Priya Sami leads listeners through cycles of love, regret, self-reproach, obsession, and rage, with a voice that is by turns confessional, theatrical, and direct.
It is a record of reckonings: scored with jagged guitars, layered keyboard textures and propulsive drums that nod to Britpop energy while veering into something messier, darker, and defiantly contemporary.
For Bub, Sami (vocals, guitar) is joined by Daniel Barrett (bass), Alex Freer (drums), and Jana Te Nahu Owen (keys). The album was recorded and mixed by Bob Frisbee at The Noise Floor and mastered by Jeremy Toy. Together, they conjure a sound that moves from post punk bite to indie balladry with ease.
At the heart of it all is Sami’s emotional dexterity. The opening track King of Wands, first released in the post lockdown haze, sets the tone with a tarot based metaphor for heartbreak as cards are pulled in the hope of clarity that never arrives. Throughout, guitars and drums are locked in Elastica like interplay.
From there, Can’t Even spirals inward and outward. Phase 2 stalks through urban nights with gritty guitars and keyboard melody lines that shimmer against pounding drums. New Amsterdam veers into rocky despair, with cowbell clattering through a song about depressive inertia “I’m lazy, not ambitious”; its sardonic tone masking a deeper ache.
At the album’s startling midpoint, Girl is followed by Another Girl: the first, a tension soaked track about yearning, emphasised by nervy guitar; the second, a bass heavy, full band explosion of fury and trauma, addressing the shift from crush to coercion with chilling clarity.
On Jeez Louise, sonic brightness is matched by lyrical darkness. What begins as an exasperated intervention, soon reveals itself as a self directed callout. Louise becomes an alter ego, a vessel for accountability: “You say sorry but by tomorrow / You won’t remember at all.” The track’s jagged riffs and escalating pace mirror the emotional unravelling.
Mrs Julian Casablancas plays as meta-pop fan fiction and inner monologue: part satire, part sincere yearning. The track slows into a spoken word recitation of a letter to the Strokes singer, a teenage fantasy stretched into adult exhaustion and alienation, all underpinned by chiming guitars, steady drums, and the subtly shifting keyboard lines.
The closing track, Bored is a quiet storm. The production is stripped back and whispered vocals ask the simplest, hardest questions about love and its limits. The emotional vulnerability of lines like “Can we be on just one side?“ leaves you hanging in empty space.
The title Can’t Even captures the emotional shorthand of the album, which is overwhelmed, undone, and speechless. It suggests burnout and heartbreak, alongside humour and self-awareness. It is both incomplete and precise, with the rest of the sentence left hanging.
Can’t Even is about surviving the emotional contradictions of relationships, being female, being brown, being broken, being funny, being done and not done at all. Sami lashes out, dissociates, and stares into the mirror, leaving a record of unfinished conversations, internalised regrets, and angry affirmations. Can’t Even is a fractured, funny, and self aware debut full of wit, grace, and grit.
John Bradbury
Can’t Even is out now!
