Gasoline Lollipops – Kill the Architect (ALP Recordings)

Gasoline Lollipops took their name from a moment of surreal inspiration during a teenage psychedelic experience that shaped and defined their creative spirit. Sweet and volatile, strange yet grounded, the phrase captures the musical and emotional dualities that have defined this Colorado-based group for over a decade.

Fusing the urgency of punk, the soul of folk, and the storytelling depth of outlaw country, they have forged a sound that is combustible and poetic. Their latest release, Kill the Architect, carries that legacy forward with focus and ambition, pairing incendiary lyrics with deceptively melodic arrangements.

Where their previous album, All the Misery Money Can Buy, embraced genre variety with mixed success this new collection draws from the same range of influences, but every track feels stitched from the same dusty cloth. The production is earthy and immediate, the performances emotionally resonant, and the vocals provide a compass that leads each song through darkness and light.

At its heart, Kill the Architect is an album steeped in themes of rebellion and ruin. The lyrics roam through a charred emotional landscape of broken dreams, societal collapse, and haunted inner lives, yet the music carries vitality and resilience. These are songs shaped by survival, providing vignettes of endurance and resistance in a world that demands too much and rarely returns the favour.

The opening track Tennessee Night establishes the album’s cinematic sweep. Slow, gothic, and saturated with organ, it conjures a Southern-noir tale of moonshine, madness, and transcendence. Holy Rebel follows with straining vocals and sinister strums, pulsing with tension. Its refrain echoes David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel, but this is no throwback. It is raw, incantatory, and searching for transformation.

That tension between lyrical exposure and musical confidence becomes a defining trait. Mercy, for example, is stripped back and aching. “I’m tangled in weeds / And there’s a silver sickle moon hanging over me” is a line that lingers, made heavier by the space around it. In Horse or the Cart, alternating male and female vocals mirror the push-pull of a fractured relationship. The emotional weight is carried by the song’s steady, storytelling tempo.

At times, the imagery threatens to overstay its welcome. Honeysuckle and Poison Oak leans heavily on its central metaphor, but the song’s layered textures and shifting pace help it move forward. Its light-footed rhythm suggests a kind of defiant joy, whilst laying bare the burden of generational damage.

Midway through the album, the title track Kill the Architect erupts. Driven by crashing drums and jagged guitar, its fury, “Throw your heart right through the wall”, meets musical combustion in one of the album’s most visceral peaks.

In contrast, Humanity moves with a jazzy shuffle and bluesy tone, dissecting disconnection and decay with cutting precision. Come Here to Die is lean and furious, its tempo pushed forward by a guitar riff that barely lets the listener catch breath. The rawness is compelling, its bleakness offset by the momentum.

The album’s quieter tracks hit hard. Black Hole uses silence as punctuation, its melodic vocal floating over a restrained guitar line. And as the title hints, Elvis carries a swaggering rock ’n’ roll rhythm, built on snarling vocals, pounding drums, and stop-start dynamics that simmer with menace.

As the album closes, Working for the Devil delves into the torment of the creative life. Fast and rhythmic, it explores the cost of obsession without losing its pulse. But Kill the Architect concludes with grace. The River flows with warmth and soul, offering redemption without sentimentality, and bookends the record with something close to peace.

What makes Kill the Architect compelling is how its lyrics and vocals form a deliberate, powerful response to the dissonance of modern life, reinforced by a band playing at full stretch. Themes of disillusionment, resistance, and generational burden are threaded through the lyrics, riffs, and space between. In the end, Gasoline Lollipops build a bonfire from the ruins and sing through the rising smoke. It is the sound of a wild idea sparked by youthful psychedelic playfulness, now transformed into something bold, considered, and fiercely burning.

John Bradbury

Kill The Architect is due out June 13th on ALP Recordings

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John Bradbury
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