Remember Sports with The Ophelias and Red Eft

After four albums of expertly crafted pop punk, Remember Sports follows up last year’s epic Like a Stone with the first EP of their decade-long run. Recorded piecemeal in their respective homes, sometimes together, sometimes apart, Leap Day trades the live immediacy of their studio classics for something cozier, though no less rousing. The core trio of Carmen Perry, Catherine Dwyer, and Jack Washburn have always kept up active home recording practices for their solo projects–Carmen as Addie Pray, Catherine as Spring Onion, Jack under his own name–and here we find them gently folding sounds sprung from their bedrooms into their signature brand of basement rock.

Absent a dedicated drummer for the first time in their recorded history, the band opts for simple drum machine accompaniment, lending the music a fresh weightlessness even as Carmen’s arresting vocals and sharp lyrics bring gravity in all their righteous anger, scathing self-reproach, and disarming tenderness. Musically, all the thrilling guitar riffs and grooving bass lines we’ve come to expect are here, but the gradual recording process offered the band more opportunity to explore and experiment, adding on subtle layers of instrumentation, distortion, and electronics, and with them a warm sense of depth. In all, Leap Day is a short and sweet, loose but confident affair; at once a reminder of Remember Sports’ absolute mastery of the pop rock anthem and a tantalizing sip from the well of ideas they have yet to plumb.