It’s been a good year for the eternally beleaguered power-pop loyalist: Paul McCartney is still packing arenas around the world, Sloan and Guided by Voices are still going strong, bands named after GBV songs are on the rise, and Cleaners From Venus’ Martin Newell is broing down with The Rock. But the national breakout of Sharp Pins—a.k.a. Chicago DIY-scene pillar Kai Slater, an artist young enough to be Macca’s great-grandson—provides the most heartening indicator that the spirit of ’65 is still alive in 2025. Once a low-key vessel for the dainty tunes that didn’t suit Slater’s noisy power trio Lifeguard, Sharp Pins were elevated to feature attraction when his self-issued 2024 album, Radio DDR, received an expanded wide release this year, followed by a coronating tour with indie elders the Hard Quartet.
While Radio DDR’s endearing lo-fi singalongs presented Slater as a valedictorian from the Robert Pollard school of industrious Midwestern home-recording auteurs singing in faux British accents, the album shirked the rough-sketch aesthetics and subversive strategies of old-school GBV records—these were fully flowered songs nurtured in a terrarium of tape hiss. And yet Radio DDR was more than just a hit-after-hit procession of gleaming guitars and melt-in-your-mouth melodies—it was a portrait of a young man with limited means summoning all the romance and possibility that once sparked a youthquake 60 years ago. When you’re part of a generation whose adolescence was stolen by the pandemic and who seems consigned to a lifetime of debt and doomscrolling, singing silly love songs starts to feel like an act of defiance.
But just as the world at large was tuning in to Radio DDR (not to mention Lifeguard’s own righteously rambunctious 2025 release, Ripped & Torn), Slater was already prepping Balloon Balloon Balloon, which maintains the same staggering hooks-per-second ratio as its predecessor, while allowing greater space for his more outré ideas to flourish. If Radio DDR had the consistent flow of a greatest-hits collection that could work just as well on shuffle, Balloon Balloon Balloon is more deliberate in design. Its 18 proper songs are evenly subdivided into three acts, each capped by a brief burst of sound-collage chaos that functions as the opposite of a palate cleanser, like a teaspoon of mud to chase generous servings of honey.
