Charly Bliss Frontwoman Eva Hendricks’ voice glimmers and chimes like a power-pop cheerleader on her sophomore record: it’s bubble-gummy, slightly nasal, all girlish spirit and vigor. The Brooklyn foursome’s “Young Enough” is a collection of dark lyrics, poppy melodies, and hooks so murderously catchy they could be used to fish for Moby Dick. Most songs tell of an abusive relationship Eva has since escaped from, and her three bandmates—drummer Sam Hendricks, guitarist Spencer Fox, and bassist Dan Shure harmonize around her pain like buzzing, sympathetic bees.
The record kicks off with synth-fizzled “Blown to Bits,” a track about our ever-present contemporary anxieties over nuclear war and the planet’s looming demise, whose chorus pounds, “It’s gonna break my heart to see it blown to bits.” Closer “The Truth” is no less of a dizzying earworm, though it has also collected an album’s worth of yearning: “Kissing babies / I’m alive, but I’m dead inside / burying my face against the wall,” Eva caterwauls on a song so hyper-specific, I’m not entirely sure what it’s about.
Elsewhere, you get the adolescent ache of teen love on title track “Young Enough,” a slow-burn centerpiece beginning with the thrum of a single guitar note and gathering into a full-blown anthem about what it’s like to have your identity tangled up in another person worse than earbuds in your pocket. On “Hard to Believe,” Hendricks reclaims her life for her own, bursting to leave a bad partner; “I’m wide awake, he’s asleep,” she crows of the mismatch. She grapples with a past sexual assault on “Chatroom” (“I am trusting, well-adjusted / Marked me dormant, I erupted”) and enters the recent emotional labor debate with the prescient “Capacity,” a lesson learner in which she announces, “I used to think I should do right by everyone / now I know I was wrong.”
Young Enough is poppier than Charly Bliss’ debut Guppy, and it’s not hard to understand why: keep those mellifluous riffs flowing, spark-fueled as electricity across power lines, and trauma will have a hard time keeping up with you. And if it does—bouncing as high as Eva Hendricks is clearly able—you’ll leapfrog straight over it.
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