The post-punk rebel incorporates elements of house and hip-hop while retaining the swagger and rawness of her early work.
If you don’t like a Sneaks song, just wait 60 seconds. A new one will rev up, mesmerize you with its barebones precision, and lurch to an abrupt stop in less time than it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. Eva Moolchan, the punk-adjacent Washington, D.C. musician who has been recording under the Sneaks moniker since 2014 (and for Merge since 2017), has made concision a kind of religion. You could comfortably fit her first three albums onto one CD-R, the kind of DIY treasure trove that might have been passed among friends at a campus radio station in an earlier era.
With 2019’s Highway Hypnosis, Moolchan tried, with varying results, to expand beyond the spiky bass-and-drum-machine minimalism that defined her earlier work. Her latest not-so-long-player, Happy Birthday, more effectively incorporates house and hip-hop textures, while retaining the enigmatic swagger that first brought her an audience in the punk community. Choruses are of no use to Sneaks, and lyrics remain fragmented snatches of mood and attitude. But lengthier, more robust compositions are no longer off-limits.
At its best, Happy Birthday showcases the fullest, most sophisticated grooves of Moolchan’s career. “Faith” is a marvel, with a four-on-the-floor thump and clanging-kitchenware percussion worthy of early LCD Soundsystem; Moolchan is sly and detached, reciting her vocals two syllables at a time, elusive with meaning until she’s not. “Faith in love, my friend/It’s the only thing we’ve got,” she repeats at the song’s close, capping a barrage of puzzles with an unambiguous statement of intent. “Sanity,” a skittering six-minute workout, is her first attempt to ride a beat for more than a couple minutes at a time, swapping out the chintzy drum machines for a heavier, club-ready boom-clap.
Moolchan talks more than she sings, often in an understated murmur. Like a rapper raised on Kraftwerk over Run-D.M.C., she achieves a counterintuitive sort of charisma through quiet force of repetition rather than volume. On “Mars in Virgo,” she repeats the titular phrase 16 times in less than two minutes, accompanied by Depeche Mode-style sequencers. She gives an enthusiastic testimonial of Virgo qualities—“We get things done! We get things done!”—as though narrating a quirky infomercial for the astrological sign. “Scorpio on Your Side” is similarly effusive and astrological: A sputtering synth melody cuts in and out as Moolchan (a known astrology obsessive) celebrates the perks of friendship with a particularly loyal Zodiac sign.
Even with Sneaks’ expanded palette, Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion, heightened by Moolchan’s status as a Black woman blurring the boundaries of a post-punk scene that’s still predominantly white. (“Why can’t a Black girl create?” she asks in “This World.”)
But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation. “Winter Weather” searches for a groove as Moolchan delivers an uncharacteristically wordy rap about her least favorite season. “Slightly Sophisticated” also lacks the cryptic simplicity of Sneaks’ best work, dabbling in glitchy maximalism that never quite gels. Toggle from that track to It’s a Myth’s spare, hypnotic “Look Like That” and it’s like feeling a lock slide into place.
This is a familiar conundrum: How do you expand or refine a sound that subverts the very ideas of expansion and refinement? On Happy Birthday, the jagged electro-funk of “Faith” and “Scorpio on Your Side” cracks the code: bolder grooves, a few more hooks, but still the same Sneaks.
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