The long-running experimental band ends the longest gap of its career with a set of urgent, direct, and celebratory songs.
Oneida are one of indie rock’s most enviable and enduring institutions. When the ragtag crew assembled a quarter-century ago, they felt like New York pariahs, unwilling to participate in established industry machinations. Instead, they became a cornerstone of a scene they helped create, turning Brooklyn lofts, warehouses, and abandoned industrial complexes into creative playgrounds. They built one studio and, when condo construction took it, built another: their fabled Ocropolis. An expanded record deal that gave them their own imprint meant Oneida could use the space as a communal hub, recording bands whose music they in turn released.
But when gentrification claimed that space in 2011, too, Oneida’s feverish output slowed to the rather adult pace of a record every three or so years. Other jobs, other bands, other relationships: Oneida’s five steady members have pursued it all during the last decade, reconvening occasionally to make madcap albums for which the word “psychedelic” feels too soft. After 25 years, Oneida continue to do what they always have—that is, exactly what they want.
Success is Oneida’s first album since 2018’s sprawling Romance, capping the longest gap in their catalog. Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades. Eschewing the overabundance of epics like Rated O or the massive canvases of A List of the Burning Mountains, Success squeezes seven songs into 41 minutes, with only one track breaking the double-digit mark. This relative concision doesn’t mean Oneida have forsaken their trademark eccentricity—shards of contorted guitar squeeze into punk shout-alongs, while layers of outbound synthesizers lurk beneath Kid Millions’ mighty drums. On Success, Oneida get back to the very basics of being a rock band, just buttressed by the experience and finesse of exploring some of rock’s wildest reaches since the late ’90s.
This pause and the resulting atavism stem from a now-familiar storyline—the pandemic. As lockdowns grew, Oneida scrapped a session scheduled for March 2020; the sequestered members spent the next 15 months writing a glut of new material. When they reconvened to record after a year and a half, they didn’t bother with excessive experimentation or studio chicanery. They just ripped. Remember how good it felt when you finally got to see old friends, to celebrate having lived long enough to reunite? That’s the spirit that animates these songs, as though Oneida decided not to wait around for another session that might never come.
The urgency is delightful. “Opportunities” explodes through a scrim of abrasive guitars, the band bounding forward like Superchunk begging to be punched harder; squiggling electronics chase Bobby Matador’s hook without distracting from it. “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand”—a lurid love song for these weird times—suggests jangle-pop launched from a slingshot, sheets of feedback howling like the wind as it rushes past. Even “Paralyzed,” the album’s 11-minute escapade into oblivion, pulses with strobe-light intensity, the beat relentless as synthesizers and guitar pedals unfurl around it in a complex duet.
There is also the lingering sense that Success is an ode to a bygone New York, before fresh development and infrastructure investments curbed wildness and danger. On opener “Beat Me to the Punch,” Oneida start tugging at a New York thread that begins with the Ramones; for the next six songs, it runs through Television, No Wave bedlam, and Sonic Youth into Oneida’s own devil-may-care scene of ecstatic improvisation in Brooklyn. They pull that link until it snaps during the finale, “Solid,” an electrifying rock song about trying not to fall apart. The righteous guitar jam collapses into a sweaty mess, a festival for chaos.
None of these old-city references smack of nostalgia, though. In 2005, Onedia were already calling themselves squares; now they’re squares deep into their 40s, their hip old nexus long gone. They are simply thrilled to have once been there and now to be here, as five friends who still love to get loud together in one room, turbocharging little rock songs with an enviable and enduring camaraderie.
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