Album Review
SURGERY AND PLEASURE
BY VUNDABAR
by Joe Vickrey
Right around the last call for drinks every Saturday night, it’s said that Vundabar appears in a cloud of cigarette smoke and Hennessy mist at the crossroads in any town with a seedy underbelly. The world-renowned slacker and sleaze rockers are materializing once again with Surgery and Pleasure, and the trio feels as fresh as ever.
In the early days of TikTok, their breakthrough single, “Alien Blues” was being streamed over a million times a day. Though the song was from 2015, it took a few years for most people to catch on. Vundabar has always sounded a bit ahead of the curve, and returning fans will be pleased to hear they’re continuing to shake things up six and a half albums in. I would say seven, but I honestly have no idea if 2022’s Good Old is considered an album or like a B-sides and acoustics release. Either way it was a great release and “Shadow Boxing” is crazy underrated.
The album’s first single, “I Got Cracked” was released all the way back in June, and it was an absolute banger. My dad’s heyday stories always referred to someone getting punched as getting cracked, so it was a bit of welcome nostalgia for me, but musically it screams “we are so back.” I had the track on a near endless loop while I spent the next nine months anxiously wondering when the album would drop.
Four agonizing months later the follow up single, “Life is a Movie” dropped, and it epitomizes the electrified apathy that Vundabar embodies. The punchy, uptempo head banger has lived in my gym playlist for months. It’s the perfect example of how the band’s sound has matured. The songs all have rhythmic hooks that no longer rely on unusual guitar riffs and falsetto vocals. It’s impressive to hear a band that can evolve while still sounding like themselves, and Vundabar has done just that. Nothing on Surgery and Pleasure sounds like Gawk, but I’m not missing any element of their formative work.
What’s shocked me most is that at the time of writing this, “Beta Fish” has been the most popular track on Spotify since the album’s release. Lyrically it reads like a millennial Dr. Seuss book, but musically it combines their cold-hearted nature with a rare warmer sentiment from the group. It deserves all the attention it’s gotten and for good reason.
Other tracks like “Let Me Bleed,” “Hurricane,” and “Stallion Running” prove that this is Vundabar’s fuzziest work to date. No one is more stoked than me to hear an album of heavy hitters, but man, the production is timely and perfect. While saturated drums and vocals are hot in indie right now, these songs thrive in the deep end of warm grittiness. The collection is blissfully soaked in a soft-edged distortion that feels sweet even at its softest moments.
Whatever Vundabar is doing should be studied, because they are setting the pace for the future of guitar-based music. This is an album that I don’t want to end. Full of character and class, Surgery and Pleasure is one hell of a beastly album and will end up on every fat cat’s Best of 2025 roundup lists. That’s a guarantee.