The Gobs - Eight Things at Once (2023)

 

Olympia’s The Gobs makes music like a raccoon trapped in a vending machine—frantic, confused, and somehow kind of inspiring. Their 2023 album, Eight Things at Once, is 24 tracks of synth-stabbed, tape-scorched punk that sounds like it was recorded in a porta-potty during an exorcism. Every song is under two minutes because any longer would be medically unsafe. “Adderall or Nothing” is what happens when your frontal lobe dissolves in a gas station bathroom, while “Get a Dog (That Can Kill Me If It Wants To)” is a love song, probably. “I Wanna Fuck the Moon” is either a metaphor or a cry for help—either way, it slaps. The keyboards aren’t playing along so much as heckling the guitar, like a drunk uncle at a little league game.

Listening to this album feels like licking a car battery during a lightning storm and glimpsing something vast and unspeakably cool. When you snap out of it, you’re barefoot in a Denny’s parking lot, your pockets are full of teeth (not yours), and you know, with a deep certainty, that something incredible just happened—something wild, beautiful, and slightly cursed, now pulsing just out of reach in the back of your brain.

The Gobs - Eight Things at Once