Radio Songs: White Reaper And Punk's Pop Sensibility

Strip away the flags and bunting and it often boils down to a desire to play fast and loud. Since Dee Dee Ramone started belting out the 1234s that base punk urge has warped and mutated, but in White Reaper we have a band who get the idea on a basic level.

‘White Reaper Does It Again’, their first full length, shoots first and gets out before the inquest begins. Scuzzy, deliriously paced and executed in a style that suggests just a hint of surprise as every riff lands precisely where it was intended to, it’s one of the year’s best debuts.

Beneath the breakneck delivery, though, beats the heart of a band with pop smarts and the guts to use them. They keep the hooks coming, never missing an opportunity to lodge something in your brain. It’s high quality writing dressed as something that mainlines a sense of abandon.

Catching the band with a morning to themselves after opening for Alvvays - who conveniently also appear to have melodies on tap - in Cardiff, frontman Tony Esposito pulls a thread from a story as old as the Ramones: the punk band with an ear for pop hits crackling through a radio.

“I definitely try to write some hooks, try to be catchy,” he said. “At the same time we don’t want to slow down. I think it comes from growing up. My parents listened to a tonne of radio so when I was really young all I heard was radio songs. That was impressionable on me as a child, on what I view as music.

“[Pop] is the easiest kind of music to make fun of or look down on. It’s the first thing that’s offered to you, so a lot of people look down on it for that. I like it. It’s catchy. I like to listen to hooks. I like to have something to grab onto when I listen to music. It works for me.”

Despite only having recently crossed into their 20s, White Reaper’s four members have been playing together for years in assorted bands. In recent times Louisville, their Kentucky hometown, has become a staging ground for raids into uncharted territory across the US and now Europe.

They’ll play anywhere, any time and, as a result, they’re super tight and understand what each other will do instinctively. Their earliest ripples were caused by just how good a live band they are, their first LP partly the result of simply needing more songs to kick out night after night.

“We didn’t really start touring until last year. We were all on our first tour,” Esposito said. “We’re eager to keep on touring and keep getting better. We really don’t have anything else to do. We don’t really have jobs or that many friends at home. We just want to be on the road all the time.

“We do have some fun when we’re at home. It is nice to come home every once in a while. There’s not a lot of traffic in our town, you can park pretty easily. It’s a really easy place to live, but at the same time nothing really compares to the fun of being on tour and we’ll never get better as a band if we don’t tour constantly.”

Recorded across 10 days with Kevin Ratterman, who then mixed the fuzz into a pretty seamless whole, ‘White Reaper Does It Again’ charged away from the ground made on their EP, the band pausing only to add another song - Friday The 13th - to the bundle slung over their shoulder. The timescale felt like a small eternity to Esposito, though, who is already looking to the future.

Without adequate means to demo on the road, he is currently walking around with new songs rattling around in his head. We might get our hands on them sooner rather than later. “After a certain point, bands just have songs they’re ready to put out,” he said. “I feel like we might be getting close to another one.”

'White Reaper Does It Again' is out now on Polyvinyl.

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