As band names go, Fuzzysurf is a rather literal one. For the project’s debut Me Wocky EP, band leader Sean Lehner spiked his dreamy, ’60s-inspired pop with striking surf-guitar licks. “I was listening to a lot of surf music and Black Sabbath at the time,” he recalls, “so I was trying to combine this fuzz-bass sound with this surf-rock sound.”
And just as Fuzzysurf lived up to the “surf” part of its name on that album, the project’s debut full-length, Hometown Feeling, delivers on the “fuzzy” part. Its songs are dosed in the kind of tuneful, distorted guitars that pervaded alternative rock in the ’90s, recalling power-pop acts like Matthew Sweet, The Posies and Blur. The album’s title track revs itself up with the same stuttery guitar effects that made “Cannonball” such a hit for The Breeders.
Lehner does the’90s throwback thing so well you could assume it’s the band’s driving muse, but he insists that it isn’t. It was just an aesthetic choice that seemed fitting for this particular batch of songs, he explains.
“I don’t usually tend to go for that distorted guitar sound,” Lehner says. “But since these songs were about adolescence and growing up, it just seemed right to pay tribute to my influences when I was growing up and the music that made me want to start a band in the first place. The reason I picked up a guitar was I saw Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’ video on MTV, and that was what I wanted to play, so it’s really a love letter to those influences. I was basically writing an album that my adolescent self would like.”
Many of Hometown Feeling’s songs find Lehner looking back on his teen years—the crushes, frustrations and dramas—through the lens of adulthood. “A lot of it is about common experiences, and some of it is about not-so-common experiences,” he says. “There’s the usual adolescent feeling of heartbreak on songs like ‘Summer Girl,’ which is basically a song about a summer fling that didn’t work out. At the time, that stuff seemed so much more serious, but then you look back at it and think, ‘Was that really such a big deal?’ But the album also reflects on the more serious stuff, the experiences that leave you with regret and ambivalence.”
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If things work out, Hometown Feeling will be Fuzzysurf’s last album as a one-man project. Lehner says he’s been working on recruiting a full band so the group can perform live. He’s had some setbacks on that front, “but I’m feeling pretty optimistic about it,” he says. “I’ve met some talented people through the auditions. It’ll sound pretty good once we get a live show.”
Fuzzysurf’s Hometown Feeling will be released on CD and through Apple Music and Spotify on Friday, April 27. It’s streaming now at fuzzysurf.bandcamp.com.