A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings: The new Beach Slang album

The band’s second full-length is described as a crash-and-thunder collection of songs about what it takes to keep yourself going, to make it through the rest of the night/your youth, and beyond. Frontman James Alex wrote much of A Loud Bash Of Teenage Feelings while touring the band’s first album, during which he spent a lot of time with the kids who’d picked up the record.

Going into the second record, Alex didn’t feel pressured to match the unexpected success of the first, given that he’s grown so much since then. He said, ‘What I did feel was a sense of responsibility to the kids who told me they were finding something in our music that brought them back from a bad place, the ones who were getting Beach Slang tattoos and quoting lyrics to me after the shows. I don’t want to let those people down.  As a 20-year-old, I thought, hey, let’s all have fun, we’re gonna live forever. You don’t really see the finish line. Now it’s more like, am I leaving behind work that’s going to matter?  What’s this going to say about me when I run out of air, and my son is listening to these records and tapes that I left behind. Is he going to say, “Yeah, my dad was all right”? These days I feel like I’m responsible for things bigger than myself.  And I want to do right by them.’