The Party After’s debut album, “Dopamine Machine”, released at the end of July this year, comes after a decade of upheaval for the band. Technically speaking, the ten-tracked album has been in the works during those ten years, though not without many hiatuses. This is a little more than a sympathetic backstory for Dopamine Machine; it also provides a lens to view the more interesting aspects of the album.
Though the band inception was sown in 2011, when the frontman on guitar and vocals, Jared William Gottberg, started it with his highschool drummer friend Derek Talburt, with bass player Tony Bates joining in soon after, it took the band until 2018 to actually manage to release anything and play shows due to a bizarre series of unlucky events, including: a robbery during a tour, laughably bad management, and legal issue over the band’s name.
Ideas for their first album have always been played with during that period, but the actual seed for “Dopamine Machine” was sown between 2018 and 2020, when Jared met producer and engineer David Montuy Robles while recording for a different project, and decided to co-produce the band’s debut full-length album.
Recording alone, done in Mexico City, was done by early 2022, but the band decided to support the album in different ways before continuing working on it, strengthening their public and artistic image first. So, the individual members’ artistic lives extend far beyond The Party After, with the front man alone having a solo career, a duo, and a five piece band as well, playing over 200 shows a year between all of them. All those reasons contribute to the level of maturity and inner diversity of the album, despite it being a debut album of a (functionally) young band.
Operating within the genres of Grunge, Hard and Alternative Rock, as well as Stoner Rock, the album expands over ten tracks. Their goofy brand of other-worldly animated characters, while distinct and fun, doesn’t fully indicate the seriousness of the music you will find in the album. Not without playfulness, mind you, but both on the musical level and the lyrical/storytelling/thematic one, it’s easily noticeable the amount of attention and thoughtfulness granted to every aspect and every track. In the band’s own words, “the themes themselves come from the soul-wrenching process of discovering how littered with turmoil the chasing of one’s dreams can actually be.”
More artists than not have made art directly dealing with what the experience of making art is like. What is unique about The Party After is the album was actively being made and thought of from their first moment, becoming itself a cynical testimonial object to the turmoils the band faced to get to the point of releasing this album. The one track that embodies this the most is “Blast Off”, a party-sounding track that details the self-destruction involved in chasing dreams, with Jared’s smoky, strained vocals playing off to the hard bass and drums.
Looking at the experience from a different direction, “One for All” comes with a somewhat softer melody but with the same consistently hard bass and drums. The vocals have more of a forefront confidence as well. Other highlights from the album include “What You’re Waiting For”, which has a more distinct 80s-like overall sound, compared to the earlier two tracks, with sections leaning into hard rock, and “Symmetrism” that is one of the more emotional and emotive tracks, without too much sentimentalism. “Celebrating Nothing”, the final track, is one of the most distinguishable in the album, a worthy track to end on. Internally diverse, the melody is composed with more layers and complexity. Jared’s vocals and line-readings varying from desperate to contemplative, angry, smug adds to the complex soundscape. Overall, the album is telling of the level of experience behind it and only positively indicates what we should expect from the band’s second album.
