Kid Kapichi — This Time Next Year — Album Review
Punk Rock | Indie Rock
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Music
It was early September last year, when a mate of mine asked “have you heard this band before?”. I bore witness (albeit late) to the 2019 song “Sardines”, and from then on, I was hooked on the Hastings-based punk rock group that was Kid Kapichi.
Following then, I enjoyed the hell out of “Sardines” and the three other single releases to follow it, which were “Thugs”, “Household Shame” and “Working Man’s Town”, which was their latest release at the time I discovered Kid Kapichi. From these four singles, I got a very similar feeling, to how I felt about the 2015 album from Slaves, Are You Satisfied. Said feeling, was that, by adding a new twist to a typically punk formula, a pseudo punk-revival could be sensed, when thinking of both Slaves and Kid Kapichi, amongst a few other enjoyable bands in recent memory.
I even deemed the aforementioned “Thugs” to be amongst my top singles of 2020 (It admittedly would’ve been “Sardines” however, if it hadn’t been released in 2019). But when all is said and done, what Kid Kapichi had released over the course of 2020 felt incredibly stellar. But everything the band had been doing last year, was all leading up towards the release of their debut studio album, This Time Next Year.
Right off the bat, I could connect the themes foreshadowed by the albums title, with the lyrical matter of their singles. I already felt early on, as if the main focal point of the album, was to reflect the procrastination and struggle of working class people in the UK. This theme felt pretty much confirmed in their late 2020 single “Self Saboteur”, which feels almost like a pseudo title-track, in the grand scheme of things.
It was definitely fair to say that This Time Next Year was one of my most anticipated album released of 2021, and it most certainly didn’t disappoint. While I was confused to find that “Household Shame” was the only single release I listened to, which didn’t make it onto the full album, I still thought that the non-inclusion of the track doesn’t necessarily detract from the enjoyment of This time Next Year.
What came as the most pleasant surprise for me, was how Kid Kapichi managed to throw in a few tracks that experimented with their sound further (some good examples of this are the luminous “Fomo Sapiens”, and the downbeat closing track “Hope’s a Never Ending Funeral”), while not feeling separate in any way to the tracks I had grown more accustomed to. In other words, while there’s a surprising amount of versatility to be found on This Time Next Year, there is no track to be found on here, that doesn’t feel like it came from the minds of Kid Kapichi, and Kid Kapichi alone.
But what I think truly ties this album together, is just how consistently enjoyable it is. From start to finished, I was kept entertained by what this album had to offer. And with the tracks I had come to know and love over the months being spread evenly across the album, there wasn’t a single moment where I didn’t feel invested.
I hold a firm belief that, thanks to how masterfully this album was made (not even mentioning that the band had release this album independently), my stance as a Kid Kapichi fan feels fully cemented.
Favourite Tracks: Sardines | Self Saboteur | Violence | Thugs | Fomo Sapiens
Least Favourite Track: n/a
Kid Kapichi
Enjoyment: 10/10 | Memorability: 10/10 | Atmosphere: 9/10
Uniqueness: 7/10 | Satisfaction: 10/10 | Narrative: 10/10
