Stream: Bloodboy, ‘Punk Adjacent’

Kevin Bronson on May 22nd, 2019

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Former competitive surfer Lexie Papilion — aka Bloodboy — first caught a wave out of her native Orange County in 2016 and she’s released music in fits and starts ever since. This week she finally unveiled her debut full-length, “Punk Adjacent,” an album she wrote in a rural cabin in Louisiana while soaking up local flavor, bingeing on “Gilligan’s Island” reruns and reconnecting with some seminal ’80s records that inspired her in the first place.

The album was originally planned for release last year, but, Papilion says, “things started falling through, money dried up and more time went on … I waited and waited for someone to tell me what to do and how to move forward, and I learned the hard way that, ultimately, it’s my fucking career and I’m the only one who can make those decisions. So, I decided that I love this record and it deserves to be in the world.”

“Punk Adjacent” draws its title from a conversation with her pals. “My best friends and I were joking about the way our moms still try to score ‘cool points’ with us by talking about the punk shows they went to when they were younger,” she explained last year. “I said, ‘I doubt my mom was really in the scene; she was probably adjacent to the scene,’ and I immediately saw the parallel. There may be moments where I get close, but I’m likely never going to make a bona fide punk record and that’s totally fine.”

Indeed, the tunes on the album, made with Taylor Locke and Kyle Fredrickson, falls somewhere on the outlying branches of the Blondies/Go-Go’s/Bangles/Cars musical tree. It’s brisk and energetic with plenty of space for her bold vocals. She has, as she sings in “(FKA) Surfer Girl,” traded the sand for a band. “I don’t wanna talk about it / what I was before,” she cries, and after getting close to “Punk Adjacent” you can see why.

||| Stream: “All My Idiots”