Kevin Bronson on March 5th, 2021

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Songwriter Tyson Evans has been flying the emo/pop-punk flag as Crooked Teeth, fashioning a sound that would have had his band ticketed for stardom (or at least a slot on Warped Tour) if it were, say, 2005. Evans loves pop hooks, he says, adding “I’m not afraid to be bombastic.”

Noted. On the first Crooked Teeth single of 2021, “Light Me Up” (out today), Evans teams up with Talker (aka Celeste Tauchar), who by releasing two EPs over the past two years has been making her own inroads in the still-breathing alternative rock world.

Co-written with Alan Day (Four Year Strong), Evans uses a cigarette as a metaphor for the tangled emotions — anger, frustration, grief, self-loathing — he felt after a breakup.

“One thing I was feeling a lot was this weird sense of gaslighting — saying that things didn’t happen in the way that they did or things that are blatantly not factual or invalidating my emotions over it,” Evans says. “I felt used out of all of it, like when you bum a cigarette off somebody — maybe you don’t even really smoke, but you bum a cigarette off someone to kill time. I was the cigarette that got bummed and then put out.”

Drummer Issac Juarez kinda steals the show in the Sean Berger-directed video, film at the abandoned Dolores Waterpark in Newberry Springs.

||| Watch: The video for “Light Me Up”

||| Also: Stream “Plight,” released last November