The Lemon Twigs are in their Golden Years (2024)

I’d like to ask you, reader, to count something for me. Please make a list of pieces of music that fall into all of these categories: a “song” in the “rock ‘n’ roll” genre, released in the year 2024. While I could gather everyone who will ever read this and, with all of their fingers, not come close to counting the technically applicable tracks (perhaps that’s not saying much), I am not looking for “tracks”. I am not, in fact, requesting a minute-and-change interlude from Twenty One Pilots’ latest record that, like, totally has a metal riff, dude.

I am being a little purposefully obtuse; let me remedy that and establish myself as familiar with music-writer-speak with the following clickbaity assertion: The Lemon Twigs have released the only rock ‘n’ roll single of 2024. Put that in your translucent bowl and smoke it! What am I talking about? Well, at the risk of portraying (revealing) myself as a complete rockist, I’ll explain myself. First I’d like to admit an intense affection for the Long Island band’s single “My Golden Years”, which was released at the top of January. It’s a summery, energetic, harmonious piece of what has come to be known by some as “jangle-pop”, a label that connects the work of The Byrds, The Smiths, and other artists, by their shared use of, well, “jangly” electric guitars. More on this later.

“My Golden Years” is the ONLY rock ‘n’ roll single of 2024? No, it’s not. But it is probably the only song of this year, in my opinion, that satisfies these descriptors to an extent convincing enough for the use of all three. Put another way: what are the songs from this year whose placement on a Top 10 List Of Rock ‘N’ Roll Singles of 2024 would leave you saying anything but “yeah, I mean, I guess” or “well, technically, sure”?

For me, I find it a little difficult to gather others aside from perhaps the singles from the recent collaboration between Liam Gallagher and John Squire, not least because of the former’s seeming need to aesthetically and musically embody the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll itself. (Vampire Weekend released some wonderful singles this year, but is that music “rock ‘n’ roll” music?) What I am trying to say is that I find The Lemon Twigs miraculously capable of this embodiment, sans the “need” for it.

I think one more band should be mentioned, too, for two reasons: first, if they had put out a single this year, it would certainly satisfy all three criteria. Second, comparing them to The Lemon Twigs might get us a little closer to a worthwhile appraisal of the latter. That band is Greta Van Fleet. I won’t go through the ordeal of asking the “are Greta Van Fleet good” question here, as that’s been done plenty of times already. They are good! I liked them a lot when they first arrived, and I’ll attach an anecdote to back it up: when From The Fires had just come out, I was about fifteen. Being the kind of kid to always commandeer the car DJ position when my parents were driving, I eventually slipped tunes like “Safari Song” or “Flower Power” into rotation without comment, and delighted at the moment my mom or dad went, “Who is this? They sound just like Led Zeppelin.” I’d reply, “you have no idea,” and would cue up something like “Highway Tune”. A one-two generation-bridging punch. When their LP Anthem of the Peaceful Army arrived, I told my dad. Unprompted, he drove us to Barnes and Noble to get a copy on vinyl; we came home, stuck it on the record player and listened to the whole thing. If Bruce Springsteen wrote a song with that much father-son bonding, you’d say he was overdoing it, but I have a feeling that Greta Van Fleet’s music produced that sort of experience for tons of people, which is unique and special.

The problem, though, is that by the time they released another record, I was voting and about to go to college!! There’s a glaring difference for those looking to compare GVF to Zeppelin: the latter put out 8 studio albums in 10 years, while the former released their fourth LP since 2017 last year. Even though there was a huge demographic of people young and old eager to identify with GVF’s style and music, they simply do not make new music often enough to sustain fandom far past their moment. It became sort of awkward for GVF to be your whole life in the three-year interim between Anthem and their next record, The Battle at Garden’s Gate. While the Twigs are not more prolific mathematically speaking, their recent critical fortune is likely a result of their releasing a very well-received album last year, Everything Harmony, and satiating hunger for more music this year with the similarly-praised A Dream Is All We Know.

So why are the Twigs capable of this rapid sort of release schedule right now? Who are they, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard? It might be because, as the D’Addario brothers Brian and Michael at the heart of the band have said, they don’t write songs for specific albums and, in the old-fashioned method, simply group into records songs they’ve recorded that they find to be of a piece. That is certainly true of Everything Harmony, with its songs connected not as much by subject matter as by their mostly being ballads. A Dream Is All We Know seems to be the more upbeat counterpart in this respect.

I think, though, that the reason for the Lemon Twigs’ recent proliferation of music is simpler: they are simply a good, efficient songwriting pair. Compared to GVF, The Lemon Twigs seem much more accustomed to the tools of the retro genres they pull from; lyrics, song structure, melody-writing, etc. Where GVF songs and records feel like rock statements, with huge vocal or guitar moments and monolithic album art, the Twigs seem content to simply exhale multitudes of tight pop-rock tracks with ease.

So, is there anything bad about The Lemon Twigs? Come on, Bosco, there must be something. Well, sure. I suppose one of the worst things you could call this group is harmless. They did not arrive with a manifesto, or to make something else seem stodgy and mark it for cultural destruction. They are not a “dangerous” band, and for some, that might be enough to completely write them off. Whenever the decree was passed down that rock ‘n’ roll bands must get their infusion of punk ethics in order to be deemed credible, the D’Addario brothers seem not to have been present. Where a group like The Chats are angry, the Twigs are fun (not that The Chats aren’t fun, but). In a cultural landscape where signaling punk ethics often involves being nihilistic enough to throw a brick through the window of a police precinct but not enough to say something mean about Charli xcx on Twitter, you can’t blame The Lemon Twigs. It’s a thin line that, frankly, no band should feel obligated to walk. Refreshingly, this one does not.

Still, it persists that what the group “does” is not groundbreaking, sonically; this matters since historically, what other than the sound of new music is described as its most revolutionary quality? Hard rock sounded rude, funk energetic and sensual, punk vicious, etc. The Lemon Twigs do not sound like anything we haven’t heard before, and this makes them sort of niche; one can’t say how far their fanbase reaches beyond those nerdy about music and those old enough to have enjoyed the type of music emulated by the Twigs when it was new. I grant that this might deduct from the band’s coolness to some, but I’d suggest that they are after something else entirely. A Dream Is All We Know, in my opinion, exhibits a band’s success at prioritizing songs themselves over sound.

It’s been said many times that a drummer like Ringo Starr “serves the song” he plays on. The sonics and genres engaged in by The Lemon Twigs are utilized to serve the tunes and structures concocted by the D’Addario brothers. Who could deny melodies like those spun on album highlight “Church Bells”? To express them most beautifully, the band correctly opted not to perform the song in a “modern” genre like, oh, I don’t know, lo-fi indie folk. A move like that, predicated on a need to sound exciting and new, might have ruined the track. Instead, the song is given a palette harkening directly back to the mid-60’s Pye Records recordings of the Kinks, where the acoustic guitars sound so tinny that their pitch is almost completely indiscernible, sounding in the end more like bustling percussive instruments. Listen to “A Well Respected Man” (or “Autumn Almanac”, for those stabs of orchestration) back to back with this song and tell me I’m wrong! That “Church Bells”’ songwriting has been likened to that of Ray Davies and John Lennon during this period is no coincidence.

“My Golden Years” is slightly harder to explain, though I’d like to declare it a classic of modern pop-rock right off the bat. Part of the reason for this is its wonderful construction; with no guitar solo, no chorus, an extended outro, and two distinct bridges, it might seem like a puzzling suggestion for a single, but it perfectly executes what a pop-rock single should: making three-and-a-half minutes feel like three seconds. From its first moments, “My Golden Years” shimmers confidently; one imagines that this is what the Beach Boys wish they had been recording in the late 60s. The first of those aforementioned bridges makes this pretty clear, sending vocal lines upward in a brief moment reminiscent of the “boys and girls” segment of the Beach Boys opus “Heroes and Villains” before melodically carving back into a heavenly verse with the connective skill of “Good Vibrations”. It’s pretty great. This, all before the song closes with its best moment, a solid minute of soaring vocal harmony and almighty JANGLE! What more could you want!? It’s the full “rock ‘n’ roll single” package; the best of its ilk released this year.

Beach Boys comparisons also bring us to a lesser moment on the record: the song “In The Eyes Of The Girl”. If the other songs in the group’s catalog succeed by emphasizing new songs as opposed to new sounds, this track emphasizes neither, in my opinion. Its sonic and stylistic similarities to a song like “The Warmth Of The Sun” have been remarked on already; this is completely fine. That the verse melody of the former begins almost identically to that of the latter, though, is another story, as is its lyrical content which seems derived exclusively from a part of the Pet Sounds cut “That’s Not Me”. What, then, does The Lemon Twigs’ cut offer us that we have not heard before, aside from its beautifully clean production and the brothers’ unique vocals? Not much of its song, or its sound. If the Beach Boys never recorded “Surfer Girl”, a song stylistically similar to “The Warmth of the Sun” but with a completely different tune, and The Lemon Twigs did, then it would still be a triumph. In my estimation, their take on this style does not melodically, lyrically, or structurally deviate enough from the songs in the style’s origin to justify itself.

I am not sure how to end this article (thank you for reading it thus far!). Let me say this: I find that this record is quickly becoming very special to me. In the footsteps of their bridge-and-tunnel peers Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, the Twigs revel in the music of their fathers. Though this statement sounds stiff, “revel” is the best word for it; the group seems in tune with the best aspects of this music and able to enjoy executing it expertly themselves. To me, this is very high praise - in my own songwriting, I try for a fraction of this - it propels the efforts of the D’Addario brothers far beyond the realm of novelty and into the conversation of brilliance. There is no band active now on whose next creation I wait more excitedly than theirs.