Jake McKelvie & the Countertops have spun up their third LP nearly ten years into the band’s existence.

This effort highlights two of what could be considered the trademark elements of the group: “what is he actually talking about?” storytelling and simple-but-clever arrangements. On the first long-player from the group that wasn’t recorded in a single day, there are a couple more layers here than are found on previous records without compromising on the concept of three people in a room playing songs.

You could say there’s a maturity in the songs relative to their last long player. You could also say, “well, that last one was recorded five years earlier, after all”. Suffice to say, it’s a batch of 10 songs that were written in the intervening years between the previous batch of 10 songs and hundreds of shows around New England and across the country.

Within, you will find torch songs, songs about snacks, computers, local card game tournaments resulting in divorce, dry cleaning henchmen, plagiaristic pop stars and, of course, the wifi passwords at participating Denny’s locations. It’s a breezy 40 min; fits snugly on a 12" record and spaciously on a compact disc. Delete some photos to free up some hard drive space and you can probably get it to fit on your phone.

Originally self-released digitally in 2020, physically in 2021.

Limited to 500 copies.