Petey

Is anyone waiting for the sun

To open up and meet someone?

I wonder who it is
— "Ask Someone Else"

Rising from TikTok cult status to nearly a million followers, Peter Martin — aka Petey USA — reaches his fourth Lp with numbers that are anything but niche: around half a million monthly Spotify listeners and a previous album released via Capitol. “The Yips” offers a clear snapshot of where he stands right now, suspended between the indie circuit and mainstream visibility. It’s a record that can reach a wide audience without feeling engineered for it, built on a pop-rock language that’s direct, instinctive, often slightly crooked — a recognisable identity that holds together immediacy and emotional friction.

Small-town America between Springsteen and lo-fi: emo and synths turn daily defeats into generational anthems

Its emotional geography is small-town America, and that shared idea of heartland rock that — thanks largely to Bruce Springsteen — has come to define it in the collective imagination. But what pulses through “The Yips” is a firmly contemporary America, threaded with synths, drum machines and a jittery, home-recorded strain of power-pop that’s rough around the edges. Dig a little deeper and the backbone is classic folk-rock songwriting in the Dylan lineage, reframed through an emo/alternative sensibility that shifts the focus away from social epic toward something more inward-looking: ordinary lives, minor misfortunes, everyday defeats, stubborn desires that don’t implode but instead burst outward in choruses meant to be shouted rather than sung. There’s a paradoxical closeness, emotionally, to Italy’s Giancane: less cutting, less punk, but animated by the same urge to turn inadequacy into a collective release, free of myth-making or self-pity.

The visual language plays into this positioning as well. The album cover clearly echoes Car Seat Headrest’s “The Scholars”: different subject, but a strikingly similar palette and layout. Scaled down to streaming-app icon size, the two images are almost indistinguishable. It works less as a direct quotation than as a generational marker, placing Petey squarely within a certain strand of recent American indie — emotionally open, genuine, unpolished, yet broadly accessible.

Finding a ragged kind of catharsis through quiet, held-back ballads and bursts of gritty theatricality

It’s in the songs themselves, though, that “The Yips” really sharpens its balance between momentum and fragility. “Ask Someone Else” turns a sequenced synth motif — faintly reminiscent of “Baba O’Riley” — into an epic, melancholy charge, where slightly ramshackle grandeur collides with full-blown emo catharsis, detonating in the chorus: “I don’t need intellect, I feel it in my heart / I think this neighborhood is tearing me apart”. Elsewhere, “As Two People Drift Apart” leans on big-music drum patterns, while “I’ll Believe You” opts for restraint: a short ballad with no real chorus, a deliberately flat verse and a slow instrumental build that ratchets up the emotional pressure step by step.

Theatrical impulse and clumsy spleen go hand in hand in the album’s most tightly wound moments. “The Milkman” is one of its most exposed tracks: the verse drives forward with the relentless momentum of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, before breaking into a thunderously Springsteen-coded chorus. The line “This is what it feels like to not feel anything” acts as a hinge — a slap that triggers the eruption. More elusive and shape-shifting, “Spirit Animal” is lit by a floating, effects-heavy pseudo-riff that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Brian Eno rock production, gradually pushing toward a harsher, angrier intensity. “God Is in the Gray”, finally, channels the Replacements in the way it turns messy vulnerability into something built for chanting along.

Overall, “The Yips” lands on personality and grit more than on immaculate craft. The writing isn’t always as sharp, and when the emotional drive dips, cracks start to show in both melodies and structures. But it’s precisely that stubborn, slightly unruly push that holds the record together — and keeps it convincing even when it doesn’t quite land the knockout.

(English version created with AI-assisted translation)

01/01/2026