Snooper temper their energy on Worldwide

Snooper's songs run at a blistering pace, with angular riffs sneaking in one ear and out the other, propelled by frenzied percussion. The Nashville five-piece – completed by bassist Happy Haugen, drummer Brad Barteau, and guitarist Conner Sullivan – squeeze in as many ideas as possible in tunes shy of two minutes, this off-the-cuff musicianship making their 22-minute 2023 debut album, Super Snõõper, feel twice as long and substantial. The wild silliness of abandoning a groove for a totally different one halfway into a barely minute-long song, just for the sake of it, is what makes them addictive.

On Worldwide, Snooper have smoothed out their rough edges. Make no mistake, the songs are bouncy and belligerent as everything else they’ve already done (the guitars on “Hologram” and “Blockhead” chug at record speeds for their discography), but the extra embellishments detract from egg punk’s freewheeling spirit. It’s the things like working with a producer (a first for them), introducing electronics, and labouring over rhythms that’ve led to tighter arrangements, different to how Worldwide would go down in person: loose, uncontrolled, and relentless.

Despite the polish, Snooper’s sonic barrages still beam with energy. “Opt Out” and “On Line” are like an angrier Suburban Lawns (apt, given Snooper covered “Unable” on their debut), with Tramel’s hypnotic yelps landing like electric shocks. A teetering synth awakens “Hologram”, which jolts into raucous chords that crash into a disorderly solo. “Star 6 9” features pulsating, mutated electronics that are dizzying, but fall short of the wowing, volatile guitars they do best. Elsewhere, their revved-up take on The Beatles’ classic “Come Together” is equally endearing and skilful – humorous to hear its funky notes coming in so quickly, but the stop-start melodies display Snooper’s clever commanding of your unwavering attention.

More time is spent in the lyrical department on Worldwide. Tramel’s words are no longer shouty, filler fragments to compound the uncalculated chaos. Instead, they’re cohesive reflections of her experiences. On the dance-punk title track, Tramel touches on the pressure of Snooper being bigger than ever, perhaps insinuating the unavoidable musical sacrifices made to get there: “Looser / Than before / New form / Can’t ignore.” More relatable is “Guard Dog”, a zippy number on feeling suffocated and trapped when adhering to other people’s perceptions of you: “Shoes glued / Adhered / I don’t like it here.”

Worldwide also ends similarly to Super Snõõper with its longest track: The four-minute “Subdivision” is a steady post-punk cut with its own twists and turns (sirens you’d mistake for woodwinds, and a maximalist, doomy climax), but it isn’t as unpredictable as the bold farewell on their first album. It’s interesting that they call Worldwide their “true” debut, given Super Snõõper was actually a set of re-recorded road-tested material. Snooper’s vision of egg punk is more hygienic; the full experience is still reserved for the stage. They’ve fantastically magnified a glimpse of that for larger crowds, but in the studio, Snooper aren’t as wild as we thought they were.