In their review of Cheem’s 2022 LP Guilty Pleasure, Pitchfork got about 70% of the way to understanding them. “Cheem aim to get louder and weirder, boosting your mood with the music that defined their childhoods…” the august taste-making site put it, registering the young band’s Pixy Stix modality. “Cheem want to detonate the concept of “guilty pleasures” by fully embracing “pleasure”. Where Pitchfork ultimately fails to get it has everything to do with Pitchfork still being Pitchfork in 2024; a site that defined itself on the back of maybe the most self-consciously posturing movement in rock history is almost uniquely unprepared to grasp the appeal of a band like Cheem, especially to a generation of fans for whom nothing is more important than speaking from your heart and nothing is more sus than a protective layer of irony. “When you lean on subgenres and stylistic choices widely regarded as cheesy, the project you started for fun quickly becomes the hand that puts the “Kick me” sign on your back,” Pitchfork scolds, unintentionally providing the best example of the difference a generation can make. With the planet boiling and fascism pushing up like zits, that “Kick me” sign is a fucking birthmark. No one’s looking.
Earlier this year, Cheem followed up Guilty Pleasure with Fast Fashion, an EP that took what they'd built on Guilty Pleasure and cranked up the metal while leaving the pop and nu dials maxed right where they were.Now Cheem are teasing a new twin single. Set to officially drop on August 20th, “WTFU” and “Faster Fashion” are a precursor to a new 6-song EP lined up for a November release.
Opening with a surging full-band build that feels like a jet engine winding up all the way to the shouted title line “Wake the fuck up!”, “WTFU” does that beautiful thing where it starts with the chorus—always a signal to the listener that the band knows it’s sitting on an absolute rocket and doesn’t need to walk you anywhere. “Goddamn you got so much hatred! God knows you don’t need no proof”, Sam Nazaretian croons at cruising altitude before the band drops down into a deep Chilis-esque funkdown, where Skye Holden’s flow takes the lead, calling out the kind of mindset that refuses to see past one’s own immediate comforts and conveniences over some deep-digging stank-face slap bass. The track is in and out in the time it takes to microwave a bag of popcorn, proving Cheem’s all-hook MO is more than enough sink a song in all the way to the hilt.
“Faster Fashion” starts right in the pocket of the kind of head-nodding groove that both Rage Against The Machine and Limp Bizkit made their names assassinating on the biggest stages in the world, and it’s so damn exciting to hear a band like Cheem able to lay something like this down in 2024 like it’s their rap rock birthright. Holden’s flow comes from way back in his chest, his confidence in staying low in his bars a fresh contrast to the ancestors. The chorus is relatively low-contrast (by Cheem standards at least), with Nazaretian showing how truly pretty a voice he has with a melody hook as light as an Air Jordan in flight, but the true star of the track has to be that Morello-like guitar groove—unless it’s bars like “You never heard of Cheem until our Pitchfork review/And now you gotta let everybody know/That you don’t approve of how all the youth are turning Chuggalo” or “Why does every artist/ that’s easy to market/ got an archaeology department in their closet?” or maybe the line of the year, “We had to switch it to get into this position now the opposition wishing they learned how to DJ”. Gonna give Pitchfork a minute to rotate that 6 and 9.
Along with bands like Omerta and the Callous Daoboys, Cheem are in a special class of nu metal’s fourth wave, where the experiment seems to be to see if songs can be built out of only hooks while preserving the wild dynamic swings that make the genre the most spring-loaded form rock has yet to crystallize. With these two new tracks and four more to come, nu metal’s spring feels tighter than ever.
Watch for them to drop on August 20th everywhere you get your music. In the meantime, check out our review of Guilty Pleasures from our Top 13 Contemporary Nu Metal Albums list.
