Upchuck’s Atlanta isn’t the glossy one you see in trap videos — it’s the city that smells of gasoline and fuzz, where music still feels like survival. I’m Nice Now, the third album from Kaila “KT” Thompson and her crew, produced by Ty Segall and mastered by Heba Kadry, hits like a punch to the face that wants to be a caress — or maybe just a cry of exhaustion that refuses to fall silent.
After two albums of compressed fury, Upchuck find a new kind of clarity here: the anger is still there, but it’s sharper, more focused. Tired opens the record like a political shout — “I’m tired of darker news” — while the guitars spit shards in pure Stooges fashion and the rhythm section pounds with near-military precision. Plastic gets murkier, with drummer Chris Salado joining KT on vocals in Spanish — a cultural reclamation, a crack of sunlight through American punk’s usual noise.
There’s a grunge soul pulsing through Kept Inside and Forgotten Token, where personal pain (KT’s loss of her sister) turns into collective language. New Case and Slow Down open the melodic window wider — hints of Pixies and Nirvana— but the band never stops snarling. Then Fried drags you back into the garage’s belly: distorted synths, collapsing drums, chaos as a form of healing.
Segall keeps everything raw and live-sounding, a mix that thrives on imperfection. At times it feels too restrained but it never loses its pulse. The KT/Salado vocal switch gives the album real character. If Homenaje and Un Momento speak from a Latin urgency, Lost One and Nowhere close things out like the end of a live set teetering on the edge of a blackout.
Upchuck are now a band aware of their power but still restless in their bones. I’m Nice Now doesn’t reinvent punk — it simply refuses to die quietly. A record that shouts without apology, and in its noise, finds its dignity.
It stumbles, it screams, it breathes — and that’s enough.