B-Side Guys

Krooked Kings calls themselves “a love child of Mac DeMarco and Julian Casablancas,” and “My Friend Max” delivers exactly that: laid-back indie-pop with enough bite to keep things interesting. The Salt Lake City five-piece recorded In Another Life (out March 27 via SoundOn) in Los Angeles with producer Yves Rothman, mixed by Lawrence Rothman, and mastered by Emily Lazar, which is an impressive lineup for a band that started in Oli Martin’s college basement in 2018. Keyboardist Davey Macey admits “My Friend Max” was “one of the more difficult songs to finish,” noting it’s “a bit more mellow and cheery sounding than our usual stuff. Still that didn’t stop us from writing some bummer lyrics, I guess we just can’t help it.”

That inability to help themselves is the song’s strongest quality. The warm melodic guitar riffs and steady drums create exactly the kind of chill indie-pop atmosphere you’d expect from a band calling themselves “indie beach-rock” despite being landlocked in Utah. But Martin’s vocals deliver lines like “I don’t see what you see in me / I’m not who I was meant to be” with the casual despair of someone who’s made peace with self-disappointment. “Crack a smile with a fake laugh, looking for myself in Flagstaff” captures the geographic restlessness of knowing you won’t find what you’re searching for but driving there anyway.

The bridge offers a brief reprieve, “when I get alone, watch how I fly / Every morning strikes like a knife / It can be fun just for a while”—before collapsing back into “I’ll never escape, I’m always the same / I never will change.” The final twist comes in the last line: “I know who I was meant to be,” where “know” replaces the earlier “not,” suggesting either acceptance or resignation. Following singles “Rancher’s Daughter” and “Parking Lot,” “My Friend Max” confirms Krooked Kings’ emotional palette runs deeper than their beach-rock categorization suggests, even if they can’t quite shake the sunny instrumentation while documenting Max and all those unpaid debts.