B-Side Guys

The band name is an inside joke that reads as a typo, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how Seattle’s Corespondents have navigated two decades of making instrumental music that serious people keep underestimating. “Queen Nut” is the lead single from their tenth album, Exploding House, and it arrives with the particular confidence of a band that stopped caring about industry gatekeepers a long time ago and has been the better for it.

Without lyrics to anchor it, the track does what the best instrumental rock does: it makes the arrangement carry emotional weight that words would only diminish. The classic surf-rock reverb is in there, the twang and the forward momentum, but Corespondents aren’t content to leave it at pastiche. Post-rock’s patient architecture sits underneath the surface energy, and a distinct Pacific Northwest heaviness gives the whole thing a gravitational pull that pure surf homage never achieves. The reference points span Ennio Morricone, Fripp and Eno, and Man or Astro-man?, which is either wildly inconsistent or a precise description of how many directions the band can pull at once without losing the thread.

Recorded for an album described as their most compact and cohesive yet, “Queen Nut” earns that framing. It doesn’t sprawl. It makes its moves efficiently and gets out, which, after ten albums, feels less like restraint than mastery.

That combination of humor and craft is what taste-makers have been misreading for 23 years, treating the jokes as evidence that the music shouldn’t be taken seriously, when the music has always been the joke’s punchline. Ten albums in, Corespondents are still making the case on their own terms.