Fake Fruit Mucho Mistrust LP (Cuties Orange Vinyl)

TAS Rated 5/5 Music, 5/5 Sonics in the February 2025 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Fake Fruit's visceral indie rock operates so firmly in the present that it's transportive and unmooring. The Oakland trio's songs careen with volatile energy and lead singer Hannah "Ham" D'Amato's lyrics are enveloped with acerbic humor and resonant perceptiveness. Though their 2024 LP Mucho Mistrust is a sly reference to a beloved Blondie lyric, the title encapsulates the anxieties of daily life, a bloodless music industry, and global capitalism as well as the clear-eyed skepticism needed to rebel against it.

Following the 2021 release of Fake Fruit's self-titled debut LP, the band's personal lives hit a turbulent and transformational period. "There were big life changes and I was so close to boiling over," says D'Amato. "I left a bad relationship, entered a more stable and loving one, got diagnosed with alopecia, and I'm turning 30 soon too." This personal upheaval was channeled into the explosive lead single "Mucho Mistrust." The track is simultaneously disorienting and direct, with clanging guitars from Alex Post, off-kilter drums from Miles MacDiarmid, and D'Amato snarling, "How you gonna blame me / when you could've done something about it / it's not right / How you gonna marinate me / in shitty things overnight." She explains, "This song was a snapshot of how I got through a difficult year."

The video, directed and edited by Jimmy Whispers, is a tongue-in-cheek parody of televangelism, featuring MacDiarmid as a TV pastor in devil makeup and D'Amato as a guardian Angel to an older woman (played by her own grandmother).

Becoming swept away by Mucho Mistrust, the second studio album by the Bay Area post-punks Fake Fruit, was my most delightfully musical surprise of this calendar year. Mucho Mistrust is so densely packed with unmatched levels of energy, intrigue, and idiosyncrasy that every listen uncovers new nuggets of riffs and lyrics, skids and detours, to admire. With each play of Mucho Mistrust, I find myself increasingly sucked into Fake Fruit's warped and fitful post-punk frenzy, and now I'm completely absorbed in their world until another Fake Fruit record can set me free.