Written by It’s been a good year for the eternally beleaguered power-pop loyalist: Paul McCartney is still packing arenas around the world, Sloan and Guided by Voices are still going strong, bands named after GBV songs are on the rise, and Cleaners From Venus’ Martin Newell is broing down with The Rock. But the national breakout of Sharp Pins—a.k.a. Chicago DIY-scene pillar Kai Slater, an artist young enough to be Macca’s great-grandson—provides the most heartening indicator that the spirit of ’65 is still alive in 2025. Once a low-key vessel for the dainty tunes that didn’t suit Slater’s noisy power trio Lifeguard, Sharp Pins were elevated to feature attraction when his self-issued 2024 album, Radio DDR, received an expanded wide release this year, followed by a coronating tour with indie elders the Hard Quartet.
While Radio DDR’s endearing lo-fi singalongs presented Slater as a valedictorian from the Robert Pollard school of industrious Midwestern home-recording auteurs singing in faux British accents, the album shirked the rough-sketch aesthetics and subversive strategies of old-school GBV records—these were fully flowered songs nurtured in a terrarium of tape hiss. And yet Radio DDR was more than just a hit-after-hit procession of gleaming guitars and melt-in-your-mouth melodies—it was a portrait of a young man with limited means summoning all the romance and possibility that once sparked a youthquake 60 years ago. When you’re part of a generation whose adolescence was stolen by the pandemic and who seems consigned to a lifetime of debt and doomscrolling, singing silly love songs starts to feel like an act of defiance.
But just as the world at large was tuning in to Radio DDR (not to mention Lifeguard’s own righteously rambunctious 2025 release, Ripped & Torn), Slater was already prepping Balloon Balloon Balloon, which maintains the same staggering hooks-per-second ratio as its predecessor, while allowing greater space for his more outré ideas to flourish. If Radio DDR had the consistent flow of a greatest-hits collection that could work just as well on shuffle, Balloon Balloon Balloon is more deliberate in design. Its 18 proper songs are evenly subdivided into three acts, each capped by a brief burst of sound-collage chaos that functions as the opposite of a palate cleanser, like a teaspoon of mud to chase generous servings of honey.
Such avant intrusions feel on-brand for a guy who also handcrafts a zine named after a Neu! song, and there are moments on Balloon Balloon Balloon when Slater blurs the line between Radio DDR’s sterling songcraft and the tape-manipulation mischief of Sharp Pins’ 2023 debut, Turtle Rock. While it shimmies and shimmers in familiar Sharp Pins fashion, “I Could Find Out” reveals itself to be three different songs stacked atop one another, with Slater exposing new layers as if he were peeling off the labels on an old overused cassette. There’s also a cruder, more corrosive quality to the recordings that belie Slater’s budding reputation as a pure pop classicist: the slack-rock strummer “I Don’t Adore-Youo” is gradually overtaken by a nasty fuzz-caked guitar solo and dubbed-out effects that turn each drum beat into a meteor strike. But Balloon Balloon Balloon’s exploratory impulses are counterbalanced by direct hits like the jabbing “I Don’t Have the Heart” and the Jam-like “Takes So Long,” which crack open the portal that connects British Invasion pop to class-of-’77 punk.
Even as its canvas stretches wide enough to accommodate the aggressive and experimental extremities of the Sharp Pins sound, Balloon Balloon Balloon is ultimately a showcase of Slater doing what he does best: filtering Beatles-‘65 joy through Beatles-‘66 drugs to hit the sweet spot between winsome and whimsical. The opening jangly jewel “Popafangout” molds its unwieldy title into an earworming refrain, and before long, it’ll be echoing in your brain to the point where you start singing along to your own bastardized variations. But whether you opt for “Papa Van Gogh” or “pop a Faygo,” the song demonstrates the hallmark of a great pop tune: the ability to twist the absurd into the profound.
And if Slater still closely follows the Pollard playbook on starry-eyed serenades like “Queen of Globe and Mirrors,” right down to the title construction, the differences between the two have become just as pronounced as the similarities. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Balloon Balloon Balloon’s fifth track, “(I Wanna) Be Your Girl,” is an upbeat acoustic strut just like Alien Lanes’ fifth track, “As We Go Up, We Go Down,” but Slater lets us savor the sugar rush well past the 90-second mark, and in lieu of Pollard’s cryptic wordplay, we get a swooning ode to club-show courtship that plays like a gender-flipped answer to the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” In effect, Slater writes songs in the same way he makes zines: personal dispatches from his little corner of the world, rough around the edges but overflowing with passion and purpose. “Here I go/Fall in love again,” he declares on the song of the same name, and, on Balloon Balloon Balloon, that amorous initiation ritual recurs at regular two-minute intervals—for him and us.
