Drag Talk - Drink the Ocean
There is an appealing contradiction at the centre of Drag Talk. The Los Angeles band essentially consists of musicians with roots in hardcore punk who also happen to love Oasis, and that unlikely combination provides a useful way of understanding music in which saturated guitars and considerable physical weight coexist with an obvious affection for melody.
That balance should be explored more extensively on Drink the Ocean, Drag Talk's debut full-length album, due for release on October 30, 2026 through MNRK Heavy. Moving between shoegaze, indie rock, post-punk, dream pop and the melodic legacy of 1990s britpop, the record appears designed to expand the foundations established across the band's earlier releases while avoiding the temptation to become simply another exercise in shoegaze nostalgia.
Drag Talk brings together Justin “Jutty” Taylor on vocals, Ross O'Carroll, Matt “Ripp” Bennett and Neil Popkin on guitars, and Hayden Scott on drums. The musicians share connections extending considerably further back than the band itself. O'Carroll and Bennett grew up together in Hawaii, Bennett and Popkin previously played together in War Tapes, while Taylor and Scott have also shared the stage as members of Ghost.
The origins of Drag Talk can be traced to the pandemic, when home demos recorded by Ross O'Carroll gradually developed into the foundations of a new group in 2021. Their first recorded statement arrived with “Egyptian Flesh” in 2022, followed by the Dogs EP and several singles before Rosy Crown in 2024 helped introduce the band to a wider audience. Growing live support on both American coasts subsequently led to their relationship with MNRK Music Group.
For Drink the Ocean, Drag Talk have again worked with longtime collaborator Tom Syrowski, whose wider credits include The Killers, Mastodon and Pearl Jam. Recording took place between Syrowski's Los Angeles studio and Henson Recording Studios in Hollywood, giving the band an opportunity to develop the scale of its sound without abandoning the chemistry established through its earlier recordings.
The album's musical coordinates extend across several strands of 1990s alternative rock. Swervedriver, The Verve and The Jesus and Mary Chain provide useful reference points, while shoegaze, dream pop, psychedelia and more traditional rock songwriting continually intersect. With three guitarists in the group, texture inevitably plays an important role, but Drag Talk appear less interested in building walls of sound for their own sake than in using them to increase the emotional scale of fundamentally melodic songs.
That distinction becomes particularly apparent on “Pony Up,” the first substantial glimpse of the album. The track is enveloped in fuzz and hazy guitar layers, yet beneath that density lies something surprisingly immediate. Its melodies and hooks remain clearly identifiable through the distortion, revealing a band that understands that shoegaze atmosphere and accessible songwriting do not have to work against one another.
This is also where the britpop influence becomes important. Drag Talk are not simply interested in heaviness or introspective immersion, because their songs retain a strong instinct for memorable choruses and melodic movement. References to bands such as Ride and Slowdive make sense in terms of texture, while the presence of Suede and Blur among the broader comparisons surrounding Drag Talk points towards their equally important interest in conventional songwriting.
Pony Up therefore occupies an interesting space between the American alternative-rock tradition and British guitar music. The guitars can become enormous without completely swallowing the song, while the rhythm retains enough momentum to prevent the atmospheric elements from becoming passive. The result feels heavy and dreamlike without sacrificing the immediacy of a rock single.
Beneath that accessibility, however, the song enters considerably stranger territory. Pony Up presents a deliberately human and contradictory vision of God, capable of love but also cruelty, insecurity and indifference. Spiritual and esoteric ideas intersect with irony and criticism of earthly authority, including the police, allowing the song to move between metaphysical questions and much more recognisable human frustrations.
Those themes appear likely to extend across Drink the Ocean, whose lyrics explore injustice, femininity, spirituality and esotericism, several of them connected with Taylor's own interests. The album will also include additional contributions from Brendan O'Brien, who plays Hammond organ on the title track, and Olivia Morreale, who provides backing vocals on “Welcome to the Aeon.”
The record itself contains ten songs: “Pony Up,” “Kingdoms,” “Breath and the Blood,” “Welcome to the Aeon,” “SY About It,” “Drink the Ocean,” “Mr. High Life,” “Don't Be Long,” “Would It Kill You” and “Redline.”
The circumstances surrounding its creation appear to have been considerably less comfortable than the melodic accessibility of Pony Up might initially suggest. Personal difficulties and tensions during the making of the album reportedly placed considerable strain upon the band, to the point that its continuation was temporarily uncertain. That experience gives the title Drink the Ocean additional resonance.
The phrase can suggest appetite and defiance, an invitation to experience everything without restraint, but it can equally describe an impossible task. An ocean represents abundance, freedom and possibility, yet attempting to consume one transforms that abundance into something overwhelming. The title therefore suits a record apparently created during a period when ambition, personal difficulty and the desire to continue were pulling against one another.
That tension may ultimately prove more important to Drag Talk than any individual genre description. Their music can clearly be situated within the current revival of shoegaze and 1990s alternative rock, but Pony Up suggests that the band has little interest in treating those influences as historical artefacts. Instead, shoegaze becomes one component of a broader language that also incorporates post-punk tension, psychedelic atmosphere, alternative-rock weight and britpop's instinct for hooks.
It would be premature to decide exactly how successfully those elements come together across Drink the Ocean before the album arrives on October 30. For now, Pony Up provides a convincing indication of its possibilities, revealing a band capable of making distortion feel expansive without allowing it to obscure the song underneath.
Drag Talk may have emerged from the wonderfully contradictory idea of hardcore musicians who love Oasis, but Drink the Ocean increasingly looks capable of turning that contradiction into an identity of its own. If Pony Up is representative of what awaits, this will be an album where shoegaze provides the atmosphere, alternative rock supplies the muscle and an instinctive love of melody keeps finding its way through the noise.
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