The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
I’ll admit, I was drawn to check out the music of Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly because they’re named after one of the best animes ever. The show is a coming-of-age tale starring a brooding young boy dealing with abandonment issues and space aliens who wield musical instruments as weapons and want to use his head as a teleporting device. It’s an intriguing twist even on paper, and Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly — a Cleveland-based three-piece operating on the fringes of emo — are similarly uninterested in replicating old methods of expression.
drought, the band’s first collection of new music since 2020, is a welcome return for GFFFC’s captivating approach to melody and aggression. Closing track “Wooden Cross” encapsulates it in the first 30 seconds with a barrage of hardcore guitars and guttural screams, broken up by fluttering math-rock guitar that seems to be bringing the song out of a panic attack. This dynamic continues throughout the song: It builds with the invigorating free-for-all of a hill bomb before some element of lightness shows up and breaks through the all-consuming smell of napalm. It speaks to the strength of Guitar Fight’s intoxicating sound that the ostensible cliches of the song’s title and its bellowing in the song – “It’s a wooden cross to bear” – never even come close to the brink of triteness.