The arrival of Puck’s debut single, “Caricature,” feels less like a release and more like a jailbreak. From the opening crackle, this is a song that’s been chewing on its own chains for some time. Galway’s five-piece racket-makers have bottled a very specific kind of frenetic energy, the kind you get from too much coffee and staring at a flickering screen until society starts to look like a poorly drawn cartoon. The dual vocal attack from Rua Grassi and Narz Hession is an immediate standout, creating a call-and-response between a rattled inner psyche and a defiant outer snarl.
There’s a grubby, exhilarating texture here, born of its self-recorded origins. You can almost feel the damp Galway air clinging to Hubert Rudy’s scuzzy guitar lines and Nora Staunton’s tightly wound drumming. The song’s chant about “creatures imposing… papers on the throne” brought on a strange, fleeting memory of a college history textbook—some bleak Francisco Goya print of contorted officials signing away people’s lives with a flourish of a quill. That’s what this sounds like: the furious scribbling of a pen scratching through the parchment of power.
As Daniel Marron’s bass rumbles underneath, the track documents a frantic clambering out of a mental cage. It starts with the wobbling vulnerability of being a “big boy” and ends in a glorious, anarchic sprint into the dark. It doesn’t offer easy answers or polished resolutions; it offers the frantic catharsis of finally bolting.
Puck leaves you with the wind in your ears and the sound of sirens fading behind you. What do you do with freedom once you’ve violently taken it back?
