Weird Nightmare “Hoopla”

Weird Nightmare is the new project from METZ frontman, Alex Edkins. We must admit, we’re not familiar with his previous outfit but when we read that this release has been ‘crafted with just the right amount of punk rock fuzz and crunch’ we knew we had to check it out.

The album opens up with the wonderful “Headful Of Rain” and it immediately made us think about the band Redd Kross. Like that band, on tracks like the opener and “Never In Style”, Weird Nightmare majestically manage to balance power pop melodies with the urgency and dynamics of the alternative rock sound. They are even better when they really nail the pop side on songs like “Baby Don’t” and “If You Should Turn Away”. Those tracks in particular reach the zenith that Redd Kross achieved on their album Third Eye (one of our favourite records of all time).

The band’s use of melodies and catchy hooks on songs like “Might See You There” and “Bright City Lights” had us wishing this was the kind of music The Lemonheads were still producing. They’re the kind of songs that would have been all over those ‘left of the dial stations’ back in the day. Speaking of which, The Replacement influences certainly show on “Forever Elsewhere” and “Where I Belong”. These songs remain as tuneful as the others, but there’s more of a dirty rock n roll swagger to them. Like Westerberg’s greatest songs, they sound like they’ve just been thrown together and bashed out but that’s just used to almost disguise the quality of the songwriting.

This has already been a great year for albums but we can’t see any way that this won’t be one of our favourite albums of the year. It really ticks all the boxes for the kind of music we love. There’s a sense of urgency and drive in the songs but they are all held together with an underlying focus on the tunes and the melodies. It probably falls into the gap of being too rock for power pop, but too pop to be alternative rock. That may not be good for trying to market the album, but it makes it a perfect album for us and we have a new name for our best discoveries of 2026 list!