It was a busy Wednesday night at Salty’s Beach Bar in beautiful Belmar, New Jersey, with all three bar rooms hosting separate events. We had league billiards matches in the main bar, drag queen bingo in the bar to the left, and Ogbert The Nerd’s album release party to the right, where they’d be playing their sophomore album What You Want in full for the first and (allegedly) only time. I was emblazoned with a green wristband that read “SHORE STYLE STOMP OUT” to let the staff know who I was here for and truly felt at home. I walked into a giddily nervous Madison James who was telling a friend about how their cousin might come. Apparently the last time someone in their family came to see Madison play live back when they were in a pop punk cover band their lead singer literally shit their pants which derailed the show quite a bit, so they were praying nobody in Ogbert pulled a repeat performance tonight. That didn’t seem to be the only source of Madison’s anxiety either, but luckily they were momentarily distracted when someone asked “Madison, what is the deal with the whole Taylor Swift thing by the way?”
Ogbert the Nerd dropped their first record I Don’t Hate You at the tail end of 2020 and never had a chance to do a proper album release show as a result. While their shouty Snowing-inspired brand of emo music garnered them fans across the globe and positioned themselves among the landmark bands of Fifth Wave Emo, that didn’t guarantee longevity. Pretty much every band who inspired Ogbert’s raw, catchy, and abrasive brand of emo broke up in relative obscurity in the middle of touring their first album, and for a long time Ogbert was worried they might face the same fate. Their debut album, I Don’t Hate You, became a nearly instant underground classic in the genre, where Madison sang with a Springsteen-ian longing to just get out of their hellhole town and make a life for themselves on their own terms. The record picked up steam, thanks in no small part to the band’s amazing live shows and their relentless internet presence, but while the group was finally getting some of the acclaim they’d hoped for, they quickly realized not much about their lives had changed. They still had to go to work, and pay their fucking bills, and have people they love disappoint them over and over. If anything the local notoriety only added to the stress of it all.
What You Want, the band’s sophomore record, deals with the group’s realization that their New Jersey is less akin to the one Spingsteen sings about and is closer to the Clerks extended universe. It was written in the wake of Madison’s grandmother dying, which caused a rift in their family that took some time to heal. As that was going on, they were equally caught off guard by the imposter syndrome that the band’s success had inflicted. What did the sold out shows and Spotify streams mean if they still felt like shithead losers half the time?
This new record sees the band trying to establish a sense of self and do right by the people who mean something to them in the face of those same people trying to sabotage their self-worth. It comes off a little less frustrated than the first record and more accepting. The phrase “What you want” appears in a myriad of contexts throughout the album, from asking at the beginning “Is this what you want? Is that what you want?” to “Twelve Dollar Snickers” admittance that “The hardest thing I ever said out loud is that I can’t give you what you wanted.” Where much of I Don’t Hate You was about forgiveness and desperately trying to move on, the titular refrain of What You Want shows Madison has realized that the cycle of forgiving and needing to be forgiven is endless.
This sophomore effort shows both an emotional and sonic maturity for the band. While their initial 2019 EP caught attention with its scrappy lo-fi sound, this record sounds like a million goddamn dollars. It was recorded at both Max Rauch’s Domestic Bliss Recordings and guitarist Ross Lane’s Dad’s studio, and both came to the record with an intimate understanding of how to make Ogbert feel as gargantuan as possible while still sounding like they’re playing two inches in front of your face. Ogbert kept their sonic formula mostly intact, even including several references back to the first record like the jokey vocal take from Ross to open the album. The real difference here is that they’re just better at this shit now than they were four years ago. They’re better song writers, they are tighter performers on their respective instruments, and they know how to play off one another better. That doesn’t always simply translate into a better album, but it did here, though I’d argue at least that their development was far from simple.
While I never thought the band could match the untamed fury of IDHY‘s album opener “Get In The Robot” the new record’s lead off track “Don’t Quit, Get Fired” showed I was stupid to think they even needed to. The song starts things off with a wry passive aggressive joke with unexpectedly doubled over vocals as Madison yells, “Can you say something nice to me, fucking act like you even want to,” before flying into an equally rollicking table setter of a track. While less punchy and angry than “Robot” it is every bit as catchy, and hints at the shift in Ogbert’s perspective on the new record.
I told every member of the band that “Bike Cops” was the best thing they’d ever made months before they put it out, as the record became a staple of their live set as early as Summer 2022. I was honored to premier the record on GSC back in June of 2023 and the bass boosted version that made the record is even better. “Bike Cops” might be the catchiest song on the record and the catchiest song in their discography, sent over the top with its monumental horn section. It’s just an undeniable track, tailor made to get a mosh pit shaking.
For me there were two truly particularly revelatory tracks on this record. The first is “Just Like Always” a song I almost thought was too slow at first before realizing what the band was trying to do. It feels the most akin to Madison’s power pop side project No Good With Secrets, playing like an indie rock barnburner in emo clothing. While Madison holds down the lead vocal here the whole band gets involved in the backing vocals, creating almost an emo version of a doo-woppy style refrain. Slowing things down really makes the band soak in the emotions of it all to boot, leading to a cathartic close even without all of the first album’s anger. There is a resignedness to the song born less out of frustration than of a calm sense of zen; When Madison sings “I’ll be fine, just turn off the lights, I swear I’m gonna make it this time” you almost actually believe they mean it.
It was about the “Just Like Always” time in the album order that things really started to get emotional in Belmar. Madison had been sitting on lyrics that found their way into this track for over six years, and the weight of all the sweaty evenings writing and playing songs that all led to this album release show was finally getting to them. Renzo stood up from his drum set and he and Ross got the crowd going with a tomahawk chop timed to the Just Liiiike Always’ as bassist Shawn helped Madison with the vocals. Right then I realized that while I’d seen the band play at least a dozen times there was something special in the salty sea air tonight.
A teary eyed Madison then addressed the crowd, talking about how it was one of the best nights of their life and how their bandmates and the group in that room could not have meant more to them. How nobody in the band ever expected anything to come of this and how the new record was only possible because of the love and encouragement of all the bands they played with, and everyone who’d ever streamed, shared, or danced to one of their songs. They shouted out their cousin who did indeed come, who was among the only family members who stayed by Madison’s side not just with music but throughout all his tribulations with his grandmother’s passing. He acknowledged how hard it was to bear his soul for the band night in and night out as a person with at times intense mental health issues, but that there was no place they’d rather be tonight and nothing they’d rather be doing. I was tearing up myself, desperately trying to avoid the sniffles, and I don’t think I was the only one. Madison finally gave a hearty thanks to The Great State of New Jersey, the only shithole they’d ever want to call home, before realizing the band still had close to half the album still to play.
The second revelatory track for me was “Raspberries”, a song I could not be hyperbolic enough about. Madison knows how to make a line stick and this track is like fucking poetry man. Just about every line on the song could be up for the best line on the record, Madison can write so simply and colloquially while still getting such depth of emotion across. Ogbert doubles down on the tracks soaring refrain to close the track sounding colossal yet intimate, like they could make MetLife Stadium feel like a New Brunswick basement. It’s a perfect track in my eyes, there isn’t a thing I’d change about it and I can’t wait to listen to it for the rest of my life.
After Ogbert was done playing What You Want in full the group went back to a couple of I Don’t Hate You’s classics for the encore. Madison spent the majority of the encore crowd surfing as the mosh pit of friends underneath him fought for the microphone to try and do the songs justice. They’d grab the mic and hold on for dear life, singing along like these were the classic rock hits that they’d grown up with. It was sweaty and violent and chaotic as all hell, I was honestly worried that someone’s leg might snap in half in the madness of it all. It was also, easily, the closest heaven has felt like a place on earth for me in a long long time.
After the show I overheard some youths talking about how things went. Most were from Jersey though one attested she’d traveled over two hours to see “her favorite band” play as the group was making plans to see other shows together. I then ended up talking with the parents of Ogbert’s touring bassist Paul, who were overwhelmed at how much support the band and their son received. His father said to me “I’m not even sure I knew what was going on half the time but there was a whole lot of love in that room tonight, that show was something special,” and man was he right. Yes, Ogbert the Nerd happen to be one of the best bands of their generation who now have two scene defining records under their belt, but all that almost felt besides the point. The night was a two way expression of gratitude, with the band celebrating the community these records had created, and the community celebrating the band who made it all possible. A night of sincere appreciation at the outlet that emo music can be for both musicians and fans. A realization that you can only make things better by acknowledging your problems and dealing with them, but that you are far from alone in this fight. For fans of Ogbert the Nerd, you have a moshpit’s worth of friends ready to lend a hand every step of the way.
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