Case in point: “Never Learned,” wherein Hemsworth gets his childhood heroes Tegan and Sara to cosplay as psychotherapists fronting a pop-punk band. Meanwhile “Break,” with its grimy, compressed production and slowed down jungle beat, sounds like something that could have appeared on Liam Howlett’s Dirtchamber Sessions. “Breed” marries knuckle-dragging guitars and metalcore vocals with skittering hi-hats, producing a hybrid that’s nearly as weird as 300SkullsAndCounting’s recent work. And while “Shifting and Tuning” opens like a folk number, the guitar figure eventually collides with a stumbling rhythm at an odd angle; it feels, well, downright Hemsworthian.
A few songs on Numbskull tilt toward the beat music Hemsworth is known for, but even these are remarkably abrasive. On “One Step,” Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties screeches through a distorted mic over a trunk-rattling 808 beat. “Break,” with its fuzzy synth bass and massive drops, is maybe the closest Hemsworth has come to dubstep, and “Toy” pushes that same bass sound to a near-industrial extreme. MSPAINT, perhaps the quintessential modern-day rap-rock group, might be the ideal collaborators for this stage of Hemsworth’s career, and on “No One Else,” Hemsworth drapes MSPAINT frontperson Deedee’s rapping over buzzing guitars and a beat that sounds like something the Bomb Squad might have produced for Public Enemy.
Hemsworth’s work has always spanned genres—just look at his omnivorous DJ sets—but Numbskull positions him as a more traditional songwriter, underscored by the album’s personal, earnest tone. “Some of these songs were starting to be made while my oldest kid was on summer break and my youngest wasn’t in daycare,” Hemsworth recently wrote, “so my association with them is just being daddy daycare all day and then making this music in the middle of the night.” You can picture Hemsworth blowing off steam by working through these songs, without thinking about what might go off on the dancefloor. Admittedly, the album’s ’90s sound palette has echoes of millennial nostalgia bait—but then again, when has nostalgia not been part of Hemsworth’s appeal? Whether he was dropping Pokémon samples or decorating his productions with gameboy synths, there’s always been a yearning for youthful innocence at the core of his songwriting. Fatherhood can make you reflect back on your own childhood; Numbskull sounds like the work of someone channeling that time through the simple pleasures of loud, angsty music.
Ryan Hemsworth: Numbskull