Thrashing, glimmering and an overarching theme of cool are just three ways to describe this new release from Canadian band Real Sickies. Dubbed as Billie Joe Armstong’s favourite Canadian bands, Under a Paper Bag crawls into the album with ominous digging and interesting ambience such as chanting which fades you into the first song which is the title track. The song itself is upbeat, and the guitar work is brilliant I was amazed by how the sound is not muddy at all.

Booming drums that hit your right in the soul open the second song. Real Sickies are said to be inspired by early Green Day and The Ramones, and you can definitely see this in their melodic vocal parts and their chanting choruses. This song, like many others on the album’ throw you through many instrumental parts which honestly is cool and interesting the first time but once it happens every other song and takes up a majority of the space it gets quite repetitive but it’s an interesting way to display each of the band members strengths in their instruments.

Keeping to punk fashion and spirit, the songs so far on the album are all under 3 minutes except ‘Summer’ and ‘Paulie’. If I were to declare a favourite on the album it would be ‘Summer.’ This song saved the album as towards this point the musicality in each song was just one loud ball of noise. I would just like to say that I know punk music is supposed to be loud, three chord thrashing songs but at least make the songs easy to tell apart.

Back to ‘Summer.’ Overall, it is a really solid song. It has a completely different vibe from the rest of the songs on this album. The guitars drifty, the melodies breezy. Then it throws you onto an unnecessary train. Literally. If I had a pound for every piece of unnecessary added ambience on this album I would be nearing five pounds. Then if the train out of nowhere was not insane enough the song throws you again into an encore of just thrashing and bashing. What a way to ruin one of the best songs on the album.

‘Triage’ is a song which feels like I will age at least 14 years just by listening to it. It goes on for ages. However, it is better than listening to the lead singer’s graining vocals which I have aligned them to be on the same level as 90s Damon Albarn in terms of whingy in some places but at least it works with the music and keeps it authentic.

Lyrically, I could only pick up and understand one line in this entire album and that was “Someone’s going to get their head kicked in tonight.” What a lovely sentiment.

I have never been gladder to reach the end of the album I fear I was genuinely going a bit insane. I cannot imagine what their gigs are like if this is the racket coming from the album. What I admire as a really nice touch in this song is the addition of different news segments in the background of ‘Lost by a Landslide.’ I wish I could make out what each one was for added context of the song as this is such a good album closer. And would you guess it we are back to the digging! I love a good full circle album, and it actually made sense for once! To conclude when the lyric ‘Future pays the price’ shoved its way into my ear I like to think it was an homage to past me going into this album naïvely not ready to hear what feels like the entire library of BBC sound effects added into a fourteen-track album. Future me did in fact pay the price.

Real Sickies: Under a Paper Bag – 14 March 2025 (Stomp Records)

Sickies – Should Have Seen It Coming (Offical Video)