Song of the Day: Tacocat - I Hate The Weekend

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJ’s think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Morning Show with John Richards, is “I Hate The Weekend” by Tacocat from their upcoming album, Lost Time, due April 1st on Hardly Art.

Tacocat - I Hate The Weekend (MP3)

The traditional notion of "Friday" means something wildly different to service workers than it does to the rest of the gainfully employed world. What most people see is a beacon of freedom, the light at the end of the week's tunnel, the moment when energy EKGs back into your bones and you see the night waiting like a glistening piece of fresh fruit, ripe for the taking. Service workers see the opposite: a tsunami of freshly unchained white collar bozos about to descend on their bar/restaurant and chug appletinis until they need to be dragged home.

Enter Tacocat - surf pop cultural commentators. Musically, the Hardly Art signees sit right in the cozy, warm, familiar generic boundaries of their surf pop peers: the distorted thrashings of tried-and-true major progressions, rolling thunder toms amid the constant light rain of hi-hats and cymbals, and grounded, meat and potatoes bass. But whereas the lyrical content of your average surf pop track will be teenage love that makes 22 year olds feel like 40 year olds who are nostalgic for being 22, Tacocat is instead known for their sarcastic social commentary, biting and oft feminist critiques of the day to day world that serve as a revitalizing juice to get you through the day. They've tackled the banal evils of bus routes, catcalling men, and with their newest release, they get to roast the aforementioned white collar bozos.

"I Hate the Weekend" is the single off of their upcoming Lost Time album which will be dropped by SubPop imprint Hardly Art on April 1st. Lamenting the "homogenized and oh so bleak" working stiffs that crawl out of their cubicles with a "two day fun permit," "I Hate the Weekend" is short and to the point, one long headbang that ends as abruptly as it starts. If this single is representative of the upcoming album as a whole, the followup to 2014's NVM should be true to the Tacocat form: a summer night yard party with a tallboy in hand album, unpolished fun and eminently repeatable, the musical equivalent of your favorite tattered jeans.

Check out the release party of Lost Time on March 31st at Capitol Hill's Chop Suey, which will be notably cheaper than checking them out when they return for Sasquatch!