The relentless pursuit of down-to-earth, horns-up tunes has long been the M.O. of South Dakota via Chicago alt-rock trio, The Kickback. This lifeblood can be traced all the way back to their 2011 EP, Mea Culpa Mea Culpa, with tracks like “Hate This City,” that undeniably ooze both an effortless guitar-centric cool and trademark rock savvy; or “Sting’s Teacher Years,” which would go on to get a proper debut record facelift that would elevate it to the status of a signature single in the band’s catalog. 2015’s Sorry All Over The Place saw Billy Yost (lead vocals, guitar), Jonathan Ifergan (lead guitar), and Daniel Leu (bass) deliver a lean, polished, snarling assemblage of 10 tracks as their foundational brickwork.

After enduring a divorce and a litany of personal deaths, lead singer Yost picked up the cardiac fragments and stitched together 2017’s Weddings & Funerals from the pain – a record that showed a maturation not only lyrically, but sonically. In the years since, an LP3 was always on the menu…but not without its fair share of difficulties. Setback after setback after financial hiccup made it particularly difficult to nail down the tracklist. In the face of such adversities, Yost continued to let his creative juices flow through the outlet of sampling and beatmaking, moonlighting as the prolific Billy Ghost. The reverence for recontextualizing niche soundbytes led to a smattering of in-between Kickback singles, such as the irresistible “Kare.” I was all too excited to see how Billy’s honed skillset would translate to the latest body of work. With Hit Piece, the band’s first record in eight years, Yost et al whip up 16 delectable tracks at a respectable 45 minute runtime.

Continuing in Weddings & Funerals‘ tradition of Will-centric openers, “William Joel” operates as a lyrically-skeletal tone setter, invoking Mr. Long Island himself. “Piano Man and then six year drinking spree/Everything is alright, everything is alright/ I think I wrapped my car around your family tree/Everything is alright, everything is alright” Billy intones hauntingly alongside finger-plucked piano, just before a synth cascade rains down upon the listener. Scratchy, scathing feedback transitions seamlessly into lead single, “Very Nice Time.” Both as a standalone track and in the context of the record, it operates as a perfect return to form. The Clue-inspired music video and Billy’s ineffable swagger lend it a sense of classiness with a killer edge. Matt Walker of The Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage fame establishes a propulsive throughline on percussion. “We’d like to thank you for a very nice time, but a very nice time must end/ Penny for your thinking, but in these ripe times/ I think I might drop a friend,” Yost threatens on the hook.

The bouncy, sea-gazing instrumentation on “Lil Moby Dick” would feel right at home on Modest Mouse‘s 2004 classic, Good News for People Who Love Bad News . “How will I know when I caught him?/Will anybody know that I caught him?” chimes in the post-chorus, an open mediation on chasing the White Whales in your life, and what happens next should you attain that lofty goal. The pre-chorus “Are you ever gonna get therrre?/Are you ever gonna get therrre?” is delivered with the same cadence that appears on the aforementioned “Kare“: “I don’t control youuuu,/ I don’t control youuuu.” “Hong Kong Suits” is one of the advanced tracks I was so fortunate to hear the band perform at Jonathan Ifergan’s Brooklyn coffee shop, Dayglow, back in December. The song manages a beautiful double duty of being easily translatable to an all-acoustic setlist, but there are so many bright spots on the studio cut, with producer Noam Wallenberg ensuring that the mix is so perfect that the infectious chorus will have you belting out in no time. “Hot Car” boasts a joy ride of a music video, shot with impressive aerial drone footage, and leaves skid marks on the insides of your earlobes. “You got your reasons/I lost the value of a soul,” Billy admits, before a chorus that transmits white-hot sunbeams through your Lexus’ tinted windows: “‘cause Hell ain’t half full/Hell ain’t half full/In your heart you′re thinking/God locked you in a hot car again.” A stupendous guitar solo closes out the mayhem before shifting to a more somber tone on “2005.”

While none of the 16 tracks necessarily sport excessive durations, the band’s second single off the record clocks in at the longest runtime – just over four minutes. The track winds back the tape two decades (wrinkles spontaneously form on my forehead as I reckon with the truth of that temporal statement) to a particular moment in time, wherein Yost’s narrator muses on being down on his luck, and born into an economic system he has no control over. The supposed “gift of the marketplace” imposes its will on “good Americans,” unless you happen to be born into wealth (“Your father tends an empire/His mother was an heiress“). The chorus is particularly crushing with respects to the passage of time and the accumulation of material success in a rigged world: “Everybody sees, everybody sees/I’ve gotten nowhere/And everybody sees.” Another sidewinder guitar solo and Wallenberg invoking some chilling talkbox snare coupling on the drum hits leads to this track feeling like the centerpiece of the whole record.

Elsewhere on “Discount Rodeo,” Yost et al grapples with the difficulties of growing up, analogizing the unglamorized experience of making mistakes as an adult as nothing more than a second-rate pony show – all the pain of getting bucked off with none of the prestige. Or, as Billy puts it: “All these broken lights are old/I’m the talent, I’m the show/Another night of rolling dice at the discount rodeo.” The twinkling, brief piano ballad “Prison Tats, Dogs of War” serves as the end of the first half of the record, and a perfect segue into “Bone Saws and Ice,” another Dayglow exclusive. A thundering rhythm section carries the verses into its earworm thesis:”All your pain goes in my head/Let me allay what remains in dread/Humble now in surgery/A cut above the rest/A way to get some rest.” As far as underrated deep cuts go, “Dum Dum” may well be the most potent grower on the whole joint. In his most hushed, scathing tone, Billy promises (read: threatens) “Ohh yeah, yeahhh, I’m gonna make it better. Oh yeah, yeahhh, I’m gonna make it better, better.” Top-notch production allows a layered rainstorm of sounds to wrestle the listener into submission.

Dear reader, I must step outside of myself and break the silent agreement that a review need remain within the third-person perspective of an omniscient narrator ghoulishly presenting subjective taste as objective fact. I try to make it a habit to never get too first-person anecdotal with it, but I must drop the kayfabe for a moment. The last time listening to a song threw my body into a full-on psychic trance was October 10th, 2007, the night Radiohead dropped In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-wish download on their website. Cranking up the volume to 11 on the opener, “Bodysnatchers,” led to me solo-moshing in my bedroom so hard that were you to open the door, you would’ve thought a tornado passed through. I had a similar full-loss-of-limb-control as I thrashed to the under-two-minute masterpiece, and above & away the record’s crowning achievement, “Take The Out.” Should this appear on a live setlist, move all your valuables to your front pockets and get yourself out of the mosh pit radius, lest you end up with a black eye. I had the local exorcist on speed dial as the words “GET YOURSELF AN OUT, NOW WHY WON’T YOU TAKE IT?!” exploded from my lips as though either automatic writing or an automatic rifle. It is an astonishing, colossal wind tunnel of guitar rock that synthesizes the band’s entire body of work into a single, fleeting, perfect moment. I had trouble making it to the end of the record for many listens, because I would be all too tempted to play that track on repeat ad infinitem.

This is not at all to suggest that the quality stops there. I’ll be the first to declare the ninth of December National Kickback Day thanks in large part to “Dec 9,” another time capsule with a thumping boom-clap backbeat and soulful, acoustic strumming. It is a pensive recollection filled with grief and growth; a remembrance of how one day marked an opportunity passing you by. Yost’s impassioned pleading of “I want you to break me, I want you to break me!” underlines this beyond question. With “God You Gotta Feel Alone,” the three-piece lean the most Midwest Emo they ever have, with rollicking guitar licks and lyrics espousing isolationism: “Oh, you gotta feel alone/ Oh, you know you’ll feel alone/ God, you gotta feel alone/ Once or twice a year/ I try to go ahead and tell you how I feel.” “The Worst You’ve Ever Seen” is a self-deprecating minute-long interlude that leads to the fangs-out penultimate track, “Rewrite Man.” Far and away the heaviest, most punishing riffs on the record are saved for this moment, wherein Billy laments: “That’s some rewrite, man/ And I don’t have that much to give/ But I’ll be your rat.” Second chances are never guaranteed. Sometimes the most we can offer ourselves is the opportunity to pick up the pen. What’s the story gonna be this time?

The album’s closer, “Pornography Search Terms That Match Your Exact Physical Description,” is far and away the wildest title of any song in 2025, and I’d put good money on that. An introspective deep dive that bookends the aforementioned self-isolationism, whose title suggests that romantic success is not how the narrative ends – “Sometimes I wish that I could see you/ Far away from city, driving on blue/ Burn away the right piece, leaving us two/And sailing off, making off.” And yet, the depressing backlight of a laptop is the only creature comfort that remains, as the final question leaves us is “Why’d you have to give uuuuupppppp?” Maybe the answers can be found in the cover art, staged with frenzied debris (a reference to an iconic freak-out from Pink Floyd’s musical fantasy, The Wall): when you take a hit, it’s up to you to pick up the pieces.

The Kickback’s third studio record is the culmination of everything the band has been working towards since the early days of Mea Culpa Mea Culpa, and proves at the end of its 45 minutes that it was well worth the wait. Sonically and lyrically more mature than ever, donning the finest production they’ve committed to record, Hit Piece is a bonafide frontrunner for Album of the Year.

Listen to it in full down below: