Hoopla

Weird Nightmare — 2026

“Hoopla is tight, catchy, and built on the kind of guitar instinct that keeps every move landing.”

Alex Edkins spent years fronting METZ, one of the more uncompromising noise rock acts of the past decade, so it would be easy to mistake Weird Nightmare as a simple change of pace side project. But with METZ taking an indefinite hiatus at the end of 2024, Hoopla, his second album under the moniker, makes clear that Weird Nightmare is something more deliberate than that.

Recorded with Spoon’s Jim Eno, the record trades the hard edges of his day job for something warmer and more direct as it is an indie guitar record built around precision, hooks, and groove. The ten tracks here rarely waste a note. Instead of piling on layers, Weird Nightmare keeps things a little fuzzed and makes every drum hit, guitar stab, and vocal harmony count. Edkins can make a two-chord riff feel enormous while never overplaying.

At the center of it all is his voice, which has a sharp, slightly raspy delivery that can feel cool and detached one moment and urgent the next. At times, like on “Baby, Don’t,” he carries a strong Britt Daniel quality that warrants a second glance. Piano chords, bells, castanets, and Julianna Riolino’s harmonies are woven in at the right moments, and the album moves comfortably between garage rock, power pop, and classic rock while still keeping its honest, unforced feel. The uptempo opener “Headful of Rain” delivers plenty of noise and fuzz up front, while something like “If You Should Turn Away” settles into a mid tempo Kinks like sway.

Lyrically, Edkins touches on the strange comfort of places you’ve outgrown and the noise of modern life that makes it easier to shut down than pay attention. That subtle tension keeps Hoopla from being merely breezy. The songwriting is direct enough to lodge in your head on the first pass but layered enough to reward a few more spins — especially once the hooks fully set in.

“Might See You There” hits with big bar chords and a melody that sounds like it was pulled straight from a Replacements B side. It is the kind of song that makes the whole album make sense. “Pay No Mind” is the rollicking counterweight, pushing harder and faster with a riff that nods toward early Buzzcocks and a lyric lifted from an Atlantic City T shirt. It moves with the loose, almost reckless energy of a band playing at the edge of falling apart. At only 2:37, it stands tall with an absolute ripping outro guitar solo complete with hand claps. “Forever Elsewhere” deploys a fuzz guitar surge that sounds genuinely optimistic without sounding naive, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. “Bright City Lights” arrives near the end of the album with Riolino front and center, functioning almost as a duet. Their harmonies lock in well together, and when she steps forward to carry a line, the song lifts to another level entirely.

The Replacements’ scrappy directness is an obvious reference point, but the record also sits somewhere between post punk, garage rock, power pop, and classic rock minimalism, with echoes of Wire, The Kinks, and Talking Heads filtered into something cleaner and more modern. Edkins occupies a similar space to Spoon, Doug Gillard, and Sharp Pins, which are all guitar forward artists who make lean, hook driven music while avoiding a lot of showiness or irony. He also shares Gillard’s knack for riffs that feel both classic and slightly off center. Like Sharp Pins, he understands that classic rock has is its own kind of power. And like Spoon, he knows exactly when to hold back, which ends up being what makes the moments he pushes forward hit that much harder.

Hoopla is the rare record that sounds effortless because so much care went into making sure it did. Put it on and try not to sing along.