Modern Baseball - “Rock Bottom” (Official Video)

My favorite thing about You’re Gonna Miss It All, Modern Baseball’s very good sophomore album from last year, is how it simultaneously embraces and wallows in adolescent clichés while acknowledging the nasty roots of all those bitter emotions. Their songs are filled with a familiar and juvenile caustic irreverence that’s as fun to sing along to as it is troubling, but the Philadelphia band manage to slide past any negative connotations thanks to the strength of their songwriting and the likability of lead vocalist Brendan Lukens.

Those vocals are a dismissal point for a lot of people — it’s one of the most distinctive voices we’ve had in a while, whiny enough to almost read as an over-the-top pop-punk satire if it weren’t so earnest and affecting. Nowhere — besides maybe “Your Graduation” or “Apartment” — are the charms of the band better captured than on “Rock Bottom,” which serves as the origin point for the band’s eventual mantra (“Whatever, forever”) and the eminently quotable line “We can watch Planet Earth and brainstorm tattoos,” which has become a calling card for the lovesick and desperately disconnected.

The band takes another opportunity to mess around with clichés in their new Kyle Thrash-directed video for “Rock Bottom,” which sees Lukens first getting some questionable career advice about the millennial market, then sitting down to wail against a backdrop of archetypal high school takeaways. The video ends in chaos, as the band says fuck the whole thing and runs away from the nostalgic box that they could so easily be placed into. Watch it below via Pitchfork, and check out the band’s recent one-off “Revenge Of The Nameless Ranger”: