The new record ‘Berkeley’s on Fire’ by the four piece band SWMRS from Oakland, California is only a few days away at this point and we’ve had the chance to listen to this wild ride of an album before it gets released.

If you’ve heard of SWMRS before you’ll know they don’t stick to any genres or let themselves be put into boxes and this album is no exception of that. With ‘Berkeley’s on Fire’ Cole, Max, Joey and Seb put together an interesting and very diverse mix of songs and instruments you wouldn’t have necessarily expected from a band labelled as ‘punk rock’ on Wikipedia.

The 10 track album features lyrics critical of society, the police, politics and the influence modern media – especially TV – has on us nowadays. On this record SWMRS are trying out  some new and possibly surprising things  while  also  somehow  sticking to  their  "roots". 

As mentioned before, the songs on this album are very diverse:  songs like ‘Lose Lose Lose’ in which Cole shows off his rap skills, accompanied by sounds very inspired by animal/bird noises to songs like ‘IKEA Date’ and ‘Bad Allergies’ which both turned out to be more quiet love songs despite the misleading title of the latter. 

At this point an honorary mention goes out to ‘Hellboy’ which, with its strong and heavier guitar parts as well as the continuous drums, proves to be the most punk rock song and my personal favourite on this album. 

Now, even though we don’t want to spoil you all too much we have to talk about the last track: ‘Steve Got Robbed’. This song miraculously manages to combine almost all the different musical styles on this album. 

It features everything from rap, electronic influences, distortion to just weird noises in the background. 

The way it brings all those influences together in one song is a perfect ending to such a diverse, interesting and exciting record.

Berkeley’s on Fire by SWMRS comes out Feburary 15th via Fueled by Ramen.