The Grasshoppers — Let It Be That Way (2023)
(Outer Order Time-Lag Lollipop Edition)
I. The Mythos: The Band That Fell Through a Cracked 45 RPM
Some albums feel “retro,” but Let It Be That Way feels like a 45-rpm single from 1966 that got dropped behind the dresser and somehow kept aging without being played.
The Grasshoppers aren’t doing nostalgia; they’re doing temporal leakage.
This is garage pop at its most earnest, most wide-eyed, most undomesticated by time. Every song sounds like it’s being performed by a group of teenagers who snuck into the school auditorium after hours, put on their parents’ Halloween costumes, and decided to record a masterpiece before anyone caught them.
And the magic is that it’s not cosplay.
It’s not parody.
It’s not wink-wink revivalism.
It’s sincerity resurrected.
The kind of sincerity rock music abandoned decades ago in favor of irony, edge, and posturing. The Grasshoppers play like no one’s watching — or like the only ones watching are their crushes sitting cross-legged in the front row.
They make innocence feel dangerous again.
It’s the perfect follow-up to Coltrane’s Expression, too:
after the cosmic firestorm, after the late-era revelation…
Stormbrain drops the needle back onto pure human joy, pressed onto monophonic wax.
II. Why This Album Hits the Stormbrain Signal So Hard
Stormbrain loves unreasonable art — and here’s the twist:
sincerity is unreasonable.
This record shouldn’t exist in 2023.
Not like this.
Not with this level of commitment to warmth, craft, and adolescent emotional honesty. And yet it does — glowing like a lantern found intact in the ruins.
Every track taps into that eternal garage-band pulse:
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the jangly guitars with just enough grit
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the tambourine that hits like a nervous heartbeat
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the vocals that crack not from lack of skill but from too much feeling
Where Futureshock was a neon meltdown
and Expression was a spiritual transmission,
Let It Be That Way is a lost postcard from a parallel 1960s where heartbreak was still mythic and the world hadn’t yet learned how to fake everything.
It’s the rare kind of pop that doesn’t need to be complicated to be cosmic.
It hits because it’s small.
It hits because it’s fragile.
It hits because it has the courage to be simple and true.
This is Stormbrain’s softest entry so far —
but also one of its most radical.
III. Highlights from the Time-Lag Lollipop
“Sugar And Spice”
This is the Grasshoppers thesis statement — upbeat, jangly, zero guile. It feels like the soundtrack to running down a hill too fast, laughing, not caring if you wipe out. The guitars sparkle like cheap Christmas lights; the harmonies wobble like a tape that’s been dubbed too many times. It’s beautiful because it’s imperfect.
“Still In Love With You Baby”
A pocket-sized heartbreak. The kind of song someone writes after their first real crush vanishes into thin air — raw, sweet, and emotionally uncomplicated in a way adulthood almost never lets you be again. The melody feels like it was stolen from a dream you had when you were twelve.
“Riding In My Car”
The garage-pop teleportation device. This is the one that breaks the Stormbrain ceiling — a song that sounds like the ghost of summer 1965 drifting through the vents. You can almost hear the garage door rattling, the amp hum, the kids with nothing to do and too many feelings to fit in their bodies.
“Words of Love”
A Beatles-channeling shimmer, but through cracked glass. The Grasshoppers don’t mimic — they metabolize. They take the sweetness, the brevity, the candlelit innocence and color it with a kind of faded-photograph melancholy. It’s the past shining through time-warp static.
“Paper Clip Beggar”
The curveball. A little weirder, a little darker, hinting that behind the costumes and jangly chords there’s a dimension shift going on. This is where the album stops being a “retro revival” and becomes something stranger — like a lost artifact that shouldn’t exist, but does.
IV. Buzz Drainpipe’s Final Word
Let It Be That Way is the kind of album you only find when you stop looking for the future and start listening for the past that didn’t happen.
It’s not nostalgia; it’s alternate history you can hum.
Stormbrain began with a neon metal prophecy, moved into a spiritual firestorm, and now — impossibly — arrives at the doorstep of a group of kids who sound like they’re trying to save the world with nothing but a tambourine and a half-tuned guitar.
And maybe that’s enough.
This record reminds you that sincerity is punker than cynicism, that joy is weirder than darkness, and that sometimes the most radical gesture in music is simply meaning every word you sing.
Stormbrain 003 proves the rule:
the journey isn’t linear — it’s a map of all the places your heart is brave enough to go.
