Music / Cheekface

"America's local band."

From the depths of Los Angeles, from between the intertwined bodies of They Might Be Giants and Cake, out comes Cheekface, cheeky Indie Pop/Alt-Rockers consisting of Greg Katz (vocals and guitar), Amanda Tannen (bass and vocals), and Mark "Echo" Edwards (drums and percussion). Their signature style is defined by a talky, peppy mix of darkly humorous Word Salad Lyrics, an ambiguous mix of ennui and irreverence, and topics ranging from dealing with heartbreak by being the guy who keeps saying "yo" outside your apartment door to The Friend Nobody Likes trying to bomb the Middle East.

Studio Albums

• Therapy Island (2019)
• Emphatically No. (2021)
• Too Much to Ask (2022)
• It's Sorted (2024)

Other Discography

• Emphatically Mo' (2021) (B-sides album)
• Don't Ask (2022) (B-sides album)
• Live at Baby's All Right (2022) (Live album)

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The Trope List Got Bigger, We're Gonna Need a Bigger Trope List...

• Album Title Drop: It's Sorted ends with the song "Plastic", which includes the deadpan rallying of "Is there recycling? / It's sorted." during the bridge.
• Black Comedy: If we're going strictly by subject matter, Cheekface is quite a dark and cynical band that touches on heavy themes of existential angst, struggles with mental health, and crummy relationships. You likely wouldn't be able to guess that on your first listen because of how frequently they dance around the topics through silly and snarky one-liners, light and conversational delivery, embrace of absurdity over how dumb some of the problems they face really are, further obfuscated by the actual music itself, which tends to be consistently energetic and danceable.
• Blasphemous Boast: On "Dry Heat/Nice Town", the narrator assures a stereotypical liberal that:
  Plus you're richer than God, and more handsome.
• Blatant Lies: We're assured "everything is fine" in "We're Need A Bigger Dumpster", twice - first when the narrator's dumpster fire gets massive (and overall reflects their life spiraling out of control), and second, when a horde of angry drivers backed up in traffic due to the narrator's shenanigans get out and are about to punch their lights out.
• Break-Up Song: "Next to Me (Yo Guy Version)" is either a straight breakup song or mixed in with a Torch Song; either way, the protagonist just can't get over it and misses their ex/crush "standing next to me", and has resorted to trying to win them back with a variety of methods.
• Broken Record: "Noodles" is a minute-long filler track whose sole lyrics are "A big cup of noodles, a giant cup of noodles", repeated over and over again with increasing volume, to the point where Greg is screaming his lungs out by the end.
• Call-and-Response Song: Several, and the audience joins in when it's live.
  • "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)" is called that for a reason, and is based on an actual incident when Greg Katz was crashing at a friend's place in Brooklyn:
    "YO..."
    "SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!"^note Greg recounts not being able to sleep because a houseless guy kept saying "yo" in a really deep voice outside the apartment. When he asked his friend in the morning, she replied that everyone calls said guy "Yo Guy" and he's not as bad as the neighbor next door who screams "SHUT THE FUCK UP" every time he says yo.
  • "'Listen To Your Heart.' 'No.'" is also called as such for a reason: Greg rattles off a list of demands, ranging from metaphorical, "listen to your heart" (no), reasonable like "eat a healthy lunch" (no) to beneficial like "buy one get one free" (no) to pressing issues of "pay your parking ticket" (no).
  • "Plastic" has the narrator ask repeatedly if there's recycling, and as the album says, every inquiry is met with "it's sorted".
• The Cameo: The music video for "Life in a Bag" features fellow indie rock artist Chris Farren as a health inspector who does his inspection of the venue while a silent disco is happening around him.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Most of their songs poke fun at materialism, especially the idea of trading in your ideals for a cushy but boring job ("Life in a Bag"), selling out for mainstream acceptance ("Featured Singer"), and the rich, especially those who say they're on their left, being out of touch ("Dry Heat/Nice Town"), but it comes to a head in "Don't Stop Believing", which outright laments that the only thing that'll survive after we're long gone is capitalism's lasting effects.
• Cover Version: The band has done a handful of covers as standalone singles: "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants, "Lauren" by Rosie Tucker, "Ballad of Big Nothing" by Elliott Smith, and "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" by Elvis Costello.
• Curse Cut Short: "Don't Get Hit By a Car" features the lyric "I knew you were full of—", which is cut off by the sound of a goat screaming.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • "We Need a Bigger Dumpster" features a section of the chorus about catching a cold, accidentally spreading it to your friends and doctors, only for everyone to insist that "everything is fine." With the song being released in early 2021, a time when the COVID-19 Pandemic was still plaguing everyone's minds, it's not a stretch to think of what Greg was actually invoking with these lyrics.
  • "Life in a Bag" — a song about ennui living in the simultaneously chaotic yet boring modern age — features a similar COVID reference with the line "American chaos, carnage and death, nature really is returning, and we really are the virus, dude!"
• Easter Egg: If your volume is high enough and/or you're using good headphones, Yo Guy makes a very quiet YO appearance before his actual appearance midway through when the narrator sings "They call me Yo Guy".
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" is — taken literally — about a warhawking psycho dictator shooting down the narrator's ideas to instead shoot up the Middle East with bombs. Taken metaphorically, it's about a dude who just can't stop suggesting the same thing over and over again to the aggrievement of his friends, and the song implies it might actually be about the narrator himself, unable to think outside of the box or stand up for himself and dealing with a frustrating existence.
  • "Friends" is about a friend who has no personality and a boring hobby that replaces it (to the point where the narrator suggests doing literally anything else), keeps ditching their plans (and other people) before things get good, and only has the most tenuous of connections to the protagonist. In fact, the song suggests they stop being "friends".
• Friendship Song: Subverted with "Friends", which describes a "friendship" that's so vacant, perfunctory, and unrewarding that by the time you get to the refrain of "We don't have to be friends," the narrator sounds like he means it very sincerely.
• Hanahaki Disease: "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)"'s singer laments that "he's puking up flowers" as he desperately tries to get over his raging crush on an ex/unrequited love/both.
• In the Style of:
  • "Featured Singer" is a huge evocation of LCD Soundsystem: Greg Katz replicates James Murphy's deadpan yet snarky method of spoken-word "singing", featuring a self-effacingly tongue-in-cheek rumination on one's status as a musician (in this case, Greg's desire to be the feature on an EDM song), with the instrumental sounding incredibly similar to LCD Soundsystem's more groovy Dance-Punk tracks, complete with cowbell riffs during the bridge.
  • "Grad School" likewise takes after Cake far more than their usual songs: the talk-style Greg adopts is more talkative and sound-effects driven, and the usage of horns and a bass funkier than usual make it sound somewhere between "Sheep Go to Heaven" and "The Distance"
• Last Note Nightmare: "Don't Stop Believing" ends on a windy drone before stopping suddenly as if it should be looped, only punctuating the depressing atmosphere and tying into the fatalist pessimism that we're doomed to slave away in mediocre corporate agony until we die.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The band loves playing around with this concept. Generally, their indie rock sound is upbeat and playful, but their lyrics have a tendency to dance around dark and cynical subject matters, yet often with a level of humor that self-awareness that rarely takes itself too seriously.
  • "I Feel So Weird!": Cheekface's typical lightness, covering up a lifetime of regrets, Desperately Seeking A Purpose In Life, and unable to name that thing that's missing from our narrator's life.
  • "Next to Me (Yo Guy Version)": Between the whimsical lyrics and upbeat beat, it's a melancholic rumination on a Hopeless Suitor missing an ex or unrequited crush, and has tried everything to get over it and can't. It's a tribute to a friend of Greg's who passed away, too. Also, they're pissing off their partner's neighbors by saying "yo" in a really deep voice.
  • "We Need a Bigger Dumpster" has the narrator try to assure us he's got his life under control via typically cheery, almost inspirational rock when it clearly isn't. Also, a bunch of angry car drivers are about to beat his ass for stopping traffic.
  • "You Always Want To Bomb The Middle East": The lyrics are either about being pals with a dictator who keeps braying to drop bombs on the Middle East, or The Friend Nobody Likes continually suggesting the same damn thing over and over again. Either way, it deals with Existential Angst.
  • "Popular 2" is an upbeat jam about the desire to be popular in the modern age... which involves being viewed from porch cameras and video drones, inadvertently reflecting how the world is steadily becoming a dystopian surveillance state. As Greg delivers in a cheery, celebratory tone: "The future is now, unfortunately!"
  • "Life in a Bag" sounds like it's evoking a cheesy 90's pop-rock-rap à la Sublime or Sugar Ray, but the lyrics flip-flop between celebrating finding stability in your life against half-sarcastically despairing for all you've sacrificed in order to achieve it, including your personal and artistic integrity.
• Phrase Salad Lyrics: The band's lyrical style doesn't always provide the most coherent of narratives, instead usually opting to stream-of-consciousness-style observations and random thoughts, indirectly providing meaning by the feeling of whatever headspace the narrator is in. As one example, "Plastic" sees Greg ramble vaguely about his inability to get anything done, recommending someone battered/fried food and balloons, being a people pleaser, and offering to make anything you want... out of plastic.
• Pun-Based Title: The album It's Sorted gets its title from the call-and-response in "Plastic" ("Is there recycling? / It's sorted"), but based on the contents of the rest of the album — dealing with anxiety and the slow, existentially troublesome decline of modern society — it's likely meant to be a pun of "It's sordid."
• Rock Star Song: Parodied with "Featured Singer", where the singer wishes his desire to be the featured singer in an EDM song, where he'll get his 15 seconds of fame of being a fad on TikTok and YouTube with kids dancing and ukulele covers, and annoying wedding DJs, your roommate, and people with thin walls whose neighbors love blasting EDM.
• Running Gag: For whatever reason, bread is a recurring mention among their more jokey one-liners. Bagels in specific have been mentioned in "S.T.O.P. B.E.L.I.E.V.I.N.G.", "Don't Get Hit by a Car", "Wedding Guests", and "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East".
• Sarcasm Mode: While most of their songs are semi-ironic snark, it come to a head in "Don't Stop Believing", which bitterly mocks their own upbeat attitude and songs and how here's another happy song complimenting the reader giving random advice. The song itself is anything but.
  Here comes another sermon
  Here comes another hill for you to climb
  You're a special guy, you have lots of talents
  You should wear a seatbelt, it could save your life
• Self-Deprecation:
  • "Dry Heat/Nice Town" critiques do-nothing liberals and leftists who are more content to complain, do worthless protests, and brag about how they're smarter than the other liberals and/or leftists... themselves included.
  • Deconstructed in "Pledge Drive", which surrounds the concept of saying the right thing out of fear of being accused of hollow virtue signalling. It appears the narrator wants to be productive, but finds himself stuck in a loop of self-criticism and putting down others as a form of expressing his politics, i.e. "If woke dudes must die, I'll go first / I don't know anything, you don't know anything."
  • "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" is primarily a biting character portrait of an unspecified second person who "always [wants] to bomb the Middle East on the weekend" among other unflattering and corrupt actions in whatever position of power they hold. However, a few passages switch to the first-person, with the narrator describing their own petty preferences for ineffectual matters like enjoying bagels. The way the pre-choruses line up imply that this is meant to be just as critical, with the first being targeted to you, the second we, and the final simply I ("I didn't start the bonfire of the vanities / But I'm tossing in my clothes and my humanity / And once a year, we act like I was glad I was born.")
  • "Don't Stop Believing" mocks their own upbeat attitude and songs, introducing their song as "yet another sermon". It's not played for laughs, and is instead world-weary and bitter, acknowledging nothing anyone will ever do matter and capitalism will win in the end.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Don't Get Hit by a Car" features a line about "Dr. Dre, not Dr. Seuss, no tenants and no trees, no snowmobiles and no skis", with the latter portion being a lyrical allusion to Dr. Dre's "Forgot About Dre".
  • "When Life Hands You Lemons" features the line "I am always hungry, yet I don't have any cake / You are always on a plane and the plane is full of snakes".
  • "We're Gonna Need a Bigger Dumpster" riffs off of "We're gonna need a bigger boat".
  • "I Feel So Weird!" shouts-out Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" with "I'm in a Jamba Juice, I'm at the therapist, I'm at the combination Jamba Juice and therapists'... It also shouts out Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized", with a scratchy, raw "LOOK MOM, I'M TRYING" in the vein of that song trying to plead with their mother that they're fine when they're not.
  • They Might Be Giants is one of their big inspirations and influences their Word Salad Lyrics, culminating in a cover of "Ana Ng".
  • "Featured Singer" has a lot: while the narrator discusses the desire to be the featured singer of an EDM song, he namedrops Spin Magazine, The Needle Drop, and Reader's Digest as review outlets that won't give it a review as it gets popular elsewhere^note Funnily enough, Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop would end up reviewing the song and its parent album, Too Much to Ask, becoming a huge fan of Cheekface in the process. He also mentions one of its potential claims to fame being how "Art Laboe will send it out with a dedication to a dog named Snuggles," referencing longtime LA-based radio DJ Art Laboe, as well as the infamous Casey Kasem incident where — while recording American Top 40 — Kasem lost his patience after a very poorly-timed memoriam segment about a dead dog named Snuggles. In general, the song itself is a homage to the electronica-dance-funk-punk styling of LCD Soundsystem, down to how the lyrics are spoken.
  • "Grad School" is a Cake homage, leaning far more on the talky, sound-effects driven lyrics and a funky chorus backed up by funkier horns n' bass. The song itself also features the line "everybody wants to ruin the world".
  • "Don't Stop Believing" seems to be titled after the same song by Journey, and if anything, it's a Spiritual Antithesis — whereas Journey's song is an uplifting ballad about working through the hardships of life, Cheekface's is a downer hymn of how we're all doomed to a life of mediocre nothing under corporate bootheels. It also shouts out a meme associated with the Joker (and even referenced in Joker (2019) itself): invoked
  ...and who could blame me? I live in a society.
• Spelling Song:
  • As you could guess from a song titled "S.T.O.P. B.E.L.I.E.V.I.N.G.", the phrase is spelled out repeatedly during the bridge.
  • Played for Laughs in "The Fringe", which misspells it in the bridge: "F-R-I-N-G — the Fringe!"
• Spoken Word in Music: Greg Katz's vocal style flips between traditional singing and a somewhat conversational form of "talk-singing", evocative of artists like Jonathan Richman, John McCrea of Cake, and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. Greg himself compares his delivery style to that of someone who speaks way too quickly and clumsily due to anxiety. It's mostly played for laughs, but it does seriously come up in "Don't Stop Believing", where Greg breaks the meter and rhyme twice to declare that "what lives on is the destruction / caused by market economics" and "being unique does not fit nearly into the grid of corporate needs".
• Stalker with a Crush: "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)" states the hopelessly-in-love protagonist stands outside their crush/ex's apartment building to say YO in a really deep voice and digs through their ex/crush's trash.
• Stepford Smiler: "Life in a Bag" surrounds the narrator having reached a state of relative peace within his life — settling down, getting a stable job, and overall going square — but still feeling discontent and not fully knowing why. It's greatly implied with other surrounding lyrics that he only reached this point by selling out, and all he has to show for it is becoming a slave to the status quo.
  Life in a bag, living my life in a bag
  Thank you for putting me in this bag!
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop:
  • "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)" suddenly stops right before a refrain of the chorus, with the implication the song's meant to be looped to show that the protagonist isn't going to get over it, ever.
  • Similarly, "Don't Stop Believing" stops in a way that implies it's meant to be looped, tying into its pessimistic theme that we'll all slave away in our boring lives ad nauseam until we die.
  • Played for Laughs in the "Life in a Bag" video, which features the band playing their song in a silent disco through everyone's headphones. At one point, the song briefly cuts out to the sounds of Greg playing his unplugged guitar amidst the ambient shuffling sounds of people dancing around him.
• Surprisingly Gentle Song: "Don't Stop Believing" is among the band's softest and most subtle songs, on top of being one of the most unusually sincere, being about the importance of not becoming jaded even in a jaded world, and encouraging the listener to continue having faith in themselves.
• Take That!:
  • "(I Don't Want to Go to) Calabasas" in general depicts a haze of anxiety and unease of living in SoCal, and mores specifically depicts early on "Spray-on chemtrails from Louis Vuitton / overzealous pat down from stupid Uncle Don".
  • "Don’t Get Hit by a Car" — during the midst of a rambling passage against politically-charged know-it-alls — Greg singles out "And of course I relate to Lena Dunham, I relate to every annoying genius!"
  • "We Need A Bigger Dumpster" has the refrain of "Let's just assume for the sake of argument," a reference to the memetic catchphrase of conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, satirizing his tendency to base all his political takes on hypothetical assumptions and strawmen.
  • "Election Day" as a whole reads as a portrait of indifference and malaise to modern political culture, how "For the garbage man, Election Day is still 'garbage day' anyway." It also features the line "Dr. Bronner was not a real doctor / The name was mostly aspirational," a reference to Emanuel Bronner of "Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps", who genuinely wasn't a doctor.
  • "Dry Heat/Nice Town" mocks SoCal liberals and leftists with a Holier Than Thou attitude who think they are smarter than everyone else and think marching and bellowing slogans will actually bring about change.
  • "Pledge Drive" has a few: Among the one-liners are "Why don't police ever obey the law?" and "I'm standing in the Wendy’s drive-thru screaming 'FUCK ALL THE TRANSPHOBES'". The second verse is a slam against, of all things, an "allegedly" environmentally and economically disastrous super-grain strongly implied to be quinoa.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" is an annoyed condemnation of either an actual dictator trying to get the narrator and his pals to help him bomb the Middle East, or an abstraction of The Friend Nobody Likes suggesting something aggressive and repetitive when everyone else in his friend group, including the friend's girlfriend would rather do literally anything else.
• "The Reason I Suck" Speech: There's an implication in "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" that the narrator's actually singing about himself being a petty tyrant unable to change his ways, as the song shifts from "you", then "we", then "I", culminating in "and once a year, I act like I'm glad I was born".
• Torch Song: "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)" gets combined with Break-Up Song to lament about a crush and/or an ex and all the myriad ways the narrator tries to get their attention and/or get back with them, but most of all, just wishes that they'd be by their side.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: "Don't Stop Believing" is almost entirely devoid of their ironic jokeyness to lament modern life, the soul-crushing work capitalism bestows on everyone, the political divisions and lies common in modern-day politics, and how we're all going to die in the end, with the only thing surviving is capitalism's evil.
  They say 'don't stop believing', but it's just too late for that. It's just. Too. Late. For that.
• Unrequited Love Lasts Forever: It's implied that "Next To Me (Yo Guy Version)" is meant to be looped as it suddenly stops before a refrain of the chorus, with the further implication that the protagonist is never going to get over his crush.
• You Are Not Alone: Played for Black Comedy in "Popular 2", where the chorus reassures us that we will never be alone, as we'll always be in each other's reach... within the gaze of the privacy-invading cameras we set up around your neighborhood.

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