“What if Nothing” is Walk the Moon’s first album since their 2014 “TALKING IS HARD” and, perhaps more importantly, their hit single “Shut Up and Dance with Me”- which wasn’t only catchy, but was the band’s hottest hit single and had off-the-chart success in its ratings and sales. Thousands of listeners discovered the band through this song.
With all of this success, it was important for the band to follow strong with this next album. And they did- for the most part.
The record definitely delivered some catchy tunes, reminiscent of some of the previous album’s tracks, such as “One Foot” and “Kamikaze”. Both songs are great to dance to and are sure to have a listener singing along.
Walk the Moon does a good job at writing songs filled with metaphors and meaning. “Can’t Sleep (Wolves)” has a foot rocking beat with lyrics that provoke thought, and though “Sound of Awakening” has a techno-synthetic feel, the lyrics are haunting.
One of the best parts of this album is that it gets better the more times one listens to it. Although some of the songs seem strange and first, they take on a new meaning the second and third time around, the lyrics making more and more sense.
But with these successes, the band did fall short in its organization of the album – there wasn’t much of it. All of the songs were beautiful in their own way- except “Headphones” which seems to be the only song the band decided to make purely beat-based, with its hard-rock instrumentals backed up with meaningless words- they didn’t flow together well. The album could’ve easily been just a compilation of random songs from other records. The different sounds of pop, hard-rock, techno-synthetics and others just didn’t blend naturally together.
Despite this, “What If Nothing” could easily be labeled a successful release, filled with upbeat pop tracks for jamming and contemplative songs for quiet moments.
8/10
Jordyn Dees // Co-Opinion Editor and Co-Business Manager
