Everybody loves a good indie-rock origin story — like Paul Westerberg holding it down as a janitor in the office of a Minnesota senator before joining the Replacements, or Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard teaching grade school while biding his time before Guided By Voices became a thing. Here’s a new one for you: Meet Mike Maple, a mailman in the small college town of Marquette, Michigan who spends his time walking the postal beat dreaming up relentlessly fun punk-rock tunes to play in his band Liquid Mike. “Given what you know/The American dream is a Michigan hoax,” he informs us on their excellent new album Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot. These guys turn their Upper Peninsula slacker blues into guitar-banger gold.
Liquid Mike debuted in 2022 with the EP A Beer Can and A Banquet, with focus tracks like “Lease Agreement” and “All Hail the Ketamine Kids.” The press photo that went out with Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot shows the band sitting around a fire pit cooking hot dogs, and the LP opens with “Drinking and Driving,” a song that highlights a life skill the members of Liquid Mike may have had down before they were out of high school. (To be clear, we’re not condoning the practice.) On Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot they play short, fast, muscular songs that split the difference between Nineties pop-punk and Nineties indie-rock, tempering the petulant angst of the former with the latter’s winning resignation.
On “K2,” they build a song about a wasted summer out of stupid Coldplay allusions (“The rush of blood straight to your head/You pissed your pants/And they were all yellow”), making the goofy conceit work because the music is so charged up and fun. On “Drug Dealer,” which sounds like Blink-182 by way of GBV, Maple sings about being stuck getting stoned with his friend and her scary new boyfriend, processing a bunch of weird feelings in a high-as-hell torpor. “USPS,” a bouncing ode to Maple’s place of work, suggests Weezer with a working-class soul. On “Small Giants” he offers the sage piece of advice: “You can shoplift any store you want/It’s not pathetic if you don’t get caught.”
Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot knocks through 13 songs in just 25 minutes, including a thirty-second Superchunk tribute and a minute-long Built to Spill throwback. But it leaves a lasting impression. In fact, you might have to go back to the 1971 debut by John Prine to find a record by an employee of the United States Postal Service that wins this hard.
Drake attends a game between the Houston Rockets and the Cleveland Cavaliers
Earl Sweatshirt Is Right: ‘Don’t Worry’ Is a Great Drake Song
Even the staunchest Drake hater can probably name at least one song that does it for them. For better or worse, Aubrey Graham has spent nearly two decades giving voice to the millennial subconscious more skillfully than any mainstream musician not named Taylor Swift, soundtracking the fears, insecurities, and romantic delusions of a generation raised on reality-TV melodrama and the first wave of social media’s main-character ethos. It should come as no surprise, then, that Earl Sweatshirt, underground rap’s poet laureate, has singled out the deep Iceman cut “Don’t Worry,” singing the song karaoke-style to close out his recent live sets. The track is the purest distillation of Drake’s appeal since the Take Care era, and a quiet reminder of why it’s hard to imagine him going away any time soon.
In the clips, which first started circulating around late May, during Earl’s Home on the Range Tour with MIKE on the heels of their Surf Gang-produced project Pompeii // Utility, it’s the song’s final turn that has Earl & Co. the most hyped up. “I just wanna see that boy beg on the pavement,” Drake coos, the type of revenge fantasy he’s built a career out of conjuring. Drake goes on. “I just wanna see that boy struggle with the phone bill,” he sings, getting specific. “The light bill/That’s how I feel.”
It’s PhD-level pettiness with a weirdly relatable spin. One must know the more treacherous depths of being broke to pinpoint the humiliation of struggling with the phone bill, and here Drake is wishing such luck onto anyone “trippin’ with the gang.” Whereas his entire catalog is fueled by this kind of anonymous sense of betrayal, it hits harder here. You can feel the sting of 2024’s rap beef in the glee with which Drake sings his imagined get-back, landing on an infectious melody all while basically giving a speech you’d expect from the Joker. “I might just get that boy hit for entertainment,” he sings.
This is classic Drake, turning the darker inner thoughts most people would be ashamed to admit into something almost beautiful. He is, in a way, rap’s Lena Dunham, finding art on the other side of cringe.
More recently, clips of Earl singing the song at the end of different tour stops — an ongoing bit at this point — went viral thanks to the never-ending stan wars between Kendrick and Drake fans. Some, unable to deny Earl’s bona fides as a rapper, assumed the whole thing must be an act of trolling, while others saw it as proof that Drake “won” the beef. The third option, of course, is that it’s a really good song, the type Drake is especially skilled at making.
At the height of the beef, like any millennial amidst a friend-group falling-out, Drake appeared to be rewatching The Sopranos, posting pictures from the show to his Instagram Stories. (Iceman’s hit single “Janice STFU” samples Tony Soprano uttering the infamous phrase to his sister, Janice.) “Don’t Worry” has the Machiavellian feeling of a classic mobster flick, a resolve for vengeance at any cost. A desire to see your enemies suffer. Across an entire album, it’s a mood that can feel heavy, but you’ve got to admit, when it hits, it hits. And that’s why Drake remains a fixture within not just hip-hop, but pop culture at large. He reconstructs embarrassingly human impulses as irresistible melodies. “Don’t Worry” might very well become the sleeper hit from Iceman, as clips from Earl’s concerts have already started to boost the song’s presence across feeds.
As he often does, Earl Sweatshirt simply speaks the truth.