Fireworks made a surprise return on New Year’s Day with their first album in nine years, Higher Lonely Power, which remains one of our favorite albums of the year so far. It was initially just released to streaming, but now it’s coming to vinyl and we’ve got an exclusive green/brown/black tri-color vinyl variant, matching the color scheme of the artwork and limited to just 350 copies. Pre-order yours while they last. That’s a mock-up above.
Stream the LP here:
For more on this album, here’s what we said in our review:
As far as anyone could tell, Fireworks went on hiatus at the end of their 2015 tour, but behind closed doors, they were working on their fourth album, unobstructed by the demands of touring or the expectations of record labels and standard album cycles. In 2019, they resurfaced with the single “Demitasse,” an ambitious art rock song that showed off a much different side of Fireworks than the one shown on the indie-friendly pop punk records released during their initial run. Along with the release of the song, they announced their new album Higher Lonely Power, but COVID hit a few months later and Fireworks once again retreated from the public eye. In the fall of 2022, The Wonder Years took Fireworks on the road, marking the band’s first shows in seven years, and on New Year’s Day 2023, they finally unleashed Higher Lonely Power, self-releasing it on their own Funeral Plant Collective label with less than a 12-hour warning and no pre-release singles.
“Demitasse” isn’t on the album, but it did set the tone for it. Higher Lonely Power is an art rock journey through sweeping string arrangements, breakbeats, synth-infused dream pop, and caustic post-hardcore. It brings to mind anything from Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz to Radiohead’s Kid A to The Notwist’s Neon Golden to the darker, artsier moments of Arcade Fire, but it still has the energy of a band that comes from the emo/punk world and it still sounds like Fireworks. (And for a more emo/punk world comparison, it makes me think of Foxing’s Nearer My God.) As Fireworks make their way through these stunning, shapeshifting arrangements, vocalist Dave Mackinder grapples with Christian trauma, death, the changing perspectives of artists who are nine years older than when we last heard from them, and the days when the members of Fireworks volunteered to have Pfizer test new medication on them so they could earn some extra cash (“Woke up afraid to die when we used to think it was funny”). It’s an album that needs to be heard from start to finish, an album where no individual track could possibly give you the full scope of everything that Fireworks have to offer here. (Though if I had to pick one song to at least give you an idea of the album’s boundless creativity, I’d probably say “Jerking Off the Sky.”) It’s an album so expansive and meticulously arranged that you can really picture Fireworks spending the last nine years getting every little detail right, and the wait was worth it. Higher Lonely Power is so remarkable that cult classics like 2011’s Gospel seem like warm-ups in comparison.
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Pre-order our new vinyl variant here.
