Hater - Siesta

Swedish indie pop band Hater made a splash in 2017 with their tightly constructed debut You Tried which helped them get lauded as one of those “bands to watch” moving forward. You Tried was full of contemporary influences and put Hater in the same vein as Hand Habits, Japanese Breakfast, and Say Sue Me. They managed to combine dream pop sequences with colorful guitar work to make it an easily accessible leap between genres.

On Siesta, Hater try to make lightning strike twice. While the edges are smoother, the motivation behind Siesta seems to be that of a band wanting to expand their fanbase, rather than create something that pushes more boundaries. This hybrid genre started out fresh and alarming, but after 2-3 years the growing population of the genre has become stale and unoriginal – unfortunately, something that Hater has embraced. At over double the length of You Tried, Siesta feels aimless at times and derivative in others.

Things start out decently enough, “From the Bottom of Your Heart” is a sweetly arranged melodic dream pop endeavor, but it never truly goes anywhere and instead leads into the first single from the LP “It’s So Easy” which seems primed for one of those Easy Pay Day Loan commercials, and “I Wish I Gave You More Time Because I Love You” is just about the most generic rip-off of Japanese Breakfast one can find. Where You Tried managed to condense a lot of the band's strengths, Siesta seems more loosely assembled, maybe even rushed so it ends up as an album bursting at its seems with different ideas that don’t being conveyed thoroughly.

Nothing in the latter half of Siesta can recoup what was lost either, “The Mornings” feels like an attempt at balladry casually misdirected and album closer “Weekend” has no character to find in its loose comparison to Mazzy Star or Mojave 3. It’s this looseness that makes Siesta’s stronger moments get buried underneath layers of monotony. Hater sound like a watered-down Deerhoof, with less experimentation and more incessant meandering. Siesta doesn’t offer anything new to the genre and instead opts for a more bloated approach to an oversaturated scene.