If you wanna know how long French Cassettes have been around, lemme give you an idea: I remember listening to them on my iPod.
Granted, this would have been in the dying days of the device, around 2010-2011, but it goes to show what absolute stalwarts they are of the local scene. After going dormant for a few years, they’ve slowly crept back into the local music world. They’re here again with another full-length, Benzene, out today on Tender Loving Empire Records. It’s an ebullient work: Tracks like opener “Fast Held Hand” and “White Noise” call to mind 2010s British rock—anthemic enough to fill a stadium, but when you listen a little closer, dripping with raw emotion. Others are classic French Cassettes with unabashedly feel-good, sunny-day, guitar-based pop tunes. It’s a trip back to the early 2010s, and comforting to know they’re still alive and kicking.
French Cassettes are one of vanishingly few bands that have stuck it out through every iteration of the hand-wringing over whether music in San Francisco is dead or not, and we don’t celebrate those kinds of bands enough. They just keep making music, their own way, trends be damned.
