Cool When They Wanna Be: Cheem's Guilty Pleasures
Nu metal and proud. The most exciting young band in America.
Cheem’s new album Guilty Pleasure is filled with moments when you hear it all. The local buzz becoming industry hype, A&Rs descending on Connecticut like bees to a hive, Madonna screaming at some poor Maverick Records staffer why haven’t they signed “The Cheems” yet, Dreamworks wine-ing and dining them all over NYC, the band casually running three hours late for every industry showcase and the execs don’t even leave. 20 years ago it would have all happened for Cheem, 10 years ago their proudly uncool influences would have made them a joke, something to laugh at in a Buzzfeed article. Today, they might be America’s most exciting young band.
While artists may be proud of their lamer influences now, four short years ago Cheem were getting shit for (literally) wearing it on their sleeve. Singer and MC, Skye Holden recalls sporting the tee shirt of rap-rock-reggae institution 311 to a local DIY show— “Somebody from another band was like, ‘Ah that’s funny, that 311 shirt, you’re wearing it ironically,’” he remembers with disgust. “There’s so many people we’ve encountered like that all over the place, where it’s not ok to like shit.” Describing their own sound as a giddy mix of Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy, and *NSYNC, Cheem isn’t just unashamed of their lameness, they’re aggressively proud. Ask lead singer Sam Nazaretian and they’ll tell you their first album purchase was Panic! At the Disco’s garish baroque emo classic A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out from Newbury Comics (“shoutout Newbury Comics”) while Holden adamantly professes adoration for J-rock stars Asian Kung-Fu Generation while also conceding their most popular tune is better known as “the anime intro song.” Oh, and let’s not forget about nu-metal. Cheem “fucking love nu-metal” and– in a refreshing break from tradition– “embrace it wholeheartedly.” Not that a band whose album contains multiple turntable solos needs to say it but just in case here’s Holden: “The first time I heard Linkin Park I was in third grade. The second that came on-- I was like, rapping in a rock band? That's what I want to do.”
On Cheem’s first two releases, CheemTV and Downhill, you can hear the band putting their irreverently engaging sound together. Songs like “Backhand,” “Game Boy Color,” and “Paint” the puzzle pieces are starting to come together but Guilty Pleasure is the moment things snap into place. The idea of combining indie, pop punk, emo and nu-metal is a concept that simply shouldn’t be possible, unthinkable even, then you listen to Guilty Pleasure and it all clicks together so effortlessly you’re left wondering why it took so long.
Holden credits the introduction of classically trained, R&B leaning singer Nazaretian as the moment Cheem went from “Taking Back Sunday rip-off” to the genre chimera they’ve become. “Understanding how to make each genre individually is really important to being able to put it together. After a certain point we had played enough to know it's not going to sound corny because we know what we're doing in the individual realms of these different musical worlds,” explains Holden, “Like we can bring them together in a way that doesn't fucking suck.”
Indeed, Guilty Pleasure does not “fucking suck.” Even if the musical hybrid isn’t appealing to some it’s hard to deny their chops and confidence. Nazaretian’s vocal melodies in particular are refreshingly accurate in an era of untrained howlers. Nazaretian - whose conservatory focus was voice in college - is as candid professing the life changing effect Frank Ocean had as he is telling the story of how an acapella rendition of Sublime’s “What I Got” for his preschool class got him in trouble. “I said ‘fuck’ and I don’t think a four year old would want to say ‘fuck’ in front of a whole class,” he recounts with equal measure embarrassment and pride, “[the teacher] called my mom and I had to go home.”
Maybe the missing piece that put Guilty Pleasure together is its snare. The snare is loud, an inky black period punctuation mark to break up the album’s run on sentences of technicolor flight. “Our drummer Sean [Thomas] is so fucking diligent, he sheds this shit to infinity and back,” says Holden, “I don't want anybody to be able to think the drums are programed.” Yet, Guilty Pleasure is not a Snapcase record either, there’s more dimensions to the drums than one loud pop. Thomas is as quick to cite Chicago nu-metalers Disturbed as he is Pleasantville, New York indie outfit Porches as influence. “For heavy music, I like my snare either cranked or tuned low and melodically,” describes Thomas, “But for Cheem? Cranked to the max.” On finale “Emerge,” Thomas holds back on the power for gorgeously sunny verses tumbling into bridges that add Holden’s deft raps before a middle-8 that explodes as Thomas comes down on those drums with the power and finesse of Abe Cunningham of Deftones. Gabe Weitzman lets towering sheets of distorted chords rip as bassist Nathan Porter’s 5-string (!!) runs tie each section together. And when Nazaretian’s gorgeous falsetto arcs up to harmonize with a piano accent while Thomas rolls a light crescendo on his cymbals it’s like leaping through a cold sprinkler on a sweltering summer day.
Cheem found their way out of the Connecticut DIY scene by holding out hope their nu-pop-metal sound would eventually gain as much traction as the “soft indie rock” and shoegaze bands that were in vogue. Holden: “The thing about Connecticut is it’s hard to go on tour and have people not think you’re rich. It has the biggest wealth inequality in the fucking country, If you come from here people just assume you live in fucking Greenwich and you’re rich but none of us our rich.” That financial situation might change soon enough, Cheem are ambitious, they speak earnestly about the Guilty Pleasure album cycle and their “insane promotional ideas” that makes Holden’s prediction that Cheem is “hitting the whole fucking globe in 2023” not too outlandish. “I hate bands that will have a cycle where once the album is out then nothing, that’s all they have to say. I feel like we have more to say with this album,” says Nazaretian, “It's beautiful how it’s all put together. In my eyes, they're all singles.” Current single “Snag” certainly leaps into your brain with Pete Wentz-ian lyrics (“You thought that I was different, well I am, but not better just a different kind of bad”) so accurate the bassist/lyricist probably activated his lawyers the first time he heard it. “It’s just fun to write about being an asshole,” remarks Holden. “I wouldn't say I'm the person in that song, it's a character, but everybody can relate to at least one element of that character. Everybody's met a person like that but everybody's also done something that's a little bit shitty too.”
Guilty Pleasure’s lyrical through line is calling out bands’ pay-to-play tactics (“or how you bought a good review” chides Nazaretian on “Clueless”) and calling out stuck up music fans (“Hot take, your hot takes are weaker than your wrist“). It could have been bitter but it’s all delivered with such irrepressible zeal and optimism you can’t help but join in. It’s an interesting script flip, Guilty Pleasure makes being a music snob with the immaculate record collection sound not just lame but boring. You, on the other hand, the nu-metal junkie and proud pop-punk karaoke king are in the VIP with Cheem having a ball. The album’s truest statement, from the insatiably catchy “Cheem SZN”, is also a hand extended to those with their backs on the wall and noses in the air and it hits harder than any listicle or 10.0 review ever could: “There’s no pleasure in feeling guilty, trust me, you’re not alone.”
Cheem’s new album Guilty Pleasure available now on streaming and Bandcamp