Model Martel A Thousand Couple Times LP
MODEL MARTEL has a parallel sound with many bands on Tiny Engines Records and the Lauren Records style of Midwest-centric emo-punk-pop-core. This is shitty jobs, friends you can’t depend on, broken relationships, expecting more from life, and finding comfort in late night talks, all wrapped in guitar hooks and melancholic melody. If I were 25 years younger, I would be calling this my favorite record of 2025 because of how it encapsulates life’s twenties and thirties. A solid, lyrically-focused rite of passage LP, open-eyed on broken and healing, punctuated with tight bass and drums. There are only 300 of these LPs, on all of the different colors that an LP could be, perhaps. A Thousand Couple Times, although budding with infectious hooks, has a regretful and foreboding lyrical sorrow to it that always seems to be amplified by a band’s proximity to the Great Lakes.