Despite what their name suggests, The Growlers’ sound is more suave than snarly. Their fifth studio album, “City Club,” continues the retro-inspired energy of their last release, 2014’s “Chinese Fountain,” but cranks it up to 11. It’s a consummately stylish affair that evokes glossy images of midnight drives and California neo-noir — yet still retains the sincerity of their past releases.
The Costa Mesa-based foursome are known for pioneering the term “beach goth,” a style that takes the sunny, surf-rock vibe of Southern California (consider the Beach Boys the prototype) but douses it in melancholia. True to form, there’s a healthy dose of angst threaded throughout this album, which approaches subjects like disillusionment and doomed romance with a sense of polished despair.
The album also boasts slick production from The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, who pushes the band’s west coast rock farther into a genre-bending realm of swooning psychedelia. One of the best results of this partnership is the retrofuturistic “I’ll Be Around,” which draws on disco, funk and electronica all at once. Most of The Growlers’ charm here lies in their ability to blend these disparate styles into a dancefloor-ready nostalgia trip. Singer Brooks Nielsen’s rasping sad-boy croon is well-suited for these arrangements, intensifying the synth-heavy instrumentation without ever overpowering it.
However, a clear sense of narrative stitches the 13 tunes together and prevents the album from becoming an exercise in artifice. The grooving title track and opener introduces an ethereal girl with a “mysterious sun,” who gives the narrator the faith to “start dancing around the continuous strife” of the album’s glittering Hollywood wasteland. However, later tracks find the hero less starry-eyed. The near-balladic “When You Were Made” starts off with the revelation, “No, they’re not in love anymore,” accompanied by more stripped-back acoustics that heighten the song’s sense of emotional honesty. Further on, the frazzled lo-fi jam “Neverending Line” laments “finally [making] it to the other side / just to find it ain't so pretty,” and the comparatively easy-going, 60s pop-inspired closer “Speed Living” finally admits, “Speed living ain’t for everyone / it ain’t for me.” It’s a sonic journey that seems positively cinematic.
“City Club” is a polished crowd-pleaser, yet it won’t disappoint fans looking for traces of The Growlers’ original DNA.
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