Album Review: GUMDROP – GUMDROP

Samuel Chown (Shmu) and Jesse Varnam (Buttons) team up as GUMDROP to deliver one of 2025’s most innovative electronic pop albums as the year fades away.

Opening track Apocalypse Wow! is, to say the least, an aural headfuck that nonetheless reels you in to its mix of distortion and day-glo sounds. As a song, it shouldn’t make sense: with guttural vocals courtesy of Buttons, and a take on R&B that has been deconstructed and remade through a hyperpop lens, it sets the scene for a series of tracks that send your emotions heading in different directions simultaneously.

A sense of disorientation creeps over the listener when Buttons’ voice suddenly becomes as candy-sweet as the arrangement, but never losing their sense of dislocation with the world around them. That contrast and catharsis becomes ever more pronounced when Button’s angst alternates and collides with the gothic R&B voice of Shmu.

In The Darkness Of Night shifts the tone of the album to something slightly more conventional, as it casts a passing glance at the likes of Drab Majesty and ACTORS, post-punk inspired maybe, but not straying too far from the adventurous template that Shmu and Buttons have already established.

Another evolutionary step occurs with EYE CANDY, revelling in the New York electro of the early 1980s, even as it pushes that towards hyperpop, as if pointing us to the origins of that genre. Down, Down, Down in turn sees the album venture into a baroque take on lowercase, upending two genres at once.

GUMDROP is retro in one very surprising and welcome manner: it’s so rare to come across an album that makes the most of its linear nature. Jumping from the wild noise of opener Apocalypse Wow! to the 90s proto-electroclash of closing track Bonnie & Clyde 2025 is a sonic whiplash, for sure. In the context of the album as a concept album without a concept, it makes perfect sense.

The GUMDROP album is a ‘show and tell’ – two artists getting together to make music that is so varied, yet so linked sequentially within the album, with every track a banger – it reads and sounds like a plan to upend pop music, one song at a time, turning chaos into art as they do so.

The album is out now via Philadelphia-based label Grind Select to download on Bandcamp.