Album Review: Tina Fey – Victory Lap

When I wrote about Dead In a Boat by Tina Fey recently, I noted how the track created a bit of a musical whiplash moment for me.

I wasn’t initially sure what I was listening to, mainly as it was so outside my normal listening patterns that it took me a while to process it. But once I did, the song grew on me and opened me up to genres I’d not engaged with much previously or for some time.

The Cincinnati-based band decamped to Louisville, Kentucky, to work with Jim Marlowe (who also christened Dead In a Boat) at End of an Ear Studio, and the band laid down the album in under a week. That means there is no fat, no filler, on Victory Lap – and it certainly doesn’t lack a polished and responsive production on some complex pieces of music.

It’s an album full of surprises, all of the good, with the doomy tones of Say What You Think featuring an appearance on vocals from Lord Overstreet – aka MMA fighter Derik Overstreet. One of the longer tracks, it also incorporates classical piano and French horn into its six-minute run, containing more ideas than you hear in some albums! Even in its relatively conventional passages, there is an air of foreboding here, one that is fully and thrillingly met.

And it’s heavy – so, so heavy: like Swans meeting via Boris at an early Minutemen gig. It’s best to experience the album in its full linear nature for the greatest impact, but if I were pushed to pick a favourite track, it would probably be the asymmetric and arrhythmic rock of Strigo. It got me wanting to listen to Prong, Swans, and Sunn O))) afterwards, as it triggers a thirst for adventurous rock music. And that is something to really appreciate, making Victory Lap a gateway to some great bands.

You can’t pin the album down to just one style: grindcore, hardcore, punk, blackened shoegaze, experimental music, and art rock are present, often simultaneously. There’s no doubting how fluid the tracks are within themselves and how the album hangs together so easily, despite all that variety in sound and influences. It’s hard to process how the band achieved so much in the short recording time, even if they spent much of 2025 writing what became the aptly named Victory Lap.

The album was released on the 1st of May, 2026, via Mishap Records, and is on Bandcamp in vinyl, cassette, and digital formats, and is also streaming on Spotify. For band news and other listening alternatives, head to Instagram for details.