“Hollywood” is the first single off Brooklyn-based garage rock quartet Lost Boy ?’s first full-length album, Canned, though they’ve been making music together since 2008. Released in July, the track is nostalgically reminiscent of a teenage summer in the late ’90s, complete with flannel-clad punks on skateboards cruising through town and knocking kids’ ice cream out of their hands. It fits in a genre I like to call “New York City surf,” which encompasses the vibes of all the (most likely) inexistent, oxymoronic surfer dudes in the financial capital of the country.
The high-energy track is ingeniously simple and fun in the way in which Lost Boy ? delivers the melody in a careless, messy fashion. They make it sound easy, but the nasally vocals and clashing guitar rhythms displayed in “Hollywood” are unique to this band’s aura and make the song intriguingly irresistible.