If there’s anything Brooklyn-based band The Big Easy can count on as they release their debut record A Long Year, it’s that there’s probably absolutely nobody with whom that title isn’t gonna resonate. The end of 2020 is in reach now, and while, sure, in some ways it feels like the start of it was only two weeks ago, it also feels like it was a thousand years ago. A pandemic, the ever-growing creep of fascism, however many personal battles we all may have had, and all before whatever is to come on election day; it’s been a long, scary, exhausting and often hopeless year. To state the obvious, we live in a very different world now than we did back on January 1^st.

A Long Year was penned in that old world, and it sounds like a time that’s gone now, if hopefully temporarily. This is raucous, beer-soaked, dive bar punk. This is being jammed into a tight space with strangers and feeling the spray of sweat and spit like it’s ocean mist and not a potential death sentence. Remember that? It sounds kinda horrifying now, but also like to just experience that one more time would be some kind of salvation.