Mom Jeans Announce Canadian Leg Of “Sweet Tooth World Tour”

“Give me something sweet so I can make it through the week/Don’t care if I end up with cavities”. This is the plea that opens Sweet Tooth, the third full Length from Berkeley’s Mom Jeans. It’s the introduction to a quasi-concept record, a structural departure for the emo punk quartet. Before any of the record’s 13 songs had been written and recorded, the band knew what Sweet Tooth would sound like: late ’90s and early 2000s pop rock and pop punk bliss. For frontman Eric Butler, that meant revisiting the guitar pop perfection of Weezer and Oasis alongside deep cuts from one-hit wonders like Third Eye Blind, Fountains of Wayne and Superdrag. Butler, guitarist Bart Thompson, bassist Samuel Kless and drummer Austin Carango all arrived at the same description for these sounds: Ear candy.

“Those hits by Blink-182 and Green Day, all those bands, it’s just hooks for days and really excellent songwriting. They really just tried to write incredible songs that would get stuck in people’s heads. We wanted to try our own version of that. Ear candy is the goal, so Sweet Tooth is the record. I fell in love with bands like Modern Baseball and Front Bottoms and Joyce Manor, so I wanted to write songs like that. That’s what our first two records were: me trying to stay in that box, cause I think that’s where I felt comfortable.”” (Eric Butler)

The result of this expedition into the Golden Age of snotty pop punk and cheeky radio rock is a thirteen track hit of musical ecstasy, crammed with guitar crunch and infectious melodics beneath boyish romance, teen-to-young adult angst, and gleeful abandon. Sweet Tooth, which arrives three years after Mom Jeans’ second album, Puppy Love, was recorded in New Jersey at The Barber Shop Studios with producer Brett Romnes. Butler says it’s the first time the band had a proper, top-to-bottom studio experience, which meant no cutting corners, and an ability to chase a previously-unattainable level of polish. Tyler Povanda (Save Face) and Kory Gregory (Prince Daddy & The Hyena) also contributed vocals to the record.

Sweet Tooth feels like an eternal dessert-before-dinner, a rejection of the idea that we need to suffer before we get to the good stuff. The band are touring in support of the album, they are just winding up the latest run of US dates and have now announced a run of Canadian tour dates for Spring 2023 with Bearings. You’ve only got one life. Indulge your Sweet Tooth.