Written by Matthew Weddig

Not Today… is over in under ten minutes, like an amusement park ride. 

Saskia Lethin, Jack Abott, Opal and Adelaide Jones from Chicago-based Bungee Jumpers offer a lean, breakneck roller coaster ride of jangly, riot grrrl–y guitar pop that sounds like, in the best way, what would happen if your coffee grinder joined a band. Bungee Jumpers wouldn’t sound out of place among Bratmobile or Heavens to Betsy, blasted out of the worst speaker in a garage or found on a cassette tape on the childhood home of Gone Home.

It’s intentionally straightforward music that rarely lingers on an idea for too long. The opening track “Wall” has one of the album’s only moments where Bungee Jumpers allow themselves to risk staying at the party too long, as Saskia repeats “I couldn’t find a wall to hit my head”, the guitars drop out to leave it in the spotlight, then come back in to joyously ride out the album’s most striking lyrics. 

Analogue elements are as much a part of the band as the instruments. Tracks are bookended with amp feedback and whirling noises that sound like tape caught in the spool, and in between there’s the inescapable lo-fi grit. These could be clean guitars, it’s impossible to know if the guitars are distorted because of amps or pedals or because the needle on the recording console was almost certainly living in the red. Not Today… sounds like it was recorded at the lowest acceptable quality – a quality that seems to be higher than Bungee Jumpers’ 2024 Demo. Two songs from Demo – “Bolt” and “Wrench” – reappear here. It feels silly to say they’re re-recorded, given how lo-fi the new versions are, but it does feel right to say that that’s the joke. “I know what I’m doing/You can trust me,” Saskia and Jack chant together on “Wrench,” letting you in on the bit.

The band’s tightness reveals this has all been intentional. They probably could have written longer songs and recorded them with greater clarity (cell phone–recorded videos of the band playing live uploaded to YouTube arguably sound “better”), but the songs don’t really need it. They thrive in this environment. As we go through this moment where we end our Spotify subscriptions and grapple with our ability to have everything, Not Today… offers an intentionally fleeting, blink-and-you-miss-it experience. If you caught a single song on shuffle, it would strike you as amateur, but you’d only be able to experience it like that if you went old(ish) school and bought and added the MP3s to your personal library. Not Today… isn’t on the streaming platforms, it’s only available on Bandcamp or via – appropriately – a handmade cassette tape from GIANT–BEAT in Brooklyn, NY. You’re either hearing these songs in their greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts whole or, if they are on shuffle in a playlist in your personal collection, you’ve already engaged with them that way.

“The Beach” might be the mission statement for why this is all like this. An unassuming song that doesn’t even clock in at a full minute (like most of Bungee Jumpers’ songs), with a chorus that doesn’t get much deeper than singing “You want to go to the beach” and “I like the beach” and “We’re having fun at the beach.” The lo-fi isn’t a gimmick or nostalgia-bait. It’s an invitation to a mosh pit captured on an old consumer-grade Sony video camcorder that probably topped out at 720p. You want to go to the beach.

Not Today… is out now and is available to be purchased on cassette.