If Rookie magazine had a soundtrack, I would picture it sounding like Gal Pal’s Velvet Rut. This is a girl-power, teenage angst, Virgin Suicides diary-reading kind of album. Two best friends came together to create this insanely fun-to-listen-to record, a pop spin on garage rock that has been compared by Stereogum and Rookie themselves to Best Coast. Colleen Green would be another comparable artist, or even the Shangri-Las vocal-wise.
These Austin-natives turned LA queens join the likes of Boytoy and Little Racer on the Papercup Music label, who are just unapologetically celebrating a young punk lifestyle. To quote Gal Pals drummer Jillian Talley (from an interview in Rookie), “I worked at a really nice hotel in Austin for a long time, and I just refused to shave my armpits for like three months. I would be serving people $15 glasses of wine with my armpit in their face like heh heh heh. You notice that people are like, Urgh, and you’re like, Fuck you. That’s just the first thing that comes to mind, but there’s probably a million little things.” This attitude captures the spirit of the record perfectly. A fun little fuck you to the grown-ups of the world.
Whether you’re still sneaking cigarettes after your parents go to bed, or you’re an “adult” who can’t stop using glitter glue for their cut-out collages, this is an album that shoves youth in the face of those who are too serious to take it seriously.