The track

A clean pop production with a hook that takes itself perfectly seriously, attached to a lyric that takes itself a little less seriously. It's the project's calling card: this is what The Punchliners sounds like before it commits to a specific target.

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The EP

Two pop tracks written from inside the head of a character who is convinced, against all available evidence, that he is the best at everything. Genius opens the EP with the simplest possible setup: a verse that walks through the senses one by one and insists, every time, that the singer is the best - believe me. It's a song that earns its joke by committing to the bit so completely it stops sounding ironic and starts sounding like a manifesto. Big Wall takes the same character and points him at his most famous talking point - the structural fix for every problem is, of course, a wall, preferably the biggest one available.

The story

This is The Punchliners doing what the project was built to do: write a pop EP from the perspective of a character whose self-belief is the whole joke. The satire works because the songs are written without breaking character - there's no winking, no commentary, no narrator stepping in. Just a confident pop voice insisting on its own greatness, over a production that's perfectly happy to play along.

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The EP

The premise is the joke and the joke is the premise: take the most punishing, dance-floor-ready genre in modern electronic music, and apply it to the most punishing, fluorescent-lit corner of modern life. Desk Dance Party opens the EP with the title track - a high-BPM banger about getting freaky next to the printer. Office Crew turns the team meeting into a hype anthem. Monday Morning finds romance in the fluorescent light of a 9am stand-up. Proper Day closes the record with the only quiet track in the bunch - a single about waking up late, smelling the tea, and hearing the kids in the garden, scored as if it were the most triumphant moment in a stadium-sized DnB set.

The story

Desk Dance Party is the moment The Punchliners' premise really clicks. The mismatch between the production and the lyric is so wide, and so committed-to, that the EP starts to feel like a tiny manifesto: any subject can be a banger if you give it the right BPM. There's a sneaky tenderness in Proper Day that almost breaks the joke - for thirty seconds you forget the EP is satire and start to actually enjoy the calm - and that's exactly what makes the rest of it land.

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