Stunts Breathe Life Into a Troubled Relationship Through Speaking the Poetic Truth on Baroque Pop Single “Sticky”

Stunts conjure an era of music in its single “Sticky” where cabaret folk and vulnerable indie singer-songwriter sensibilities seemed to complement each other perfectly. Think late 90s and early 2000s America and Europe. But Stunts hail from a city south of Sydney, Australia called Wollongong yet Matty and Racey have roots in that aforementioned musical time period and bring an emotional authenticity to a song that gets very raw and real about what it is to live as a human in a time of great turmoil and challenges, in which an ambient angst and anxiety and yes exhaustion in navigating it all can take an underlying toll on everyone and their relationships which can at the best of times be a work in progress. With spare spare guitar, male and female vocals in resonant harmony and taking lines throughout, “Sticky” gets to it with the opening lines “We’re fucking numb/And I come and I come, for fun and I’m done/We’ve been fucking sad, and I’m bad/And you’re mad and I’m sad because I’m bad.”Without having to spell it out explicitly the songwriters poetically capture how because you want things to work out sometime you will put aside the discomfort and the hard questions and conversations until you’re spent. But in this song those coping mechanisms and real feelings and lack thereof (a problem in its own right) are expressed until the key question comes up, “Are we ok? Not the easiest thing to say/Are we ok?/I think we’re ok, today.” And the answer in the melancholic outro chorus is that by being honest with how things feel in the moment that it’s okay to not be okay, as the modern expression goes. The song could be incredibly sad but its rhythms and swells of sound bringing in percussion and a more lively guitar riff express a will to get through these times now that the truth can be expressed without feeling like it has to be hidden and maybe, just maybe, this partnership is worth sticking it out. Listen to “Sticky” on Spotify, where you can listen to the group’s new album Housework (released April 7, 2023) and follow Stunts at the links below.