Cheekface Makes Life Harder Than It Needs To Be With New Single “Hard Mode”

Cheekface has been very busy throughout 2024, releasing the new album It’s Sorted, a collection of b-sides called Sort Of, and the single Flies. Now the trio of Greg Katzm Amanda TEnnen and Mark “Echo” Edwards are getting in one more song before the new year with Hard Mode.

Vocalist/guitarist Katz says the song “is about growth and how f****ing awkward it is, and it’s about growth’s younger sibling self-awareness, which is not the same as growth, and twice as awkward. The phrase ‘living life on hard mode’ is something our touring keyboard player AJ likes to say when he does something that makes a routine task needlessly difficult, like reaching for something in a clumsy way when you could just ask someone to hand it to you.”

Katz admits that they life the hard mode as a band. “I guess being in a band is a pretty hard-mode activity in general. I think the start of this musical idea was us wanting to do a dance song with a skittering hi-hat beat. Mandy came up with the super syncopated bassline and then I added the chunky guitar riff that became the chorus. It started as a really short song idea, maybe just 2 minutes long. But once the three of us started to learn it, we were having fun with the groove and wanted it to just keep going, so we stretched it out with the instrumental section.”

Cheekface will go on tour in April with dates throughout the US with dates in Cambridge, MA on May 3rd and Burlington, VT on May 4th.