“Pants are tight/ Shades are on/ Full regalia,” Gus Baldwin promptly sets the scene of his eponymous debut solo LP. That’s rock regalia, to you – and you’ll recognize it in every pulsing second of this 12-track release. Like a scrappily successful heist plot, Baldwin borrows and bends the genre’s classic conventions, scrawling his signature slackjawed voice over fuzz-loaded strumming and punk-intoned basslines. Elastic guitar solos and disintegrating outros on “Whatever Happened (To My Grandaddy’s Gun)?” harken to Baldwin’s psychedelic roots, while drum machine beats on “West Korea” and a toy keyboard in “The Pesticide Song” implicate artsier experimentation.
Baldwin describes the 2022-2023-written songs as a snapshot of his early 20s, chronicling the breakups of his psych rock band Acid Carousel and of his long-term relationship. “Each song on the record is a different piece of me trying to figure out who I was,” he writes in a press release.
As in the Sketch, the witty songwriter’s solo compositions traffic in hyperlocal references and the contemporary concerns of a DIY darling: OnlyFans ode ”Credit Card” becomes a comedy of automated phone sex errors, “Aesthetifuck” rails against the social media machine, and “Azie Morton,” a short-but-sweet, carousel-tempoed ballad, offers a welcome demonstration of Baldwin’s burgeoning versatility.
This article appears in October 31 • 2025.
