NAKED GIANTS - The Shadow (Sealed) (LP)

Seattle’s Naked Giants burst onto the national music scene with their 2018 full-length debut, SLUFF, a candied and insanely catchy blast of unhinged pop-punk-grunge-surf-rock. But if that record was the sound of, as one reviewer labeled them, a trio of “affable miscreants just out of high school” getting their musical rocks off, then The Shadow, the band’s new and second studio effort, is in comparison a decidedly more—what’s the word?—mature offering.That is, if “mature” is the appropriate term for an album where one member is credited with playing a fun machine, and another merely with “charisma.”