Sharp Pins Maps a Teenage Dream on ‘Mod Mayday 23’

The Chicago outfit Sharp Pins, steered by Kai Slater (also of Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe), will release a new album, Mod Mayday 23, on September 4 via K Records. The announcement arrives alongside single “Saturday Sun,” a bite of power pop that funnels Carnaby Street iconography through a crusty four-track lens — nodding to Television Personalities more than the Nick Drake song it shares a title with.

Slater’s output has been relentless. Two full-lengths surfaced last year alone, and this new collection doesn’t pause for polish. “I thought it would be cool to record a bunch of songs that never really got recorded in a semi-more-thought-out-way,” he said. The sessions happened on a Tascam Porta One, channeling what he calls “the original Sharp Pins garagepopspew sound in all of its crustiness and yelping.”

The record draws from a specific, almost cinematic nostalgia: his 18th summer spent on a scooter in Chicago’s Logan Square, chasing a mod ideal that threads The Kinks and The Move into a lo-fi indie vocabulary. The results feel less like revivalism and more like a private mythology, preserved in tape hiss.

Sharp Pins play London’s ICA on August 12.