Album Of The Week: Joyride! Miracle Question

In the early 2010s, there was a surge of indie rock bands that sounded restless and ramshackle and endearingly earnest. Much of this music came out through the label Salinas Records — bands like All Dogs, Radiator Hospital, and the early Crutchfield projects P.S. Eliot and Swearin’. Joyride! were the San Francisco outpost of that sound, combining the urgency of Bay Area pop-punk denizens Jawbreaker with some twee emotionality that drifted down from the Pacific Northwest. A lot of those early Salinas bands are no longer around, or their members got involved in different projects, and it seemed like Joyride! might have succumbed to the same fate. After releasing three full-length albums over six years, culminating with 2016’s excellent Half Moon Bay, Joyride! took a long break. They did what most bands end up doing: kept up jobs or got new ones, occasionally played in other groups, explored what life is like away from music.