【Adventure Archives】

All of our anger sounds the same. It oozes from Twitter and Adventure Archivesthe mouths of late show hosts, but how can we hear anything when everyone is yelling? Anger strikes one ineffectual note.

But once there was a female-fronted rock band that made rage sound romantic and exciting, giving us energy instead of fatigue. And now, at at time when our rote response to anger is a feeling of powerlessness, that band is back.

On Tuesday, the beloved '90s alt-rock group The Breeders debuted "Wait in the Car," their first new track since the 2009 EP Fate to Fatal. It's the first time the band's best-known lineup of Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Jim Macpherson, and Josephine Wiggs have made music together since 1993's platinum Last Splash."Wait in the Car" will be released on a seven-inch album series from 4AD.

At the height of their fame, revered by the likes of Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke, The Breeders were seen as disaffected partying poetesses who provided the soundtrack for many a late-night car ride. Today, you can hear echoes of their raw, reflective shredding in critically acclaimed contemporary rockers such as Courtney Barnett and Mitski. However, The Breeders have not really enjoyed widespread success since the early 2000s.

On "Wait in the Car," The Breeders' signature sound is back. It's brash, sexy, and rebellious like the best of band (as in the hit single "Cannonball.") Electronic feedback pairs with stalking bass and wordless "ah-oohs" to convey an emotion that gets your attention, even if you can't quite put your finger on it. And because they make familiar feelings like anger sound ... different, there couldn't be a better time for a Breeders comeback than right now.

Practically, '90s nostalgia is everywhere. But where are the punk bands?! The lighter side of the '90s — Disney films and cutesy cartoon characters that we now call bitmoji — is getting more play than Deal's grunge-y rock side. It's time for an injection of flanneled, black lipsticked, guitar-shredding rage. The Breeders should ride the '90s nostalgia wave out of old tape decks and onto iPhone X's.

We're also due for some of Kim Deal's gravelly charm, because the contradictions that consume her haven't gone away. In a 1995 profile in SPIN, writer Charles Aaron described Deal as an "American girl," who's wallowed in "rock’s broken promises and suburbia’s lame spoils" more than most. Today, there's a renewed sense that America has broken its promise of economic potential and reliable government. Maybe Deal's preoccupations can help us work through our own.

The Breeders are a unique breed: a female-fronted band that has endured over time. They're tough and vulnerable, but don't fall back on being cutesy. In concert, performing songs like "Hag," they still rock cargo pants, stringy hair, and make-up-free faces. And in 2017, the more women who are unapologetically rattling the cage in bodies and lives they fully, proudly inhabit, the better.

Perhaps most saliently, we need The Breeders today because of their power to make common emotions strange as they merge verbal fragments with roaring, old school instrumentals. With today's emphasis on 140-character reactions, a rock band whose songs aren't just "sad," "happy," or "angry" can help reorient the way we react to our world. "Too many people let technology override the communication of a personal experience," said Kim Deal in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. "To my mind, there is a reason that music is there, and it's about being human."

On "Wait in the Car," Kim Deal delivers playful but incisive lyrics about struggle: with words, her mother, mistakes, selfishness. Deal conveys confusion about what to do with having a lot of feelings at once, something anyone living through 2017 can relate to. Deal answers her own struggle to "find the words" with "meow meow meow meow" — a refrain tailor-made for The Breeders in the internet age.

Deal opens the song with a roar of "Good Morning!," accompanied in the video with images of bricks with cut-outs in them, like finger-holes for bowling balls. Perhaps The Breeders don't have solutions to the anger of 2017. But Deal can certainly help wake us up. There's no doubt about what she would have us do with those bricks.