Eric Schroeder has apparently decided that subtlety is for cowards. Cat’s Game is what happens when a musician who’s spent years carefully crafting harmonic introspection finally looks around, shrugs, and mutters “screw it” before plugging in everything he owns and turning it all the way up. The result? A lean; loud; emotionally wrecked album that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as it physically tackles you and screams into your face about lost love and quarter-life malaise. And you’ll thank it.
Gone are the layered arrangements and gentle existential crises of the previous but still great project, Turned On the Stereo; in their place is an album that sounds like it’s been recorded in a garage on the verge of collapse, produced by Rob Schnapf, mind you, who’s apparently made a second career out of immortalizing the musical nervous breakdowns of emotionally competent men. With Cat’s Game, Schroeder finally sounds like he’s fully inhabited the music he used to edge around. This isn’t an experiment; it’s a controlled detonation.
Everything on this record is designed to make you feel like you’ve walked into a bar mid-fight, only to discover the guy swinging the guitar is actually working through some very specific personal problems. The guitar tone? Biting; unapologetic; borderline unhinged. The drums? Aggressive in that “do not make eye contact” kind of way. There is no polite small talk here; only a relentless barrage of distorted confessionals.
The real trick here is that despite the lyrical vulnerability and emotional flailing, the album never wallows. It thrashes; it grooves; it actively resists the urge to be pitied. This isn’t sad boy music for people who want to lie in bed all day; this is sad boy music for people who want to throw a chair through a window and then apologize sincerely.
Track highlights include “Emily” kicks things off like a love letter penned during a caffeine crash at 2 AM, with equal parts poetic and unhinged. Then there’s “Don’t Wanna Let You Go”, which plays like Schroeder’s thesis on romantic self-destruction; when he asks, “Am I just a child when it comes to playing your silly games?”, it’s less a question and more a mic drop from someone who knows the answer and already wrote an entire record about it. And finally, “Leave Me Sleeping” arrives like a soft collapse. It’s a hushed anthem for anyone who’s ever tried to hide under the duvet from their own emotional tax returns; Schroeder repeats the title like a man hoping that unconsciousness might be the cure for existential malaise. It’s vulnerable, sharp, and so honest it almost feels rude, just the way it should.
Lurking beneath all the reverb and lyrical bleeding is a sense of clarity Schroeder hasn’t always allowed himself. You can tell this record came after a season of frustration; it’s the kind of album you make when you’ve spent three months trying to write the perfect song and finally just yell into the piano until something breaks. It’s deliberate in its chaos; calculated in its catharsis.
If Pascal was right and all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Cat’s Game is Schroeder’s very loud counterargument. Maybe the problem isn’t that we can’t sit still; maybe it’s that we haven’t cranked the amp loud enough.
This is Eric Schroeder at his most sonically volatile and emotionally clear. Cat’s Game by Eric Schroeder is the sound of an artist tossing his inner monologue into the nearest amp and letting it scream. It is sincere; it is chaotic; it is surprisingly life-affirming.
Also: it absolutely rips. In case you needed the reminder.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
