It’s the difference between hippies taking massive bong hits and revolutionary freaks snorting the same prepared cannabinoid snuff the Zulu used to knock the shit out of the British.

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Their singer is a girl, and she doesn’t sound like she cares about anything she’s singing about.

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No iMac here—this lo-fi assemblage of beats around looped vocal clips feels put together with twine, and reminds me of one of the best eras of hip-hop, when groups like EPMD really got out the scratchy vinyl and put together smart, evocative new songs that respected their source material while standing on its shoulders to achieve something utterly new. Except, you know, EPMD had rappers, and here there are none, except maybe the loops of Ned Flanders saying “Son of a gun-diddley-un!”

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Theirs is not “another stupid summer” in the parlance of 50 Foot Wave, but one of soft-serve, cartwheels and tranquil afternoons in a hammock. The production on their self-titled debut is refreshingly clean and the instrumentation minimal, in contrast to both current indie pop bands and the original Wall of Sound. They bring to mind 90s Brit acts like Helen Love or Talulah Gosh—you got it, twee!

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There’s something both exciting and familiar about this album’s sound, which hearkens to that period in the 80s where George Clinton and Zapp were making way for Prince, albeit with backward-masked sounding guitars and plenty of leftover hair metal vibe. This is the rock of party vans and melted 8-tracks.

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Though the majority of the melodies stay pretty light, lyrically the album is mainly preoccupied with longing, regret and the bittersweet wistfulness of lost loves, and it is at these most melancholy moments that Leftover Cuties achieve their greatest emotional impact … Places to Go manages to be both a good summer album and a good breakup album, no easy feat.

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Not even Courtney Love in The Year Punk Broke will prepare you for the desperate fame-seeking hunger in the eyes of The Reinactors’ skinny Superman, or the crazy-eyed Marilyn Monroe who claims to have slept with him, or the shockingly realistic (and white) Michael Jackson, or the weird demon-man with wings and fangs and cat’s eyes who seems to adore a character in his own mind, even if that character is hard to explain to tourists who just want to meet Charlie Chaplin or Minnie Mouse.

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Rumspringa’s vibe can be defined as East of the Brite Spot Americana: sweet potato fries with pepperjack cheese, crispy on the outside, soft and orange in the middle.

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