Wide Awake!

The album was first announced in February 2018 and recorded from December 2017 to January 2018 at Sonic Ranch studios outside Tornillo, Texas. The band recruited Danger Mouse to produce the album, as the band claimed, as a way to push themselves outside of their comfort zone. On recruiting Danger Mouse for the album, Andrew Savage said, "I was writing a record that indebted to punk and funk, and Brian's a pop producer who's made some very polished records. I liked that it didn’t make sense."^[6]

In an interview with Billboard, Savage described the album having a funk influence, saying, "there's this duality between joy and anger that I find to be really interesting, and that's something the record kind of deals with at large. ... [H]ardcore could be such an angry music form but could make you feel so positive. There's a lot of moments on the record when all of us are singing at the same time and... that's something I kind of associate with hardcore, or Funkadelic."^[7]

Savage characterized opening song, "Total Football", as "a bit like a manifesto; it's got that bold and declarative language, with each line emphasizing the larger ideology". Savage said that the song addresses the "duality of collectivity and individuality", referencing in its title the Total Football system in association football. The title of the album was intended as a "tongue-in-cheek" response to "wokeness".^[8] Savage described the closing track, "Tenderness", as being complimentary to the opener, sharing its "manifesto-like" lyrical style. Other songs concern endemic violence, addiction, dysfunction, environmental disaster, and the normalization of these things.^[9] Austin Brown said: "In such a hateful era of culture, we stand in opposition to that – and to the nihilism used to cope with that – with ideas of passion and love."^[10]

More information Aggregate scores, Source ...

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	8.3/10[11]
Metacritic	82/100[12]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[13]
The A.V. Club	B+[14]
The Independent	[15]
NME	[16]
The Observer	[17]
Pitchfork	8.0/10[18]
Q	[19]
Rolling Stone	[20]
Uncut	8/10[21]
Vice (Expert Witness)	A[22]

Close

Wide Awake! received critical acclaim upon its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 82, based on 28 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".^[12] In a five-star review, Emma Swan of DIY called the album, "a gut-punch of an immediate classic".^[23] Writing for Exclaim! magazine, Vish Kanna said that Wide Awake! "is a letter-perfect musical contemplation of modern times, where social uprisings are actually affecting positive change. It's urgent and potent music that's thought-provoking and danceable, and whose rage is measured by a pointed optimism."^[24] Roy Trakin, in a rave review for Variety, praised the album for its social conscience in its day and age, stating it "may be the most woke punk-rock record since the heyday of the Clash."^[2] Will Hermes in Rolling Stone named Violence as a standout track and described it as "an epic rant about normalized barbarity".^[20] In Pitchfork, Mike Powell wrote that at the "heart of the album" is "a tension between the individual and the group, between the angst of freedom and the lull of dependence".^[18]

In a more mixed review, Chris Nelson of Mojo wrote that "unsurprisingly, it flies the Wire and Minutemen flags high. More surprising are the occasional nods to funk and '60s bubblegum."^[25]

Wide Awake! was named 'album of the year' in an end-of-year list by Australian radio station Double J,^[26] and the second-best album of 2018 by Paste.^[27] It was named 51st best album of the 2010s by NME.^[28]