Liquid Mike is the best Midwestern Indie-Rock Band with a postman you'll hear all year

Everyone loves a good indie-rock origin story — like Paul Westerberg holding it down as a janitor in a Minnesota senator's office before joining the Replacements, or Robert Pollard's Dayton, Ohio, elementary school teacher while spending time before Guided By Voices become a thing. Here's a new one for you: Meet Mike Maple, a mailman in the small college town of Marquette, Michigan, who spends his time walking the postal beat and nonstop dreaming up fun punk-rock tunes to play in his band Liquid Mike. 'Given what you know/The American dream is a Michigan hoax', informs us of their excellent new album album/paul-bunyans-slingshot” target=”_blank”>Paul Bunyalbum/paul-bunyans-slingshot” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>onealbum/paul-bunyans-slingshot” target=”_blank”>n's Slingshot. These guys turn Upper Peninsula slacker blues into guitar gold.

Liquid Mike debuted in 2022 with the EP A can of beer and a banquet, with focused tracks like “Lease Agreement” and “All Hail the Ketamine Kids”. The press photo that came out with Paul Bunyan's Slingshot shows the band sitting around a campfire cooking hot dogs, and the LP opens with “Drinking and Driving,” a song that highlights a life skill the members of Liquid Mike may have had down before they graduated high school. (To be clear, we do not condone the practice.) On Paul Bunyan's Slingshot They play short, fast, muscular songs that split the difference between '90s pop-punk and '90s indie-rock, tempering the sad angst of the former with the triumphant resignation of the latter.

On “K2,” they make a song about a lost summer out of stupid Coldplay allusions (“The rush of blood straight to your head/You pissed your pants/And they were all yellow”), making the silly conceit work because the music it's so charged and fun. On “Drug Dealer,” which sounds like Blink-182 as GBV, Maple sings about getting stoned stuck with his boyfriend and her creepy new boyfriend, processing a bunch of weird emotions into a groggy riot. “USPS,” a bouncy ode to Maple's workplace, suggests Weezer a working-class soul. On “Small Giants” he offers sage advice: “You can rob any store you want/It ain't pathetic if you don't get caught.”

Paul Bunyan's Slingshot he records 13 songs in just 25 minutes, including a thirty-second Superchunk tribute and a minute-long Built to Spill throwback. But it leaves a lasting impression. In fact, you might have to go all the way back to John Prine's 1971 debut to find a record by a United States Postal Service employee that earns this hard.