REVIEW: Silversun Pickups - Tenterhooks

This ain't it

39:22 // February 6, 2026 // New Machine Recordings

There are moments where Silversun Pickups almost manage to convince me that Tenterhooks is a great album. The sudden powered-up guitar which roils midway through opener “New Wave”, that rollicking pattern which enlivens “Thorns and All”, and the way closer “Hot Wired” compellingly executes a high-energy formula into a rough approximation of a great SSPU track - for blissful seconds, maybe even minutes, I can still feel briefly that these 2000s rock stalwarts still have the effortless vitality they once possessed.

Sadly, though, those genuine highlights simply serve to demonstrate how aimless the majority of this tracklist proves to be. Tenterhooks is (by far) the shortest full-length in the SSPU discography, but it feels longer than its real duration, in a bad way. While every song is more-or-less competent, the preponderance exist in the unsatisfying space of mediocre-to-decent tunes, all the while feeling like we’ve heard this before. It’s no secret that Silversun Pickups have been at least vaguely faltering for a while - their long decline hasn’t been exactly linear, but they’ve never been able to fully recapture the excellence of early releases like Pikul, Carnavas, and Swoon. After a couple forays into a more pop-rock direction (albeit with an eerie tinge), the last decade has see the band, now firmly in the mode of a veteran act, emerging with periodic widely-spaced-out attempts at recapturing the vigor of their distant heyday.

Personally, I didn’t find either of the band’s previous attempts at a “return to roots” to be terrible by any means. Widow’s Weeds was wildly uneven, but had some genuine highlights, and Physical Thrills was an overall quite solid album, albeit a bit overstuffed, but both albums made clear that the band couldn’t really recapture the essence of their early work. Even so, it’s pretty shocking how uninspired most of Tenterhooks is. There’s a song here titled “Running Out of Sounds”, and while it’s far from the worst offender, that phrase is on the nose, as most of this material is simultaneously rather bland and reminiscent of far better tracks somewhere in the SSPU back catalog. Even songs that try to shake things up more overtly, like the brief “Wake Wake”, are devoid of hooks or memorability - that tune in particular is a real offender, throwing noise and energy at the wall to no real purpose. It’s hard to find the band that released such irresistible earworms as “Melatonin” or “There’s No Secrets This Year” in this music. Maybe they’re still in there somewhere, and this album retains enough positives to loosely qualify as a competent alt/indie effort, but waiting four years to release something as unambitious and stale as Tenterhooks doesn’t inspire confidence.

5.5/10