Empire

Personnel: Yoodoo Park (vocals, guitar); Tae San Park (guitar, background vocals); Keith Frerichs (drums).Recording information: Different Fur Studios.Explore, Yoodoo Park's debut EP as GRMLN, was a wistful set of songs that had the bittersweet cast of summer's end, but on his first full-length, Empire, he trades that melancholy sound for a bright, active one that draws on '90s punk-pop. Out of all the styles from that decade -- grunge, shoegaze, trip-hop -- that found new life in the late 2000s and early 2010s, punk-pop remains fairly unexplored territory, and so Empire manages to sound nostalgic and relatively fresh at the same time. Contemporaries such as Cloud Nothings, Male Bonding, and Wavves have dipped their toes into these waters, and songs like "Blue Lagoon" and "Do You Know How It Feels" recall the work of those bands. Interestingly, and unlike some similar groups, GRMLN actually sounds best on Empire's slickest moments. Park cited Superchunk and Jimmy Eat World as influence