San Diego (US) band, Cardboard Boxer, have been making music together for five years. Waste My Time is the latest single from this punk indie rock band.
Waste My Time is all about the feeling of stagnation. The feeling of getting older and nothing changing. This seems to be quite a recurring theme among songwriters since the start of the pandemic . Cardboard Boxer capture this theme with heavy guitars and punchy drums.
Starting on panned electric guitar and an exciting build, Waste My Time literally wastes no time getting to the meat of the track. The panned guitar riff in the right speaker reminded us of Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine). The repeated guitar hook throughout the track brings the listener in and makes you feel part of the song.
The layered vocals are a great, authentic touch, helping the track feel like a 90s punk/rock track – similar in many ways to Terrorvision.
There’s a sudden stop at one point, fairly early on in the track that really made us sit up and pay attention. It makes the listener wonder what’s going to happen next and really kept us on our toes. There’s also some great rise and fall and superb separation between sections.
Speaking of sections – there’s a lovely breakdown section with some fantastic toms work. An exhilarating build into a stabbed section was also extremely well performed.
Cardboard Boxer are truly accomplished musicians. This sounds like a band that would really get the crowd going and ones to watch out for – we can really picture them in a festival setting.
From a production perspective, the bass could use a boost around 140Hz to fill the low end out a little. To our ears, the right hand rhythm guitar is a little heavy around 200Hz and again around 800Hz. A couple of careful cuts in these two places could really tidy up the mix and improve the overall clarity of the track.
Cardboard Boxer was a new name to us today, but judging by the quality of musicianship and songwriting, this is a band that we’ll be returning to many times in the future. For fans of Terrorvision, Blink 182, Rage Against The Machine, we urge you to add Cardboard Boxer to your playlist.