Cartel - Learning How To Cope
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Thirteen years is a long time to leave a band’s story unfinished. For Cartel, however, the gap between 2013’s Collider and Learning How To Cope doesn’t feel like lost time so much as a period of necessary recalibration. After spending the past year and a half celebrating the 20th anniversary of Chroma, the Conyers, Georgia trio could have easily leaned into nostalgia. Instead, they’ve used their past as a launching point for something considerably more restless.
Learning How To Cope is an album about confronting what comes next. Produced by vocalist Will Pugh and featuring drums from Atom Willard, Cartel’s fifth studio album retains the band’s instinct for enormous hooks while pushing further into heavier riffs, ’90s alternative-rock textures and the hardcore sensibilities that shaped them long before Chroma made them a household name among pop-punk and emo listeners. The result is a record that sounds unmistakably like Cartel while refusing to simply recreate the sound that made them successful.
“All Singing, All Dancing” gets things moving with an immediate sense of urgency, its melodic instincts counterbalanced by a sharper lyrical edge. The album’s central idea is established almost immediately: retreat is no longer an option. Pugh’s declaration that listeners can “summon the courage to take a stand” establishes the record’s recurring tension between despair and action, setting the tone for an album that would rather wrestle with uncomfortable realities than provide an easy escape from them.
That confrontation continues with “Oxy Moron” and “Deadbeat Drag,” two songs that pull heavily from Cartel’s ’90s alternative-rock influences. Their riffs feel rougher and less polished than the band’s classic material, giving the songs a sense of looseness and abrasion that suits the album’s subject matter. Rather than sacrificing melody for heaviness, Cartel understands that the two can coexist—and often become more effective when they do.
“Constants,” featuring Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, provides one of the album’s most atmospheric moments. Its airiness recalls Collider, but the emotional context is different. There is a reflective quality to the song that fits an album concerned with examining what remains when the expectations, disappointments and identities accumulated over a career begin to fall away.
Pugh’s own story gives Learning How To Cope much of its emotional weight. After stepping away from music to pursue golf, he describes realizing how much of his self-worth had become tied to Cartel’s success. That realization appears to have liberated his songwriting. Instead of writing with the pressure to live up to Chroma hanging over every note, Pugh approaches these songs with the freedom of someone who has stopped asking whether he is allowed to make them.
That newfound immediacy is particularly evident on “Inside Out,” the first song Pugh completed for the record. The songwriting throughout Learning How To Cope often feels instinctive rather than over-engineered, as though the band is following ideas wherever they lead. “Think Twice” tightens that approach into something more tense and riff-driven, while “Supercalapocalypticexpialidocious” turns Pugh’s full-throated aggression into one of the record’s most exhilarating performances. Yet the album’s most significant departure from Cartel’s past may be its willingness to directly engage with the world around it. “Shirts & Skins” is the clearest expression of the band’s hardcore roots, functioning as an unapologetically confrontational response to social and political violence. Its very existence rejects the notion that a rock band must remain safely detached from difficult subjects. “Disarmed” similarly confronts bigotry and close-mindedness, while “Give Or Take” directs its frustration toward an industry and system that Pugh feels has repeatedly worked against the band.
These songs aren't detached political observations. They are personal, angry, and deliberately cathartic. Pugh isn't attempting to disguise frustration behind metaphor when a direct statement will do. That bluntness can be jarring, but it is also what gives Learning How To Cope its sense of conviction.
The album's closing statement, “Everything’s Fine,” takes that confrontation somewhere more intimate. Its widescreen perspective considers the world being inherited by the next generation, touching on international violence while also reflecting Pugh’s concerns as a father in a country repeatedly confronted by gun violence. After an album filled with anger, the song offers something more complicated than optimism: the recognition that despair and responsibility can exist simultaneously.
That distinction is crucial to Learning How To Cope. Cartel aren't pretending that everything is fine. They are arguing that acknowledging what isn't fine is the first step toward doing something about it.
Even the album title carries that ambiguity. Learning how to cope isn't the same as learning how to accept. Across these twelve immense songs, Cartel process disappointment, betrayal, injustice, aging, fatherhood, artistic identity, and the complicated reality of returning to a band that once defined such a significant part of their lives. There is grief here, but there is also renewed purpose.
Most importantly, the band doesn't sound like it is trying to prove that it still belongs in the conversation. Learning How To Cope sounds like a group that has stopped worrying about where it belongs. That makes the album's heavier moments feel less like an attempt to reinvent Cartel and more like a return to something that was always there. The melodic craftsmanship remains. The hooks remain. The emotional directness remains. But the edges are sharper, the riffs heavier, and the perspective considerably broader.
After Chroma became a defining record for a generation, Cartel could have spent this chapter simply celebrating what they had accomplished. Instead, Learning How To Cope asks what happens when a band looks at its legacy and decides it isn't finished yet. Additionally, for a group returning after thirteen years, that sense of urgency is remarkable. For Cartel, it may be the most honest way forward.
Check out more from Cartel: Website: https://cartelrocks.com
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