Karina Rykman truly steps into her own on Late Checkout, the bassist’s sophomore album since stepping out under her own name.
The album’s opening number and lead single, “Easy Rider,” bops along as Rykman sings of adventures along a classic road trip through northern California. (She also rips a guitar solo on the track.) Next, the album’s title track covers a delayed departure that reads as more rebellious than hotel sanctioned. It’s the album’s thesis, and everything downstream either rides that high or argues with it.
The middle stretch is where the tempo does the talking. “Shoegaze Summer” and “Riverside Drive” pick up the pace, swapping the getaway-car-sprint for something woozier—devotion with static on the line and an overcaffeinated joyride that keeps promising just one more lap before sunrise. “Zoom Out” turns the exhaustion into an actual flight pattern, while “Childlike” answers with the record’s warmest, most reckless-in-a-good-way stretch, offering a lyric sheet that evokes LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” rewritten for two young people hiding beneath a restaurant table. “90” is the queasiest turn on the tracklist, flirting with mortality under a melody that is equal parts sedated and elated. “Old Enough to Know Better” fights back with fire instead of fear.
The album’s one unguarded laugh, an inside joke for those who follow Karina on social media, is “Seafood Towers.” It’s highly specific and genuinely funny, with no metaphor required. “Balcony” cranks the drama back up before “Spacecase” starts as a phone-in-the-lake fantasy and quietly loses the plot by its own ending. All of which leads to “Where You At?” the hushed comedown the whole record’s been dodging.
This is Rykman at her most mellow and introspective, the moment of reckoning when the late checkout arrives. And it turns out her reluctance to leave was never really about the room.
