Most underdog rock documentaries paint a doleful portrait of neglected geniuses who have been cruelly denied their due. Director Edgar Wright’s 2021 love letter to Sparks, The Sparks Brothers, doesn’t exactly make that case: The copious clips of brothers Ron and Russell Mael performing on Top of the Pops in the ’70s and joshing with Dick Clark on American Bandstand in the ’80s indicate this band hasn’t exactly been wallowing in obscurity. What Wright’s film argues is that Sparks simply aren’t popular enough. But thanks to The Sparks Brothers’ Netflix-abetted dissemination, and the Maels’ subsequent César Award win for scoring Leos Carax’s maniacal musical Annette, the brothers are currently enjoying an unprecedented degree of mainstream attention for a couple of septuagenarians on their 26th album—complete with a Cate Blanchett co-sign and prime Yellowjackets placement. This summer, the brothers will headline the Hollywood Bowl, the same venue where they saw the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania. Fifty years after these American Anglophiles first became cause célèbres in the UK, Sparks are an international institution—and with The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, they meet their moment head-on and thoroughly whomp that sucker. The album marks the Maels’ return to Island (incubator of their earliest ’70s hits) after 47 years, but the move doesn’t so much signal a return to their glam glory days as reaffirm Sparks’ surging currency.
Sparks are rightfully praised as savvy shapeshifters, but the past decade has been one of relative aesthetic consistency. After a half-century of bounding between rock theatricality, electro-disco austerity, and classical frippery, recent releases like Hippopotamus and A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip have synthesized the Maels’ interests into sleek hybrid models, presenting a vision of pop music that belongs equally to Old Hollywood and outer space. The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte stays the course but exudes even more vitality and verve, striking the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire. What Kimono My House was to their glitter-rock phase and No. 1 in Heaven was to their synth-pop period, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte is to this late-career era of holistic stability: While it may not aspire to the same game-changing sense of surprise as those ecstatic classics, it nonetheless represents a new high-water mark for 21st-century Sparks.
As titles go, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte would make for a perfectly wistful Belle and Sebastian record, but Sparks present that melancholy café scene as a five-alarm fire. On the opening title track, buzzing synthesizer and panic-attack beats direct our attention to a weeping woman who’s experiencing not so much a midlife crisis as a middle-class crisis: the appearance of having it all but feeling empty inside. As the pressure mounts, “The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte” transforms into an electro-shocked “Eleanor Rigby,” its dejected protagonist serving as an avatar: “So many people are crying in their latte,” Russell repeats, providing a bumper-sticker slogan for a record that suggests the true meaning of life is to brace yourself for its endless disappointments.