Story Pile: Can We Hang Out Sometime, by Good Kid

Can We Hang Out Sometime is a 2026 album (like, two months ago, April, to be specific), by the band Good Kid. Good Kid are a band that’s existed since 2018, and released singles over the past eight years, but which have only recently bundled their songs together into ‘an album.’ Knowing this, going into it, I didn’t expect this album to have any kind of narrative the way that other more structured albums from my listening have been, which meant any narrative or pattern I found, I figured, was just going to be much more representative of the themes that this author engages with.

Oh yeah, author, hang on, just in case you’re new here and not familiar with the work of Roland Barthes, I talk about ‘the author’ of a work as a character who is perceivable as the person that is ‘saying’ the things the album is saying. I don’t mean to psychoanalyse the actual people who made the album, this is just about listening to the songs and trying to treat them sincerely as if the song itself is a completed text.

For an overall sound, Can We Hang Out Sometime reminds me of two specific bands; it has a jangly, irregular sound that reminds me of Franz Ferdinand, and it has a plaintive, nerd-culture-adjacent (which is these days just ‘the culture’) vocalist and song style that reminds me of Imagine Dragons. The actual lyrics of the songs (the things I think I’m best equipped to engage with, because I am not good with music) tend towards asymmetries in emotional exchanges, where two parties have different needs out of the same thing. There’s a lot of emotional uncertainty, and the lyricist seems to really like the device where they start out with a mundane, material placement in the world, and then the lyrics drift away from what’s happening. The lyrics naturally have repetition, because, you know, it’s a song, but the choice of phrases also seems to me to suggest the singer is trying to convey an anxiety.

The vocalist isn’t doing a lot of ridiculous acrobatics; I think of this as a ‘singable’ album, where someone with my middling masc-base range can probably follow along with the song, and only occasionally disappoint the people around me listening to me.

What follows from here is my track-by-track notes and some final thoughts, so I guess if you care about… spoilers? For songs? That may make you think of how they sound, in a single particular way? Then you could avoid this.

If you want to listen to the album, here!

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