Who's Laughing Now Studio Release

Alex Freund

May 12, 20232 min read

I can't recall what was more attention grabbing initially, the simple bright yellow back ground or the emotionally charged and raw vocals of Durry's viral hit Who's Laughing Now. If you don't know by now, the group out of Minnesota has sky rocketed to the indie scene headlining a tour incredibly quick all things considered and it's all thanks to a short tune Austin Durry and his sister Taryn posted to TikTok where it struck a chord that road the wave of the pop punk resurgence. Talk about a run on sentence.

Yesterday my friends, I say my friends because I met them once and they regularly like my tweets, re-released their hit Who's Laughing Now with a whole new level of production and labor of love. Now I will admit when I saw they were releasing an album and said they were reworking some of their tracks my immediate gut reaction was...negative. How could an artist rework something that had so much passion and rawness to the original only to "water it down and give it cleaner lines"? But, as I should have guessed, I was sorely mistaken on that thought.

When I listened to the new version of Who's Laughing Now it landed on areas of the brain and heart that the original almost broke through to. With cleaner levels that let the raw vocals and energetic instrumentation pierce to the core to truly tap into how the group sounds live and what the band Durry represents, at least for me. Misfit creatives that have continually battled not only the expectations of those before them, but their inner psyche that started to believe the cruel joke that is living by the book.

For many, to get a viral hit and touring the United States would be the dream. The end of the line.

It takes a really passionate artist and group to take that success and rework it.