Cape Town’s SIDEPIECE are a punk band with a sense of humour and something to say, and Faux Confidence is their first proper statement. It’s a title that tells you something about what you’re in for: sardonic, self-aware, and not particularly interested in taking the long way around.
Sidepiece built their early reputation through their sweaty live shows and a self-titled EP released in 2024. The four-track sprint contained ‘Right Person, Wrong Time’, ‘The Hustle’, ‘Crisis’, and ‘Don’t Hold Your Breath.’ All four appear here remastered and folded into an eight-track debut that fills out the picture with four new songs. For fans already convinced by the EP, the new tracks show that there’s more where that came from.
Lead vocalist Nathan Garrett’s delivery is often staccato — focussed on rhythm first and melody second. This isn’t a flaw the band is working around; it’s a well-worn punk staple, and SIDEPIECE lean into it deliberately. The vocals land like percussion. Syllables snap into place on the beat, and the effect, when it’s working, demands a room full of people shouting back. Pair that Nathan’s knack for visceral ad libs and you get a band with real personality baked into the vocals alone. He is accompanied by Louwrens Venter on guitar and Pierre Horne on the drums, who brings more play to the otherwise driving rhythm section.
When it works, it really works. ‘Who’ opens the album and earns its exclamation mark inside the first ten seconds: the main riff gets your head moving immediately, and the whole track has an energy that begs to be experienced shoulder-to-shoulder with a crowd screaming the “WHOOO” refrain back at the stage. It’s short and to the point, with a sharp end. The breakdown is a genuine highlight, and you might find yourself wishing it went a bit longer — but it’s better to leave them wanting more than overstaying your welcome.
‘Right Person, Wrong Time’ makes it clear why it made it onto the initial EP release. It’s a great demonstration of what Garrett’s rhythmic vocal style can do when it has the right vehicle: punchy, almost solemn, reinforced by both the riff and drums to get your head banging.
And then there’s ‘The Hustle.’ Whatever else you want to say about SIDEPIECE, ‘The Hustle’ is a serious romp. It’s the most immediately fun thing on the record — groovy in a way the newer tracks don’t quite match, with a momentum that makes it the benchmark everything else gets measured against. The commentary is both funny and sharp enough to bite the tongue firmly pushed into its cheek. If you came for a good time, this is the song.
‘GenFT’ is a complicated one. The chorus isn’t particularly satisfying — there’s a sense of something being reached for that isn’t quite grasped. But then the song’s back half arrives: an ad lib that’s pure SIDEPIECE at their most charming, leading into the “all we think about” refrain and a breakdown that’s genuinely great. But the transition back into the chorus feels like it left something on the table by not returning to the infectious fun of the “sex money drugs” interjection.
‘Bad Habits’ opens with less than the band’s usual immediate pull, and while the layered chorus vocals are a nice touch, it ends with a repeated chorus where a bridge or breakdown was clearly called for. It’s a flat exit from a song that had been building nicely. ‘Knock Knock’ shows off some of the band’s heavier influences. The vocals have a great rawness and snarl in the verses that would also have been welcome in ‘Who’, but the final chorus arrives without the vocal switch-up needed to properly bring it home.
Faux Confidence is a decent debut with a handful of genuinely great songs, plenty of personality, and some witty writing. SIDEPIECE have real strengths — the vocal character, the crowd-ready energy, the short-and-punchy approach — and they deploy them well enough that even the album’s weaker stretches don’t outstay their welcome. It’s a record that leaves you wanting the next one to push harder on what makes this one interesting.
And if you end up with ‘Hustle’ stuck in your head for a week, consider that all the review you actually needed.
