The Happiness of Tomorrow

Editors’ Notes “Too stoned to hang with the cool kids/Too broke to shop with the rich kids,” Neon Dreams frontman Frank Kadillac announces at the top of The Happiness of Tomorrow. But over the course of their second album, the Halifax duo wields that outsider status like a badge of honor. Neon Dreams are old-school pop-punk romantics navigating a post-everything Top 40 landscape, singing about going to Warped Tour and listening to “mixtapes that nobody likes” while rolling hip-hop beats, R&B flows, and indie guitars into songs that are as outwardly ecstatic as they are inwardly emo. “Don’t even know what I’ve been looking for/But I ain’t going to find it at a house party,” Kadillac sings on the introvert anthem “House Party”—but that doesn’t stop him from dropping a sky-high chorus that will get the whole living-room dance floor shouting along.