Rating: 8/10

Spotify shoveled Meet Me @ The Altar’s new single “Garden” into the dark corners of an obscurely alternative playlist, thus giving the song a well-deserved platform, while simultaneously dismissing a clean-cut pop-punk gem that would have Blink-182 and that girl from Lemonade Mouth salivating. Have your opinion on pop-punk—I have mine, it’s not great—but Meet Me @ The Altar is entirely worth checking out. Under the echoed clinginess of “I’ll always be right here when everything’s unclear,” live classic guitar hooks and a drum line that says everything Travis Barker has been stumbling over for the past 20 years. The all-black, al- female group cuts away at the pasty face of what Green Day and Fallout Boy essentially turned into “Disney Rock.” It isn’t token diversity that makes Meet Me @ The Altar’s new single so remarkable, it’s the musing over how great the genre could have been if they had come sooner.