Wednesday May 21, 2025
There’s a moment in There’s No Time For Presents when a pocketknife slices through paper. It’s a sound that cuts through the track like a breath held too long, a knife edge pressing against the skin of a song already stretched to breaking.
The Burbs, a trio from Bells Beach who’ve been carving their way through Australia’s rock scene with a raw, grunge-tinged intensity, have never sounded this exposed. In 2024, they dropped Sunlight Spills Across The Swimming Pool, a demo album that landed somewhere between a scream and a sigh, a series of late-night confessions wrapped in barbed-wire guitars and post-punk sneers.
There’s No Time For Presents is the natural, bitter aftertaste of that record — a song that doesn’t just show its wounds but digs the knife deeper, twisting it in the process.It opens with “From somewhere deep in a hereditary trap / Couldn’t do shit to hold you back,” a lyric that hangs heavy like a storm cloud. There’s no redemption arc here, no crescendo that sweeps you off your feet. Instead, The Burbs keep you pinned down, the guitars muted and the drums simmering like an argument that’s about to boil over.
The rhythm section is relentless, hammering out a pulse that feels less like a beat and more like a ticking clock. Producer Aaron Dobos lets the band bleed. The production is unvarnished, raw, every strummed chord and murmured lyric like a bruise that’s barely begun to heal. Brook Mckeon’s vocal delivery is bruised and bitter, his words rasping against the back of his throat as he sings “What a nice weight to get off your chest / All it took was a pocketknife and a press.” It’s a line that feels less like a lyric and more like a confession overheard through a motel wall.
What’s unnerving about There’s No Time For Presents is how the song refuses to resolve. The guitars build, the vocals intensify, but the song just hangs there, unresolved, a wound left open. The refrain — “What happens at the times when you’re not sure?” — repeats like a mantra, as if trying to shake off a memory that won’t stop haunting.
For The Burbs, There’s No Time For Presents is more than just a song. It’s a refusal to pretty up the mess, a stubborn insistence on leaving the wound open and letting the air sting.
