Across his latest full-length release ‘The Aviation Station’, Exeter-based artist Twenny Bucks allows panic, humour, vulnerability and distorted guitar noise to collide freely, creating a record that feels like a vivid snapshot of one person’s mind in motion.
The project is entirely the work of Ed, a professional luthier who writes, performs, records, produces and mixes his music inside the same shed where he builds guitars. And that setting feels inseparable from the album’s personality. There’s something fitting about songs shaped among timber, tools and sawdust, where instruments are both carefully constructed objects and devices designed to make an enormous racket.
Since finding a clearer artistic identity on 2022’s ‘Sleeper’ EP, Twenny Bucks has pushed further into a sound informed by the abrasive guitars and angular energy of Queens of the Stone Age, IDLES, Viagra Boys and Ramkot. Yet ‘The Aviation Station’s strongest quality is Ed’s willingness to let the ridiculous and the sincere exist without separating them.
Opening track ‘Small Green Frog’ captures that balance immediately. Racing forward for less than three minutes, the song imagines escape from adult responsibility through the apparently preferable life of a tiny amphibian. The concept is funny, but the impulse beneath it is recognisable. Bills, expectations and constant obligation can make a simpler existence sound remarkably attractive.
Elsewhere, the album moves into more reflective territory, addressing mortality and the instability beneath ordinary routines. This shift creates deliberate tonal whiplash, but it also reflects how thought actually behaves. A day can move from an absurd joke to a sudden awareness of life’s fragility without warning, and Twenny Bucks sees no reason to tidy those reactions into separate records.
The production follows a similar philosophy. Vintage-style analogue textures and straightforward distortion are combined with a cleaner modern mix, giving the guitars weight without turning the record into a nostalgic exercise. The sound can be rough around the edges, but that roughness feels intentional rather than unfinished.
As a completely self-directed release, ‘The Aviation Station’ benefits from its lack of external restraint. Ed is free to move between existential reflection and amphibian escapism, between tightly constructed riffs and ideas that appear to have arrived fully formed in the middle of the afternoon.
In all, ‘The Aviation Station’ presents Twenny Bucks at his most complete: part garage-rock craftsman, part anxious observer and part man who would genuinely prefer, at least occasionally, to become a small green frog.
It may be sawdust-covered “maccies rock”, but beneath the noise and jokes lies a sharply recognisable portrait of modern exhaustion, and a reminder that taking life seriously doesn’t require treating every song that way.
