Worship This!'s The Nard Years reminds me a lot of another band that has recently risen to public consciousness, Red City Radio. Both bands straddle a line between pop-punk and post-hardcore but not in the way that pop-punk and rock bands of the early 2000s were labelled "emo." The songs on this seven-inch are more lyrically introspective than pop-punk is traditionally considered and relies less on the strict verse-chorus-verse structures of a pop song, yet the mood is generally brighter and vocal melody tends to have more emphasis than traditional post-hardcore. It is the kind of aesthetic that Samiam's body of work has always played with but Worship This! temper that, perhaps because of location, with a debt to a noodly Midwestern style of guitar playing.

As the title implies, "Michigan Ocean" deals with a kind of alienation in people moving away in actual space but also distance of a social nature. The repeated phrase of Don't wanna die here! located within a context of people going away to school and getting drunk in oceans that aren't really there is pretty affecting. That is what good "art" is supposed to do right? Produce thought and emotion. While feelings of claustrophobia aren't unusual, especially within a Midwestern experience, caught between coasts and all that, Worship This! conveys this feeling especially well both lyrically and musically. However, "Posture Perfect"'s hi-hat heavy beat lends to a looseness when coupled with the unwieldy guitar lines that isn't commonly found when these types of ideas and feelings are expressed that allow it to standout.

It is difficult to put into words what makes this EP work so well and stand out from the rest but that is probably because it works in a lot of subliminal in between spaces. If you like your music to be extremely straightforward or too obscure for it's own good this probably isn't the record for you.