Librarians with Hickeys — what a name. You hear it and you immediately start constructing the image in your head: a tangle of smudged glasses, bookish rebellion, a zine-spun ethos slashing through the overcast skies of suburban ennui. Their track “Hello Operator” is nothing short of a jangle pop-fueled call to arms for the underachiever, the bored teenager, the disillusioned adult trapped in a system that runs on decibels of monotonous corporate soul-sucking. But instead of screaming bloody murder or railing against the system, they just slap it in the face with a smirk and soaring ringing guitars. The song is the lead track from their excellent — and one of our favorites of 2024 — record, How To Make Friends By Telephone (out on Big Stir Records).

The song’s pulse is a sweet relentless stomp, feeling like the clock ticking down to something important, but what? Who knows. There’s this sense of the need for connection and the futility of that need, an operator on the other side who may or may not be listening, a technological abyss where human connections dissolve into nothing. The song sweeps forward, like an old jukebox with a bad needle sharing thoughts and desires from one jump thought to the next. And isn’t that just the way? We’re all dialing up, trying to make a connection with something—another person, a higher power, ourselves—and getting lost in the static.

The lyrics, always a strength of this band, are power-pop blissful clarity in the deeply felt reaching out: “Hello operator, can you tell me one more time, what do people say when they talk to you? Hello operator, I really hope you don’t mind. I would like to talk to you. Yes, I would like to talk to you. I think I would like to talk to you.” It’s not just a plea for communication, but a brutal statement about how we’re all caged in by our own methods of connection. Forget the pleasant humdrum of politeness versus the insanity of the world around us, this is the telephone line, frayed and half-spliced, where any answer you get is an accident.

The kicker is the sound. At times driving power-pop cascading, ringing, jangling, like a late-night jam session fueled by too many cans of cheap beer and a pile of too many bad ideas that we took to heart instead of ignoring them. Yet somehow, in this pop gem chaos, there’s a profound sense of liberation. The cry of “hello” is the message.