Hit Piece, the third album by Chicago's The Kickback, is an attempt to leave everything on the table. At 16 tracks, but under 45 minutes, the band has amassed every conceivable hook they could find and beat you over the head with before running off into the night. 

The album is the finished result of 54 demos, one long hiatus before, during, and after the pandemic, and singer and songwriter Billy Yost hearing one of producer and engineer Noam Wallenberg's productions playing in a tiki bar in South Dakota.

"I was visiting my family back home, and my wife and I went out. We were sitting at the bar and a song by (Chicago artist) Jennifer Hall came on," Yost explains. "I didn't know it was her, I just knew it was really good. I asked my wife to Shazam it. It was produced by the same guy I'd seen on all those Reverb videos I'd watched on YouTube while I was learning to record at home, and he was in Chicago."

Yost and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Leu collaborated with Wallenberg for a full year, recording at Wallenberg's house before moving to a proper studio. Guitarist Jonny Ifergan, freshly moved to Brooklyn, eventually flew out to record a flurry of guitars. 

"If the band never records another thing in our lives, this is what we are," Yost says about the band's third album. "There was no time crunch, there was no panicking. This record is a high point for me at the moment. I don't hear the pain points like I do on our first two LPs. We had the time to live in them and do the absolute best we could."