A split that made local sense

Nine days after Young Prisms released their debut album, Friends for Now, an older two-song record offers the sharpest introduction to where the San Francisco group sits. The 2010 split with Weekend is only a seven-inch, but its scale is useful: one song per band, no compilation sprawl and no need to pretend that two neighbors with similar effects pedals must share an identity.

The physical release paired Weekend’s “End Times” with Young Prisms’ “I Don’t Get Much.” Retail documentation identifies it as a UK Transparent pressing, catalog number TP014, with the Weekend song on the A-side and the Young Prisms song on the B-side. Young Prisms’ own catalog dates its contribution to May 2010 and gives it a running time of 3:12; MusicBrainz also records the joint release as a 2010 single. Young Prisms HHV MusicBrainz

The format intensifies the comparison. A split album can absorb detours and gradual changes of mood; this record allows each group one concise argument. Turning the disc over moves directly from Weekend’s four-and-a-half-minute pressure chamber to Young Prisms’ shorter, more diffuse construction. The sequence encourages listeners to notice choices—how quickly each band establishes rhythm, where it places the voice and whether distortion behaves like impact or atmosphere—that might disappear when either song is heard deep inside an album.

That bare discographical record is enough to establish the object, but the music explains why the pairing works. Both bands turn obscured vocals, repetition and overloaded guitars into pop structure. Weekend make those elements feel compressed and confrontational. Young Prisms let them drift and overlap, allowing the melodic center to appear less like a hook than a shape glimpsed through fog. The shared vocabulary is real; so is the difference in grammar.

Weekend: force with a melodic center

By the time of the split, Weekend were still early in their run. Slumberland’s account says the trio formed in San Francisco in late 2009. Their album Sports followed on November 9, 2010, and placed “End Times” eighth in a ten-track sequence. The label’s page describes the song as a meeting of power pop and the heavier end of My Bloody Valentine—a promotional formulation, certainly, but an accurate pointer to its double action. Slumberland Records

“End Times” does not use noise as decoration around an otherwise clean song. The distortion is the environment in which the song has to move. Drums and low frequencies press forward while the vocal and melody fight for partial visibility. The result is severe without becoming formless: the tune is present, but Weekend deny it the comfort of a polished foreground.

Contemporary reviews repeatedly heard that balance. Pitchfork called Weekend a San Francisco noise-pop trio and emphasized the strong songwriting beneath Sports’ volume; its review singled out “End Times” for the sweetness of its melody inside a dense, low-end-heavy field. The Line of Best Fit focused on the same track’s sustained tension and placed it within an album of heavily distorted guitar waves. Pitchfork The Line of Best Fit

Those descriptions matter because “loud” alone tells us almost nothing. The track’s appeal is not maximum signal for its own sake. It is the contrast between pressure and yearning, between a rhythm section that keeps the song physically direct and a vocal that seems to recede even as the arrangement bears down. The familiar reference points—shoegaze for the guitar density, post-punk for the unease, noise rock for the abrasion—locate the tools. They do not substitute for the construction.

Other period criticism confirms that Weekend’s darkness was more than a surface pose. The A.V. Club heard Sports as vulnerable and inward-looking, while Drowned in Sound stressed the dynamic rhythm section that held its abrasive mix together. The latter also reported that the young group’s scarce pre-album records had appeared through Mexican Summer and Transparent. In that sequence, the Young Prisms split is not an orphaned curiosity; it is part of the short run through which Weekend’s sound reached listeners before and alongside the debut. The A.V. Club Drowned in Sound

Young Prisms: a single becomes album architecture

“I Don’t Get Much” has a different afterlife. Young Prisms’ Bandcamp page preserves it as the sole stream from their side of the split, but the song now also occupies track nine on Friends for Now. Kanine’s official ten-song listing places it between “Feel Fine” and the closer, “Stay Awake.” AllMusic dates the album to January 18, 2011, lists a total running time of 35:56 and confirms the track at the same 3:12 shown by the band. Kanine Records AllMusic

That move from split side to penultimate album track changes the song’s job. On the seven-inch, “I Don’t Get Much” must represent Young Prisms opposite another band. On the album, it arrives after more than half an hour of related textures and helps prepare the comedown of “Stay Awake.” The recording is no longer simply a calling card; it becomes part of the album’s pacing.

The track’s opening does not announce itself with Weekend’s blunt force. Guitar layers accumulate around a pulse, the voices sit inside rather than above the mix, and the boundaries between individual parts soften. The performance still has weight, but its motion is less linear. Density expands and contracts; melody survives as a repeated contour rather than a brightly exposed chorus. At 3:12, it is among the album’s more compact statements, which makes its control easier to hear.

That approach fits the larger record. AllMusic characterizes Friends for Now through large guitars, shifting dynamics and vocals that emerge from the haze, while its biography traces Young Prisms’ path through a 2009 Mexican Summer release and 2010 splits with Small Black, Weekend and Mathemagic before the Kanine album. The group was not arriving without a paper trail. The debut gathered a set of ideas already tested in smaller formats. AllMusic biography

There is also a personnel dimension to the album’s layered sound. AllMusic credits Matthew Allen, Giovanni Betteo, Jason Hendardy, Stefanie Hodapp and Jordan Silbert as group members, with Monte Vallier handling engineering and mixing and James Barone also credited as an engineer. That is not evidence that every audible gesture can be assigned neatly to one player; it suggests the opposite. “I Don’t Get Much” works by making ensemble texture more important than instrumental display. AllMusic credits

One city, two different uses of noise

A split single invites comparison, but it does not require a winner. Weekend’s side is more compressed, using impact and repetition to keep tension high. Young Prisms’ side is more porous, with voices and guitars sharing the same blurred middle distance. One song makes melody feel trapped inside an assault; the other lets melody dissolve into atmosphere and then gather again.

The distinction also resists an overly tidy story about San Francisco in 2010. Pitchfork situated Weekend among a regional field that included the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Girls and the Castle Face orbit, while explicitly noting the bands’ different sound and songcraft. Young Prisms belonged to that broader burst of guitar activity without duplicating Weekend or the city’s garage-rock contingent. Geography explains access, bills and conversation; it does not make aesthetics uniform.

The labels widen the frame. Transparent joined the groups for one compact UK release. Slumberland gave Weekend’s “End Times” a place inside Sports. Kanine gave “I Don’t Get Much” a new position inside Friends for Now. Each context asks for a different kind of listening: direct comparison on the split, immersion on the albums. The same songs can therefore serve as both introductions and structural parts of larger statements.

That is why this modest record remains worth hearing now that Young Prisms’ debut has arrived. It catches two young San Francisco bands at a point of contact, using related materials while already pulling away from each other. Weekend turn distortion into pressure and keep the melody under siege. Young Prisms turn it into depth, letting the melody hover within the accumulated sound. Two tracks are enough to document the resemblance—and to show why it should never be mistaken for sameness.