The American Professionals

San Francisco hook-heavy guitar pop band The American Professionals’ core members Chuck Lindo and Cheryl Hendrickson’s music and personal lives are both intertwined and parallel. This husband/wife team makes that paradox possible on their latest release, Sympathetic Overdrive out June 23 via their own label Charlie In The Box Music. The record is a ten-song genre-hopping display of both unity and individuality, fear and hope, love and scorn.

Sympathetic Overdrive, the follow-up to 2013’s We Make It Our Business, pulls from a more personal space with songs that reflect their life together, highlighting forces both internal and external that can cause people to buckle under or grow. This new record combines the thick, chunky hooks and straight-up pop of the previous album with layered melodies and harmonies, diverse instrumentation and more intimate lyrics that reflect their own emotional narrative. At any turn there could be a sweet, retro-styled love song (“Higher Degree”), a bouncy indie pop tune (“The Story”), nestled alongside grinding, haunting rock (“Familiar Ghosts”), driving power pop (“Just Do Something”), and hints of Leonard Cohen’s darker melodies (“Civic Living”).