Upset is Dork's go-to playlist for the best new heavy music, where urgent guitars and boundary-pushing bands meet moments that hit hard.
Outside a train station in Denver stands a twelve-foot man made of balloons, and he is running. Running heroically. Running eternally. Running, erm, absolutely effing nowhere, actually, due to not being an actual person. Every hour of every day since 2016 - bar a short break for maintenance, if we're being pedantic - he's remained stuck there, a monument to maximum effort and absolutely zero progress whatsoever. Kevin Hart passes him every working morning. He wrote most of his band's new album on that train, and recorded the demo vocals in his car at the park and ride, the great galloping nothing-man in view the entire time. Something had to give, and what it gave was a song. 'Balloon Man Running' is named after our inanimate hero, he says, "but the song is about feeling stuck and not being able to get where you're going."
Kevin Hart! Yes, really; no, not that one, a clarification even the band's own press release makes before anyone else can, and one he'll presumably be issuing for the rest of his natural life. This Kevin fronts Public Opinion, holds down a day job in Denver, and greets Dork amid scenes of rare personal triumph. "Today's going great so far. I'm off work, and the city is experiencing some respite from the last couple of weeks of excessive heat that seemingly everyone in the northern hemisphere has been dealing with." A day off AND a cool breeze? Rock and roll has indeed known darker times.
'The Curse of Public Opinion' is out today, and it lasts 23 minutes. Twenty-three! There are queues for festival toilets longer than that. Ten songs; in, out, done. And he has already heard the argument that the Borings are about to start. "This was a big discussion in-house," he says. "Listening back to it now, I understand where someone could've formed the opinion that it's 'too short', but that also runs counter to the creative side. From where I'm sitting, the record is a perfect length. It has the ups and downs and doesn't feel incomplete at all. We've all heard 14-16 song records that probably could've been improved by losing a couple of tracks, and I didn't want to become another example of that in order to meet some antiquated quota when most music listeners aren't spinning albums in full." He is, obviously, entirely correct, and the record makes the case perfectly: fast, snotty, tuneful, fed-up and totally free of flab, it's the sound of a band who threw out anything they didn't need except the point.
They took the long way here. Public Opinion crawled out of Denver's hardcore scene in 2020, put their first 12" out on the city's Convulse Records, and toured themselves silly before working out what they actually were. Kevin reviews his own back catalogue with a brutality most bands save for ex-members. "I think we weren't ready to be a band yet," he says of 2024's 'Painted On Smile'. "We were getting the chance to go play a whole bunch of shows without having the opportunity to write and discover what the band was. Up until this record, every time we went into a studio, the intention was to make higher-quality versions of the iPhone demos I had already recorded. That's no one's fault but mine; we just worked with what we had."
"We have all heard 14-16 song records that probably could've been improved by losing a couple tracks"
This time, they took a different route of total demolition and rebuild. "We took songs apart, put them back together and made a much more finished and complete version of them. I think the band is fully realised on TCOPO." Going in, he says, the mood was "some blend of trepidation and freedom, as odd as that sounds. The intention was to try to expand, but with that comes anxieties about potentially losing what makes it Public Opinion along the way. It feels like we threaded the needle there."
The operation runs on a rotating cast of long-serving Denver punks, but the wider family tree pulls its weight too. Militarie Gun's Ian Shelton produced the early records, Drug Church's Patrick Kindlon guested on last year's 'Laughing Academy', and this album finds The Movielife's Vinnie Caruana dropping in to sing on a re-made 'Modern Convenience' - the title track of that first 12", reassembled for active service like everything else around here.
"2026 so far has been a strong contender for one of the best years of my life"
The hardcore tag was always more a vague shrug in the direction of something easy to label than a full description of their sound ("we were never much of a hardcore band sonically," he confirms), and what they've become instead is a garage-punk band with an enemy: your For You page. The wellness gurus, the infographic healers, the seven-slide sages promising you closure between adverts; "I think all of that is fake as hell for the most part," he says, warming up. "So we're clear, I'm very aware of the positive impact that seeking professional help can have on one's life, and I've gone through that myself. But regurgitated nonsense from a TikTok algorithm is NOT the same thing. Expertise is important, and we're seeing that the death of expertise is happening in real time. The handful of examples in my own life are people who learned the wrong lessons and are now sharing them as gospel."
There's range inside the sprint, mind. "The catchy big rock parts are catchier and bigger, while the downbeat stuff is softer," he reckons, flagging the record's one proper curveball: "There's an interlude on the record that is a single guitar chord, piano and singing that could feel like a departure if consumed by itself, but within the context of the record still feels very Public Opinion to me."
Momentum, meanwhile, is functioning as it should. Spring brought their biggest tour yet, three weeks across North America opening for Drug Church, White Reaper and Spy, and the year is scoring highly on the Hart index. "2026 so far has been a strong contender for one of the best years of my life, truth be told," he offers. "We started off the year by getting to make a new record in January and then got to spend the rest of the winter at home with family and partners, which is always lovely."
And next? The good stuff, in bulk. "We're going to play a lot of shows and try to get to some new places, the UK and Europe being at the top of that list," he says. "I've started to write the next record as well, but that's in the very early stages, and who knows what's to come of them. I'm sure more music, more shows, the usual stuff to expect from us."
Book the flights, someone. The Balloon Man, bless him, will be back at it on Monday morning, giving absolutely everything, going absolutely nowhere. The band who wrote his song will be doing no such thing.
Public Opinion's album 'The Curse of Public Opinion' is out now.
