Pete Donnelly starts off 2022 with the power-pop sampler EP ‘Anthem of the Time’

Singer-songwriter Pete Donnelly says he’s ringing in the new year with some power-pop goodness. “No subtlety here,” he writes on Bandcamp. “I usually bristle at music categories but this one seems apropos.”

The project in question is Anthem of the Time, a delightful five-song set that allows you to trace Donnelly’s sonic lineage through Nada Surf and Fountains of Wayne, through The Caulfields and his own band The Figgs, all the way back through progenitors Big Star and of course The Beatles.

The set was recorded last year at his upstate suburban NYC studio Katonah Sound, and includes a mix of lush and emotive cuts like “The Opposite Side,” an outtake from Donnelly’s 2021 album The Perpetual Tryst, as well as raw and immediate four-track style tunes like “Play Music,” a jaunty tune about the joy and release we find in songs. It ends with “Half The Time It Takes,” a fingerpicked acoustic instrumental that he describes as an “improv apertif.”

“I’m overly earnest at times,” he writes, “and I’m just trying to have a bit of fun in the process.”

Listen below and grab a download at Bandcamp.