If you’re sick of college bands writing about doing drugs and being lazy — and it seems like just about every college band on earth can’t think of much more to write about — it’s easy to dismiss Face for Radio. Couches, booze, pot, girls, jobs, Netflix, quarter-life anxiety, copious usage of “fuck” and “fucked up”: it’s all here on the Eugene band’s debut album I Can Explain…

What’s different is the almost virginal purity of the music. There’s hardly any distortion and though horns are one of this band’s big selling points, they mostly just toot contentedly in the background. Singers Spencer Tanner and Billy Zimbrick sound like choirboys. Though they’re inspired by ska-punk, there’s no grit — none of that rough-throated Tim Armstrong shit. In fact, mercifully, they rarely sound like they’re trying to be manly. I was reminded often of early pop-punk bands like the Descendents and the Undertones, who understood it was more punk to be wimpy and soft-spoken than to wave your middle fingers in everyone’s face and start fights.

Another tie to punk is how uniform all the songs sound here. They use maybe two guitar tones on the whole album. The horns pretty much do the same thing on each song. There are few frills, enough that when they make use of the studio in any particularly experimental way — like when “Cosmos” disappears into the void and revs back up with a digital whirr — it’s jarring.

I like to joke that college bands should be judged by how much their albums sound like the Chili Peppers. Too many young rock bands go into the studio with a mainstream-rock idea of how their work should sound and come out with disheartening, bone-dry EPs. Not these guys; it was refreshing hearing how warm this music sounds. The compression enhances the texture rather than subtracting from it and the instruments are mixed to roughly equal volumes (quiet). At one point on “Educated Guess,” Tanner shouts “Fight back!” and the instrumentation gets…quieter.

The main flaw is that, yeah, pretty much this whole album is about being a lazy 20-something, which is impossible to write compelling songs about unless you’re Curren$y. College is a hermetic place, and it’s nowhere near as inspiring as high school with its pointless drama and endless awkwardness. It’d be one thing if they found clever ways to talk about college, but lyrically, they seem to be going for the hashtag-relatable route: “I tried to write a song, but I got too high and watched Criminal Minds instead,” they sing on “Criminal Minds,” undoubtedly hoping to elicit a smirk of recognition among the friends who might be listening.

But if they’re not so bold with their lyrics yet, they’ve displayed remarkable chutzpah just by making such a perfectly listenable, understated, likable and quiet record in spite of possessing all the tools they need to be a lean, mean rage machine. And this really is one of the most phenomenally produced albums I’ve heard from a college band: It’s like they’ve deserted the Loudness War to go find a pub or tree to smoke under. Even more remarkably, the guy who mixed this album is their trumpeter, and the trumpet isn’t even the loudest thing in the mix.

Listen to “Cosmos” from Face For Radio’s debut album I Can Explain… below: