Everybody loves an acoustic punk band made up of a husband-wife duo and a couple of their friends. And that is exactly what McCafferty is… with a couple more cool details.
Of course this dynamic sounds kind of wack, but when you listen to their music you would only expect a couple of rowdy teenagers making these tunes behind the scenes. However, the lead singer and frontman, Nicholas Hartkop, is a licensed special education K-12 instructor as well as a licensed real estate professional. Additionally, his wife Emily who plays bass guitar, is a professor at North Carolina State University McCafferty. If you ask me, these qualifications really do add on to the amount of punk that this band exudes. Moreover, 
this band is from Cleveland, Ohio and formed in 2010 out of a love of music, and a dream to connect and impact others with their songs. The two other members of the band are Wesley Easterly on drums, and Evan Graham on electric guitar. To this day, they have released eleven EP’s and three full albums with The House With No Doorbell (2019) as the most recent.
The typical McCafferty song sounds a bit down, scratchy, screamy, but simultaneously something that you will want to jump around to. Nick’s voice pulls on your heartstrings as his soft and odd voice sings and curses about drugs, mental illness, relationships, religion, addiction, and other things. One thing that I really love about this band is the weird and unique atmosphere of every song as one song may be a soft ode to old memories that features a riveting bass line, or a crashing, screaming song about a love interest. Earlier songs have a more acoustic dance-punk sound, while later releases take on a heavier punk-rock sound. If you know the band The Front Bottoms, McCafferty has a pretty similar, yet distinctly quirky sound like them.
My absolute favorite song by McCafferty is “Beachboy” which is a super playful and fun song that would most probably fuel teenage angst and rebellion. It features a super up-tempo beat, as well as a driving bass line that
is fronted by Nick’s screaming and wailing voice. The song centers around the certain teenage feeling of being lost and overwhelmed, yet at the same time enjoying the stupid, manic, and impulsive times of one’s youth. A lyric that especially sticks out to me is “I know that you think I don’t care/ About all the friends I left behind/ The ones who stay up late at night/ Screaming out their shattered minds.” The idea of the teenage years and the connotations associated with it often don’t focus around the immense development and emotional depth attributed to this time, but this song mentions the bad and the good side of things.