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Michael, Hello or welcome, not sure if I’ve heard anything or yours yet. This is a pretty damn good pop song to my ear. I am in agreement with some of the comments already made. Save the vocal distortion treatment for the final spoken. Between the telephone eq and some grit the angst will be huge. Your arrangement has movement. The guitar bass interplay varies verse to verse and thats good. I can hear deeper into the music when the bass and guitar play more sparsely. The musical stabs they play have impact and leave open space. I understand your words of “more pop than punk.” If its a pop song, and I do truly believe it is, let the lady’s vocal shine through without having to compete with your overly energetic guitarist, especially in the first verse where the tone is trying to be set. Eighth notes from the bass and the guitarist feels too heavy to me. That might feel gentler if they combined to one sound. Bass notes but with the fuzz of the guitar slightly on top. I love the couple stops in arrangement. At that quick tempo even a measure of silence is so refreshing. Once again, I favor the space. The chorus is dense. Love the BGVs and its spread and level behind the lead vocal. I get confused where my attention is being drawn to. The lead vocal? The counter melody slightly underneath? That “energetic” guitarist again? Then again, I am old, closer to dead than my prime. I also come bearing gifts. I took your tune and ran it through some AI software I’ve been playing with. It can take a two track and separate out 5 stereo stems of BASS, DRUMS, GUITAR, PIANO, VOCAL, and a catchall, OTHER. I might just be able to easily experiment with some of these ideas and quickly implement a VOCAL up GUITAR down, etc version. Here’s three snippets of your catchy composition. I wanted to see if recombining the separated stems had audible artifacts compared to your original. I think the RIP-X stem version fared very well. (No processing done other than mixing the stems back together at unity.) Then I went nutty and said “I wonder if we can tell the difference if one version presented here had a channel (L) from the original and the other channel (R) from the post RIP-X recombined. Michael, I had a great day going down this rabbit hole. Thank you. Far more productive than the Taylor Swift conspiracy from last week. -PT