The Albums That Raised Me: Sleeper Agent's raucous breakthrough 'Celabrasion'
2011 was the year Bowling Green's music scene catapulted onto the national stage. Sleeper Agent will forever be my dark horse favorite that defines this era.
The Albums That Raised Me is a recurring series about the records that have stuck with me—not always the biggest or most acclaimed, but the ones that resonated deeply and kept resurfacing throughout different chapters of my life.
They weren’t the biggest act to come out of Bowling Green—not even close—but they were the ones that hit hardest. They felt like ours in a way no one else did. Celabrasion wasn’t just a debut album—it was a time capsule of my youth, capturing the chaos, the charm, the reckless optimism of being nineteen and convinced that everything mattered. It sounded like falling in love too fast, like bad decisions made in good company. It sounded like possibility.
I was 19 the year Celabrasion debuted—a naive and aimless journalism major at WKU, trying my damndest to slough off the chronic shyness that had hovered throughout four awkward years of high school. I was a poser in checkerboard vans, thrift store flannels and obscure band tees I hardly knew.
Momentary escapes came through newfound obsessions: The Pixies, The Strokes, and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Like hoards of college youth since the 1990s, “Where Is My Mind?” and “Fuck and Run” were the soundtracks to my intemperance that felt euphoric, if not profound.
The fall semester of my sophomore year brought my greatest joy: skipping general education classes to smoke copious amounts of weed. On endless cruises in my sea-foam green Toyota Corolla—driving treacherously windy backroads on the outskirts of Bowling Green—I first listened to Celabrasion. It struck me like no album I had listened to before.
Released on September 28, 2011, by Mom + Pop Records, Celabrasion arrived during a pivotal era for Bowling Green’s music scene. Cage the Elephant had just dropped their sophomore album Thank You, Happy Birthday, and Morning Teleportation had debuted with Expanding Anyway. But Celabrasion was the one that felt personal.
Sleeper Agent’s debut LP indulges in reckless whims, channeling toxic teenage abandon, snakebit love, and cruel mornings-after. It does all this with a punchy, anthemic energy that earned the Kentucky band a cult following. The record’s most gripping moments come from the brooding, bratty call-and-response exchanges between lead vocalist Tony Smith and drummer-turned-frontwoman Alex Kandel.
The band’s debut single, “Get It Daddy,” sounds like it was penned in a dilapidated apartment packed with musicians, misfits, and suburban slackers passing around fifths of bottom-shelf gin and coming down from lines of big love.
My dark horse favorite from the album is hard-partying lament “Bottomed Out”.
The album’s rollicking pulse almost makes the horrors of chemical dependence seem alluring.
“So give me love, that big, big love and I’ll feel the same,” Kandel sings on the track.
*What is big love, you ask?
If you were lucky—or unlucky—it was a research chemical, a dark-web concoction designed to mimic the euphoric effects of MDMA or ecstasy. In 2011, Bowling Green was awash in these designer drugs. They came in unmarked baggies from your weed dealer, who also moonlighted as a self-proclaimed Ambassador for Bassnectar during the summer. You’d get an eighth of Blue Dream, a half-assed warning, and a nod toward whatever was blasting from the speaker in some seedy basement—the low-end rumble of Bassnectar vibrating through the walls like a prelude to bliss or disaster.*
That year, everything felt like it was accelerating—music, parties, connection, oblivion. Celabrasion captured that speed. It pulsed with a nervous joy that mirrored the high: giddy, euphoric, slightly off-kilter. A defiant, feral anthem, it finds Tony Smith howling like he’s being exorcised by love, while Kandel’s voice floats above like a warning or a dare. It’s a tension that defines the whole record—a messy, magnetic chemistry.
Years later, “Love Blood” would crash back into public consciousness briefly thanks to HBO’s Girls, soundtracking the bold, ridiculous opening scene of Season 4, Episode 4 (“Cubbies”). The song cues up just as Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flashes her bare ass to Hannah (Lena Dunham) over video chat. The moment is as chaotic, unapologetic, and emotionally off-kilter as the song itself—a perfect pairing.
The album as a whole is gloriously unpolished. Songs like “All Wave and No Goodbye” trade the snarl for sincerity—Smith turning in a heartbreak ballad that doesn’t beg for pity but still bruises. The ending is subtly devastating, like something from Rilo Kiley or Best Coast.
“That’s My Baby” marks a striking departure from the album’s otherwise relentless pace. Stripped back and emotionally raw, the track slows everything down to a simmer, allowing space for vulnerability to seep through. At its core is an iconic breakdown which is equal parts resignation and yearning, where Kandel paints a vivid picture of chasing a tailgate that’s already disappearing into the distance. The imagery hits like a gut punch, evoking the ache of missed chances and relationships that move on before you're ready to let go.
The album as a whole is gloriously unpolished. Songs like “All Wave and No Goodbye” trade the snarl for sincerity—Smith turning in a heartbreak ballad that doesn’t beg for pity but still bruises. The ending is subtly devastating, like something from Rilo Kiley or Best Coast.
Celabrasion never left my CD changer. I played it on repeat hundreds of times, feeling something rare with each listen: that my youth had been preserved in song. Now, it’s a difficult album to return to—not because the songs have lost their spark, but because they conjure a version of myself I no longer recognize. The music calls back to a time when possibility seemed to beckon from every corner. It reminds me of humid basement shows at the long-defunct house venue The Manor, of a wasp sting on my neck as I was coming down from MDMA.
I look back and wish I could grab that naive kid by the shoulders, remind him that the magical music scene he was so transfixed by wouldn’t give him the sense of belonging he craved.
I recall the 19-year-old who idolized this record and laugh at the mythical importance he gave it. Sleeper Agent may be a blip in indie rock history, but they were my favorite flash in the pan.