Digging Up the Dirt: A Conversation with Arthur Alligood of phoneswithchords

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Amiable Alleycat Music

Arthur Alligood started phoneswithchords as a (mostly) solo project after already having forged a career in music under his own name. The project launched in 2022 with Cut the Kid and hasn’t slowed down an iota since. In the last four years, Arthur has put out four more full-length albums, several singles, a collaborative EP with the anonymous bedroom punks Superdestroyer, and a collaborative album with singer-songwriter Ben Sooy of A Place for Owls.

High Up On The Wheel Well is Arthur’s latest excavation of memory. Flashes of summer woods, sunlight, and flittering mosquitoes run through the lyrics as he reflects on where he came from and considers where else the world might take him. Plucked acoustics are as natural as explosive drums and jolting guitar effects. This record finds phoneswithchords leaning fully into a more expansive, electric sound while keeping their folk roots and wrapping it all around a staunchly emo heart. Wheel Well is an exploration of twilight, the liminal space between the light and the dark, heat and cold, youth and experience.

phoneswithchords do not seek to know but rather to experience. “Born” marks the literal birth of a new chapter for the band, with drums by Will Stout lending the project a robust, full-band sound. As the track unfolds with a campfire feel, it grows booming, adopting a sound that feels more at home in a stadium. Alligood also tapped Dustin Ragland and Doug McCarthy for drumming support, letting the project crescendo exactly when the story needs it. Arthur credits himself with all acoustic, electric, and bass guitar, as well as synthesized strings, programmed drums, vocals, and samples. Throughout the album, Nick Webber’s production envelops listeners in reverb, echo, and filters to underscore phones’ awe of both the grand and the infinitesimal.

In the waning days of the summer, Arthur and I got on a call to discuss how family, impermanence, and experience have impacted his career as a musician and mentor, and where phoneswithchords might go after diving into introspective depths. The sun remains high as one season wanes into the next, but the tips of your fingers touch cold. You can wear shorts and walk barefoot, but a hoodie feels good after dinner. Summer is dying again, but this death feels good.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SWIM INTO THE SOUND: First off, thank you for being here. Appreciate you sitting down to talk about your new album, High Up on the Wheel Well. Could you tell us about the impetus for the record?

PHONES: Every time I go to talk about the beginning, I get to the point where I'm not totally sure where it started. I know through therapy, and in conversations with friends, I have these certain memories from childhood that have been coming up. Like, why does this one memory from a certain day during a summer when I was 12 keep coming back up? And so I had the idea to do an album years ago, probably ten-plus years ago, to do stories from my family. There have just been a handful of stories that have been told over the years, some of them from my grandfather who was in World War II, and I thought, okay, that’s how I want to tell these stories. But then every time I would try to approach it, it just felt like there was a little bit of disconnection because it's hard to tell someone else's story.

As these old memories kept resurfacing, I thought it would be really fun to write just as an exercise and maybe try to explore that scene. And I did that on one specific song, “Winter in Late June,” that was really the first attempt at this way of approaching it from my perspective as a kid on what I saw.

Then I noticed all these memories were taking place in one season: the summer. The summers of my childhood were pretty epic because I got to explore my grandparents' farm in Georgia. We would have breakfast, and then I could just do all kinds of stuff. So it was just a culmination of resurfacing memories and then getting the key for how to write about these things because it's really hard to write about your own personal experiences. Often I have to change the facts just a little, you know? But this time I felt like I had an in on writing about this stuff, and so I just went with it.

SWIM: It's a very vulnerable album, so what made this the right moment to excavate those feelings and memories?

PHONES: I'm forty-seven, and my oldest daughter is about to graduate college. My other two daughters are going into their senior year of high school. I don't know, it just feels like a very transitional period for me, and it's really got me thinking about life and what shapes us as human beings. The moments, the memories that make up the bedrock of who we are.

And so I think it's a combination of seeing my kids grow up and also going back to therapy, just revisiting some of these memories and going like, “Why did that shape me? Why was this one moment so formative?” So it's almost this dual thing happening where I'm seeing my kids grow up and they're getting older, and they're about to leave for college and do their thing and live their life. It’s also me going, “I'm getting closer to fifty…What the hell? What is happening?” 

Then there's like a third kind of mysterious thing. I don't really know why these things have surfaced now. Maybe in five to ten years I will be able to look back and go, “Oh, okay, that's why that was coming up.” It just feels very shrouded.

SWIM: You get a sense of… I don't want to call it mystical or spiritual, but the album has a sense of the unknown throughout. Every song explores these reflective feelings, so there is this abstract notion of reaching for something, but sitting on the outside of it, just observing the feeling and letting it in. Was that almost “objective” reflection on purpose?

PHONES: I don't think it was necessarily on purpose. I think what you just described is how I felt. Since the album's been out, I've listened to it just once all the way through, and after getting a little bit of distance from it, even I don't know where this came from.

It just feels like a culmination of so many things. Again, some of those things I'm able to name, and then a lot of those things I just don't know. So I think I lean sonically into the unknown, and somehow that came across.

That's interesting for you to say that. Because even when I turned in songs to Nick Webber, who mixed and mastered the album, he would sometimes ask, “How did you get the guitar to sound that way?” Or “How did you do what you did here?” And I would have to go back through and try to piece it together.

I think one of my strengths as an artist is that I can recognize when it's working and I don't have to know why it's working. I can just run with it. And so that's why these songs are some of my favorite projects that I've done. Somehow this works, but in the end, I don't even want to know. I want some of it to be a mystery.

SWIM: That reminds me of your album phoneswithBen with Ben Sooy from A Place for Owls. I remember you guys said you were passing songs back and forth Postal-Service-style and that you'd run with whatever imperfections were on there. There's something special when that happens, and it makes it sound extremely human. That just makes it hit all the harder, which is fun for people like me.

PHONES: Yeah, thank you for saying that.

SWIM: I did want to ask about your relationship with Nick because you've been working with him for a while. How has that relationship developed? How's it changed? Because there's definitely the classic phones folk-Americana style on here, but it also does start to expand, and there are those big, resounding live drums on some tracks. It gets really, really dynamic.

PHONES: Yeah. So Nick and I, first of all, we've just become really, really good friends—even though we've yet to meet each other in person. On Wheel Well, I immediately felt like I didn't have to explain things to him the way I did when we first started working together on that record with Ben. That's really the beginning of when we started working together. 

I can send him stuff because we’ve got an unspoken language now, and I will sometimes hold back on certain things because I can already hear his instinct. So I might send him just a brief note that says, “Hey, I left some space if you hear anything,” because I know he's already hearing something. He's so good at adding tasteful elements; anything from guitar to other instruments and even vocals.

With this record, I was in the trenches reworking songs. I wrote maybe four different versions of “High Up on the Wheel Well.” One that we may release is totally different from what’s on the record. It didn't work for the album, but it's already mixed, so I think it’s ready to go.

Nick is really good at taking all the information and helping me piece it together. Sonically, he just knows the things that I like. He has a free license at this point; musically, out of anyone in my life, I trust him the most. I will say if you hear anything, add it. If something that I've sent is taking away from it, feel free to delete it. So we are in this really, really beautiful, like, back-and-forth relationship that we have.

And so I think Nick knew kind of the epic quality that I wanted these songs to take. And so he has a very soft way of doing this, but he very much pushes you as a producer, which is what I need. And so a lot of times I would send him something and go, “Do you think we need live drums on this?” And then he would either go, “No, I think we're good,” or “Yeah, live drums would take this over the edge.” And so a lot of the live drums are because we had that back-and-forth. 

SWIM: It sounds like you guys have a lot of trust together, which is awesome. Especially since, as you said, you've never met face-to-face, but you're able to pull it off the way you do—that's magic.

PHONES: When we meet, we will probably hug for like ten minutes. He's my little brother from another mother. Beyond music, we chat once a month or so, usually on a Saturday, not really even about music; we just like catching up on life stuff. So it's been really good.

If you don't end up with a friend, then you're kind of doing it wrong, you know? I don't even see our friendship as a byproduct. I just see it as a gift of collaboration.

SWIM: What’s the point of the art that we make if not the community we're trying to build?

PHONES: Exactly. Yeah.

SWIM: It sounds like you had these songs or ideas for a while. You said that you weren't quite ready for them, but they just kept coming up in therapy or in your songwriting, and then you took it as kind of an exercise and ran with it. Was anything particularly difficult about putting the album together?

PHONES: I would struggle when I wanted to write in third person. Every time I tried to do that, I was always drawn back to first person. Anytime I wanted to zoom out, I felt drawn to go into the minute details of my upbringing. So I learned that if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna have to get really personal, and I'm going to have to write about things that just tell it how I saw it.

Part of my struggle with it is that I referenced my cousins in these songs. My family moved away, so I grew up in the middle of Georgia for the first four or five years of my life. And then we moved away because my dad was a journalist. He got his first real paper job in Tennessee, so we moved.

Every summer I would come back, I want to reconnect with my cousins and we would play and we would go swim and go fishing and all that stuff. But I knew I was sharing my perspective of the things I remember and the things I saw. And I did worry a little about one of my cousins going, ‘That's not how I remember that.’ I didn't want to feel like I was pushing a narrative. I just didn't want to over-tell my perspective. But it's been cool.

They listened to the album, and they were just very, very encouraging and said some really sweet things. For me, that was a success. It felt very full-circle to get their stamp of approval on it.

So yeah, it was really great.

SWIM: I can imagine that's pretty scary when there's some element of autofiction in the art that we make, but the people who are in it as characters or players in your life. But it's really good that they were supportive about it.

PHONES: No one's asked me about this yet, but the only person that I called by name was my brother. I didn't want to name my cousins or even my mom or dad. I still wanted there to be a little bit of separation because we all have these stories. I wanted the door open for people to hear these stories and remember their own experiences.

SWIM: I saw on Bandcamp that you wrote about how you hope the songs bring comfort and joy and liberate your listeners. What do you mean when you hope they feel liberated by listening to your album?

PHONES: I guess I want them to be free to accept the struggle. I just thought, well, I'm focusing on all the good moments, and I struggle with that. Is it wrong that I'm not talking about the things that weren't so good? But then as I got more into it, I realized, no, that's not what I'm doing here.

I guess what I'm inviting the listener into is to treasure those formative moments that were really positive. Those are the things that, whether we realize it or not, really drive us forward. We all have 'em in different moments of our lives.

Physical editions of High Up On The Wheel Well

I've thought many times that winter may be more impactful for listeners than summer was for me, but for some it may be fall or whatever, so I'm just inviting listeners to remember the beautiful times.

I think sometimes we live so many different lives and we all experience really horrible things, but it's just a remembrance of the light trying to shine through, especially nowadays. I feel like it's really a big struggle in our society to remember that it's not all shit, you know? Even saying that out loud sometimes feels scandalous, but I'm learning this in my own life, so it's a work in progress for sure.

SWIM: There is a whole golden hue about Wheel Well. You can feel it. What I love is that I can imagine listening to this in late August and autumn twilight as it starts to cool down, and I will have those wistful feelings of the summer that just passed. I think that there is a timeless nostalgia in that.

PHONES: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to every summer because it will be this gift back to myself, and hopefully a gift to listeners. I hope it's for my kids; maybe even my grandkids.

SWIM: When we started the conversation, you said that this album felt like a culmination of sorts. I felt the same way while listening. It felt like all your work up to now had been building to this point, sonically, thematically, lyrically. You feel the reflection and the acceptance coming in your songs. And that just leads to catharsis. So we get this relief.

If this is kind of a culmination, where do you think phoneswithchords is going from here?

PHONES: I'm always writing. Wheel Well was mastered, and we had set a release date and everything, but I just kept going. So I'm like, “Okay, I did this. Now I want to do the exact opposite.” That's the pattern in me.

Will Stout, who plays drums on “Born,” lives outside of Nashville and has a little studio. We've been, just for the fun of it, writing almost power pop-type songs.

I sent him a couple of demos and was like, “Hey, would you want to play drums on all these fuzz pop songs or whatever that I have?” And he was like, “You had me at fuzz.” So I went over and, in a day, we just had mapped out with electric guitars and scratch vocals and everything. Then we went over and recorded like three or four one day at his little studio.

It was so much fun. It was kind of dissonant, because I'm trying to figure out how to get ready to release this album, and then I'm getting these really fun drum tracks and songs that I don't know what to tell you people. I'm just gonna do whatever the hell I wanna do, so yeah.

SWIM: Ha, that's awesome!

PHONES: It's been really fun. I think that phones, from the beginning, was just to follow whatever's in front of me. So far, it's been a meandering trail, you know? I've just been doing all kinds of different things. There's no pressure for this culmination record. It's cool because I can do whatever I want, and I don't even have to do anything. I feel a lot of freedom with it, and I feel like people who have followed me so far know, ‘Okay, yeah, this is a fun little ride we're on. Let's see where we're going.’

SWIM: I'll be there for the fuzzy power pop phones era whenever it comes.

PHONES: Yeah, man, I'm having a lot of fun.

SWIM: That's it for me. Do you feel like there's anything that we didn't get to discuss or cover about the record or anything else?

PHONES: I just really want to highlight the people that played on the album. I did most of the guitars and bass and programming and synths and obviously vocals and all that. But as I mentioned, I had three different drummers playing on the record. Dustin Ragland, an amazing drummer out of Atlanta, played on “Summer of ‘91,” which made for the most epic ending ever. Then on “Winter in Late June,” the drums were played by Doug McCarthy. And then obviously Nick Webber played all kinds of little stuff along the way, adding little sonic textures to everything so it feels very much like a DIY album. 

You got all kinds of people. The cords have been expanded now.

Joe is an all-purpose creative from Brooklyn, NY. He loves reading, writing, and playing the bass almost as much as he loves his dog. Every now and then, he discovers another reason to love Jimmy Eat World more deeply. Check out all of his work here.

Total Retention: 20 Years of The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America

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Vagrant Records

Something I didn’t realize until I started writing this piece is that [adult swim] is responsible for introducing me to not just one, but two of my all-time favorite bands. When the dark claymation comedy Moral Orel entered its final season in 2008, it incorporated a swath of songs by The Mountain Goats in its soundtrack, which is where I first heard John Darnielle’s distinctive voice cry, “I hope you die, I hope we both die!” One year earlier, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters was released along with an accompanying soundtrack CD that I completely wore out at the time. On a compilation mostly full of comedic tie-ins and extreme metal, one curious track that appeared on the album was “Girls Like Status” by The Hold Steady. The song is a B-side from their 2006 album Boys and Girls in America that helped score the film’s end credits and immediately stood out to me thanks to another one of indie rock’s most distinctive voices, Craig Finn. Like an inscrutable message that wouldn’t be demystified until my next year of grade school, Finn kicks off the song’s bridge with, “It was song number three on John’s last CD, ‘I’m gonna make it through this year if it kill me,’ and it almost killed me,” nodding to The Mountain Goats’ scene-defining “This Year” from 2005’s The Sunset Tree. That voice and those cryptic lyrics led me to Boys And Girls In America, which I quickly fell in love with at an age where I was almost certainly too young to understand the trials and tribulations of its cast. It primed me for the 2008 release of Stay Positive, and sparked a lifelong obsession with the world’s greatest bar band.

A few years back, I got to document my weekend with The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats in Chicago, who teamed up for two glorious shows with Dillinger Four, the celebrated Minneapolis punk band that also get namechecked in “Girls Like Status.” Finn, Darnielle, and D4’s Patrick Costello brought the song to life together for the first time during the second night’s encore, sixteen years after I first heard it. I have spent twelve massive nights with The Hold Steady so far, and if I had to narrow it to the top five, both of those co-headlining shows would be up there. I would also include their Empty Bottle performance in 2017 and the miraculous two times I’ve seen the band play Boys and Girls in its entirety: first in 2016 at Riot Fest for its tenth anniversary, then earlier this constructive summer when they returned to Chicago to celebrate it again for the twentieth. 

Long before it first turned double-digits, I’ve always considered Boys And Girls to be my second favorite album of all time, right behind the unbeatable Raw Power by Iggy And The Stooges. The reasons it’s resonated with me so strongly in the last two decades are likely the same ones that countless members of the Unified Scene have. The sordid storylines of the titular boys and girls, the anthemic choruses that Finn and company pull off so well, and a strong collection of tattooable lyrics. To offer just a few:

“He was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected.”

“Lost in fog and love and faithless fear. I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere.”

“He was rough around the edges. He'd been to school but never finished. He'd been to jail but never prison.”

The legacy of Boys and Girls in America highlights the best and brightest of 2000s indie rock, a band who worked through two other great records to make their first perfect one, and remains a celebrated record for both die-hard fans like myself and casual connoisseurs of the era – eleven songs of romance, challenges, and bad decisions amongst a fictional youth.

Boys and Girls in America’s opening blast is “Stuck Between Stations,” which kicks off with a U2-esque riff that eases the listener in before a quick mention of the album’s title, buried beneath a beat poetry reference from Finn: “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right, Boys and girls in America — they have such a sad time together.” I believe one of Finn’s sharpest lyrics remains “She was a really cool kisser, and she wasn't all that strict of a Christian. She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend.” The descriptors of the characters captured in his songs are a hallmark of his writing on any record he leads, from the early days of Lifter Puller to his expansive solo discography.

The next song “is about a boy, a girl, and a horse,” as Finn always introduces it live. “Chips Ahoy!” is a song only The Hold Steady could write, featuring some of the best keyboard work from Franz Nicolay, another one of the band’s defining elements across this record and many others in their discography. Nicolay boisterously bursts and slickly shreds with co-guitarist Tad Kubler on the album’s most uproarious and overlooked cut, “Same Kooks,” and the keyboard and guitar trade-offs in “Hot Soft Light” come off like a Marshall stack version of Wilco’s Nels Cline and Mikael Jorgensen.

The album’s title appears again in the ballad “First Night,” where Finn also postures, “we can't get as high as we got on that first night.” There are many lyrics throughout Boys and Girls that reference getting high: “How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” on “Chips Ahoy!”; “I wasn’t there, I was blind, high, I was scared” and “There are guys with the wild eyes when they ask you to get high” on “Hot Soft Light;” “It only gets inconvenient when you want to get high alone” on “You Can Make Him Like You.” As a straightedge guy, something about the way Finn describes his characters getting high in all these scenarios is extremely alluring. In some ways, it makes me feel like “high” means more than he says, although maybe that’s just my untainted brain projecting, and truly is just about a bunch of kids getting high. The same thing goes for liquor, like in the epic singalong, (oh shit!) “Party Pit,” where the narrator is “Gonna walk around and drink some more, gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.” 

Of course, with the kind of substances The Hold Steady spill out on the page, there comes plenty of interpersonal turmoil and awkward human truths. There’s always other boys and always other boyfriends on “You Can Make Him Like You,” one of the record’s best hooks, and “Massive Nights” has become one of The Hold Steady’s trademark tunes, with the band naming yearly residencies after it in various cities. “We had some massive nights, we had some crushing lows, we had some lusty little crushes, we had those all-ages hardcore matinee shows.”

I have only seen The Hold Steady play “Citrus” in the Boys and Girls in America setlists, and on one hand it’s a shame they don’t bust it out more, but on the other, it's all the more special when they do. The brief acoustic cut brings the same energy as the full-band rockers do while showcasing some of Finn’s most tender lyrics: “I see Judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners, I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.” Late-album highlight “Chillout Tent” usually gets the same treatment, due to its need for male and female call-and-response vocals in the chorus. The original recording featured Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum and Elizabeth Elmore of the criminally underrated Chicago band Sarge. When played live, the band will pull in friends and peers to bring the dueling vocals to life, like at their Riot Fest 2016 set where the girl in America’s vocals were handled by Jessica Louise Dye of High Waisted. At a multi-generation indie rock romp at their Salt Shed B&G set this year, The Hold Steady borrowed vocalists from each of their openers: Alicia Bognanno of Bully and Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus.

The album’s finale, “Southtown Girls,” has always been one of my favorite positive jams due to its odd but very, very Hold Steady lyrics. When Finn sings, “Southtown girls won’t blow you away, but you know that they’ll stay,” my young mind heard it as: those girls in America won’t blow you off; they won’t leave, but they’ll stay. Not that the girls were inadequate. And then the rest of the song is just MapQuest directions. It’s brilliant in the Hold Steady way that makes all of their classic material brilliant.

On the album’s 2016 deluxe edition, “Girls Like Status” follows as track twelve, another song I’ve only gotten to hear at the Boys and Girls shows, in addition to the Mountain Goats & Dillinger Four show. A few other B-sides come in tow, with my favorite being “Arms & Hearts,” which is compositionally a very strange song, but once it gets going with the refrain, it pays off like any Hold Steady classic with a good old-fashioned pub-rock rouse. “Arms and hearts and alcohol and death. She was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet. Arms and hearts and alcohol and faith. We pull each other in, and then we push it all away.”

Boys and Girls in America is a part of me like I know it is for so many other fans, but I never directly saw myself in the boys or girls in Finn’s stories. There are elements of their feelings that I can connect with, like the running themes of frustration and romanticism, or frustration due to romanticism, but ultimately The Hold Steady evokes the same response in me that I know it does for pop-punk and hardcore fans. The finger-pointing, the lyric chanting, the communal exercises in rock and roll: Finn as the Midwest’s greatest preacher, and his band as the barfly gospel choir. There is so much joy in what they do up there. We are all The Hold Steady. 

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

Greg Freeman – All Set The Bone Review

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Transgressive Records

Barely a year after Greg Freeman stormed onto the scene with Burnover, the ascendant indie bard of New England is striking while the iron is hot with his ambitious new album All Set The Bone. After the warm reception of Burnover and an energetic, buzzy tour, he set out on a solo journey through the Southwest to write his third album. Freeman spent months walking in the desert, playing guitar, and dealing with an “inhuman” confluence of life events - a combination that quickly bore creative fruit. All Set The Bone teems with the same urgency that defines his first two albums, taking Freeman’s heart-on-sleeve, dynamic Americana to raucous new heights and punishingly bleak lows. Though it feels cut from the same cloth as the rest of his catalog up to this point, Greg is testing the boundaries of the band’s sound as the turbulence of his life is channeled into something shaggier and rawer.

While he carried some of Burnover’s key elements into this new era, such as the plinky piano and emotive horns, the production on All Set The Bone (courtesy of John Congleton) feels much closer to Freeman’s first record I Looked Out. His latest effort shirks the polished tightness of Burnover’s writing and production in favor of a first-idea-best-idea approach that Freeman wields to great effect, churning out excellent songs like the lead single “Indu” in 20 minutes while sick and alone in the desert. Despite the looser approach to genre experiments and sharp changes in energy and song structure, this is a rock record through and through. Each track adds a new flair to the sprawling 67-minute album, but there’s less emphasis on maintaining a sonic throughline as Freeman attempts to capture the chaotic reality of modern life.

If labeling Freeman’s music as “alt-country” already felt reductive, this third record complicates that identity even further with a collection of 13 meaty tracks that span a wide spectrum of rock music. Opener “Cahokia” is a textbook Greg rocker that seamlessly blends the nerve-fried and the euphoric, with a chorus that begs to be sung and lyrical imagery that reflects Freeman’s view of our downtrodden, isolated world. From there, we roll into “Totaled,” which is the rowdiest thrasher of a track that Freeman has ever put to record, capturing the signature noisiness of his live show. The staccato stabs of “Culture” and the spare wailing of “Withdrawn” add to the rawness of the record’s first half and establish a track-to-track dynamism that borders on whiplash.

By the middle of the album, you’ve already heard several different versions of what this band can sound like, and that variety continues on the centerpiece and crown jewel of the album, “Loser’s Prize.” It’s a song that contains all Greg’s multitudes, as it almost breezily flips between the hooky anthem, the western-ish jam, and the noise rock blowout. More than any other track, it captures the band’s rowdy live energy and emphasizes the breadth of its arrangement with well-placed sprinkles of keys, strings, and backup vocals. Despite its presentation as a solo project, All Set The Bone is anything but. Almost a dozen players are credited on the album, ranging from the expected drums, bass, and guitar to keys, sax, trombone, trumpet, accordion, and violin. “Next to Nothing” is another testament to the band’s versatility, as they oscillate between a piano rock groove sesh and a noisy, freak folk instrumental. The lyrics are equally mercurial, rolling from a classic emo declaration, “I don’t wanna be here right now,” directly into a growling punk nightmare:

They’ll stick you in the dog food factory
With a mouth full of teeth like piano keys
Working for a man you will never ever see

It’s a thrilling twister of a song that sets up the album's phenomenal final stretch, with a bit of Neil Young worship in “Costs” and the crooning banjo ballad “Bury Me The Shovel” making what might be my favorite 3-track sequence of the album.

I’m still struggling to quite put my finger on what All Set The Bone actually is, and that isn’t a bad thing. While I hear bits of the 90s in the production style (Pavement, Pixies, Time Out of Mind Dylan), there are singular qualities that make Freeman’s music stand out - the barroom band vibe, his signature high vocal register, and clever lyricism that is at once earnest and wry. Even if all 13 tracks don’t converge on a particular sound or theme, Greg is refining a sonic identity that is increasing in scope by continuing to delight and devastate in new ways. All Set the Bone is the sound of him and the band experimenting a bit, working out a few exciting new ideas without too much concern for perfection. This sort of looseness, paired with this level of quality, seems to reflect a promising state of creative freedom for the project. After spending some quality time with the album, that liberty to experiment starts to feel like an antidote, a coping mechanism, and, undeniably, a relief from the hectic reality it reflects.

Parker White lives and works in Boulder, CO where he moonlights as a music writer. When not attending local shows or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hitting the trail, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.

more eaze – valley and structure | Album Review

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Thrill Jockey

In my dreams, I inhabit a world that has become reassuringly familiar over my thirty-odd years of sleep. I often return to the same three landscapes. One is a large room, wood-paneled and crowded, where I often encounter friends, or at least memories of them. The next is a vast mountain landscape, stretching beyond the tree line, sickeningly sheer cliffs dropping into millions of acres of granite. The last is my favorite: a deeply verdant and misty hill region, threaded by a road that never leads me to my destination, no matter how long I sleep. There is strange comfort in these landscapes - relief in the repetition of whatever pattern my unconscious brain is tracing. I feel similarly about music, finding myself consistently drawn to minimalist works. The thrum of the music’s predictability brings me comfort, cocooning my ears with a beautiful structure of rhythms, patterns, and notes. 

Because of this, I expected that valley and structure, the latest release from composer Mari Rubio, would immediately capture my minimalism-loving ears. Mari releases music under the name more eaze, both solo and with a rotating group of musicians behind her. I’ve greatly enjoyed her body of work over the years, watching with admiration as the worlds she spins with each new release build upon themselves in delicate, haunting webs. When I reviewed one of more eaze’s recent albums, sentence structure in the country, I commented on the otherworldly aspect of the music - it felt surreal, even dystopian, merging nature with machines. This effect is certainly also present on valley and structure, but in a distinctly different way. Instead of a darkly alien dystopian atmosphere, I sense vast open spaces, eternal fields of waving golden grass, and mirages that taunt from an indistinct horizon. A cloudless sky screams silently above, empty and infinite and possibly too blue. It’s a different brand of dystopia: everything is so perfect, so clean, so empty, that it cannot be anything but unsettling. The tie between these two albums is clear, not only in name but also in theme: whispers and fragments of sentence structure float through valley and structure like leaves in a breeze. It’s a brilliant concept, further tying more eaze’s worldbuilding into itself in a deeply satisfying way.

The album opens with a track titled “they tried to shove me in the structure,” featuring a deftly plucked guitar line that loops and drives forward incessantly. It’s accompanied by warm string swells that alternate between joy and unease, captured in a continuous dance. As I wander the golden grasses of this album’s landscape, I see the first sign of life in the terrible blue sky above: a hawk and a sparrow whirling in dizzying spirals, fighting over territory. The sparrow is relentless, but the hawk evades her, and their struggle traces a Möbius strip in the sky. A thin layer of strings hum in my ears as I watch them, and I notice the guitar’s arpeggios have started to lead away from the home key. However, the tension eases slightly as the rhythmic playing returns to the familiar notes of the opening chord progression. The hawk, realizing it will not be able to outsmart the persistent sparrow, breaks the loop and disappears into the endless azure ceiling. The sparrow has avoided the structure. Radio feedback crackles in my ears, and I realize I am not alone. 

I look around me and catch a glimpse of something metallic on the wavering horizon. The next track, “what’s wrong with the structure?” begins to play: a solo violin enters, bowing a precise string of notes that resemble a technical exercise. Its eerie quality is heightened as another violin joins, harmonizing in various intervals, and the music begins to melt together as a wind instrument adds to the arrangement. There is a faint clatter of voices and static layered behind the instruments, the piece whirring from one ear to the other until, at last, the guitar joins in. Dreamy whole-tone progressions create a blurry atmosphere - I notice a piano fading in and out, the deep thud of a bass, and even the shimmer of a distant synth organ. The silvery chords match the glint of the structure on the horizon I am walking toward. It flickers like a mirage, but the closer I get, the clearer it comes into focus. 

As I mentioned earlier, I am deeply drawn to minimalism for its sense of familiarity and the comfort I find in repetition. This same hypnotic quality is present throughout valley and structure, especially on track three: “once you say yes to the structure, you never get out.” An intensely rhythmic violin melody opens the track, paired in unison with guitar and bass. As I trudge towards the monolithic silver building on the horizon, I am reminded of an album that drives in a similar way. “Different Trains,” I muse silently. It’s one of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s best works. A moving, captivating, and powerful piece of art, I love its texture and depth. I find more eaze employing her own gifts of textural writing here, the instruments whirling around each other, mirroring their melodies in a method so contrapuntal that it feels damn near Baroque. The building is closer than ever, yet I have never walked so far. Everything comes around to itself in the end - modern music sounds Baroque, and the hawk is conquered by the sparrow.

I notice that the music has not stopped playing. Pleased, for I don’t want the song to end, I note that it’s exactly 20 minutes and two seconds long. 20:02 - a delightful numerical palindrome. Another Möbius strip of sorts. Around the eight-minute mark, “once you say yes to the structure, you never get out” slows, skulking back into the only shadow on this planet: the one cast by the building, its darkness a gash across endless miles of golden wheat. There is no whirling melody now, just sustained strings and the occasional comment from the piano. A low, dull humming fills the air as I find myself at the base of the building. There are no windows and no doors. It is hot even in the shade, hotter than it was under the eternal blue void. So I wait as brass and guitar offer their nervous harmonies. I hear a soft voice humming beneath the strings, though I’ve not noticed any company. The air grows heavier as the seconds pass, and the music plods now, no longer hiding in the shadows, but pulling itself along under the blazing sun. I notice the hawk has returned to the sky, whirling in spirals that draw closer to the ground with each rotation. The music has become frantic, and I find my heart beating in my hand, staining my palm red. On the horizon, the grasses dance with anticipation, and the violins follow in a fierce ostinato. I am weeping without knowing it. My heart is no longer a heart; before my eyes, it becomes the sparrow. And then the building opens with a scream – 

– and swallows me. “i’m in the structure.”

This is my favorite song. A heartwrenching melody, sung by an invisible entity, echoes in my ears as I am borne up, up, up to the top of the building. Major one to minor six chords, I note. It’s the same progression as my favorite song of all time, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. I am still weeping, tears coursing silently down my face. I do not know why. The violin wounds me, so beautiful that I ache with every note. The sound of waves crashing surround me, filling my ears with pressure as though I were underwater, but I am dry and surrounded by light. I am at the top of the building now, and I still hear the voice singing to me: "I’m content to be the void that collapses time and space / tracing out the melodies, replacing / tones / the faceless friend somehow never alone / blanketed by tastes.” I know these lyrics, for they are the same ones used on “The Producer,” a track from sentence structure in the country. Hearing them on this album, in an ethereal new setting, is like greeting an old friend. I am in the structure, and have only just entered the structure, but maybe I have always been here.

Time bends, and cold air burns my lungs without warning. I am on top of the monolithic building now, and there is no visible way to leave. “how can we get out of the structure” is the final track on valley and structure, and the only means of escape for the listener, and for me. The plucked, near-percussive rhythm at the beginning mirrors my heartbeat as I contemplate my options for escape. I sense that I am not alone: I turn slowly and behold something more than light but less than solid. I am briefly reminded of the Eldil of Perelandra. So this has been the source of the singing, the melodies, the driving life of this strange planet. As the music begins to deepen and build, the ever-present piano weaves through the top and then the bottom of the melody like a bright blue thread. Harmonies begin to melt into dissonance, and as the chill of the thin air cuts through my clothes, I hear the more-than-light being start to sing. The music is disintegrating slowly, beautifully, but the driving rhythm never falters. The light atop the structure is all-consuming, growing with each breath, and a honey-sweet breeze carries the sound of victory. I too am light, more than light, and I watch the structure sink into the golden grasses. Suspended in air, I spiral higher with the hawk and the sparrow. The entire planet vibrates with joyous melody, and I – I am singing too.

Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

wakelee – Under Construction Forever | Album Review

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Wax Bodega

I never have the right words to say. Being a writer comes with the expectation that I should know what to say and that I should have the right words, but for the people who matter most, I seldom do. In his 1982 novella, The Body, Stephen King wrote, “The most important things are the hardest things to say.” This sentiment has stuck with me like gum on the bottom of a shoe, largely because I related so closely to the protagonist, Gordie Lachance, an offbeat kid with an affinity for writing and familial trauma to boot. In the wake of his older brother’s unexpected death, Lachance and his group of misfit buddies set off to find a dead body in the woods, seeking small-town acceptance for locating a missing boy. Throughout the coming-of-age tale, our narrator struggles to put his feelings of isolation, grief, and parental neglect into words. 

As an adolescent, this is largely expected; however, no one prepares you to carry that loss of words into adulthood. Frustratingly, it almost gets harder to say what’s on your mind as feelings, relationships, and life become increasingly complex. Even when it comes to things we feel strongly about, often once we try to put them into words, they fall flat. On their new LP, Under Construction Forever, the Brooklyn-based indie unit wakelee grapple with this perpetual struggle to find the right words in the most difficult circumstances.

wakelee are a group that lean into the nostalgic idiosyncrasies of life. This is evident even in their band name, which comes from a park in New Jersey where twin brothers Alex and David Bulmer grew up playing baseball. Although they eventually became high school benchwarmers, the yearning remained, and they decided to channel their energy into music. After playing in a handful of different bands throughout high school and college, Alex and David enlisted Elliot Shiang on bass after a chance meeting at a party in New York. What emerged was wakelee, a project with an eclectic mix of influences that ebb and flow seamlessly, proving the trio to be anything but a run-of-the-mill emo unit.

Photo by Gabe Drechsler

The group’s 2023 self-titled album features tracks like “Mood Rings” and “Texas” that draw on Pingrove and Macseal, while 2025’s Doghouse EP keeps those same emo foundations but also pulls in influences ranging from The Story So Far to Tyga and Korn. The group flexes this wide range of inspiration throughout that EP, crafting emo/pop-punk bangers like “mildlyinteresting” before switching to the alt-rock vibes of “Gary's Outcome” just a few songs later. Doghouse catapulted the trio from another passing NYC band to one that not only commands but deserves attention.

Under Construction Forever is wakelee’s first release with a label, the band now backed by the eternally tapped-in Wax Bodega. On their sophomore LP, the trio embrace their assorted tastes, resulting in one of the most exciting emo-adjacent releases in quite some time. Brisk album opener “Sundial” clocks in at just under two minutes and finds Bulmer grounding the listener in his reality, “Shaking / all my thoughts turning physical.” The introductory track finds the group dipping into some of their most aggressive material thus far, with the above lyrics screaming in on a red carpet of cymbal crashes and guttural bass lines. The song tackles the difficulties of owning up to your shortcomings at the end of a tenuous relationship as Bulmer sings, “In a different timeline / I’d have it all laid out / I know it’s my fault / I’ve been hanging on to you for so long."

The lead single, “Joyce Kilmer Service Area,” named after a rest stop about halfway between New York and Philly, is a polished pop-punk heater where the co-production from Zach Aumueller and Chris Freeman (Hot Mulligan) shines through. Debuting the first d-beat in a wakelee cut, it’s a song packed with family gripes and fast-tempoed instruments that mirror the lyrics’ palpable frustration. The song depicts a snafu where Bulmer’s unidentified relative seemingly forgot to meet him at the aforementioned service area, and he rebuts: “You’re forever slipping in an absent-minded mode / So I’ll stay home now / There’s little left between us / And I guarantee that you know it hurts me so bad.” Under Construction Forever forwardly mulls over blood-related barriers that tend to harbor lifetimes of pent-up resentments when left untended. 

Being plagued with familial dissonance is an overarching theme in The Body as well, which, if you haven't figured it out yet, also served as the inspiration for the 1986 film Stand by Me. Yes, the same film that features one Davie “Lard Ass” Hogan, who transforms a pie-eating contest into a puke-induced revenge fest. Despite the occasional absurdity of King’s writing, he eclipses it with truth-laden prose that sticks with readers for an eternity. Lachance feels largely invisible to his parents, who are in the depths of grief following the loss of their first-born. Much like the iconic story-turned-film, Under Construction Forever seems, at least in part, to be a cautionary tale about unresolved grief. On the mid-album cut “Box Fan,” Bulmer compares ever-present grief to the constant hum of a box fan, one that never goes away but simply becomes less noticeable over time. “Well, I know this went south / But I can drive there / A subtle distance / That’s always kept us apart,” he musters after the screeching tremolo of the bridge. 

Both “Decision Tree” and “Box Fan” put forth this concept of intentionally placed distance, both physical and hypothetical, that is woven throughout the LP. It’s here where Bulmer recognizes: “I tried to measure all the distance / There were signs I just missed them / Every thought is a misstep.” wakelee’s use of metaphorical gaps between loved ones aligns with the overall theme of an awkward barrier where words fail to adequately penetrate. “Decision Tree” traverses complicated feelings in relationships (familial and romantic alike) in which words could never define the brooding resentment, guilt, and longing that fester. Musically and lyrically, the track finds the band at the top of their game with pensive instrumentation and devastatingly catchy vocals that will bring tears to the eyes of even the most stoic of individuals: “There’s so much left to say, but I can’t get it out.” 

Summoning Worst Part Ever-esque vibes, “See It Now” immediately follows and finds wakelee licking their wounds while attempting to articulate complex feelings. With stripped-down lyrics and instrumentation, this song captures what happens when reality crushes romanticism, as the guilt-fueled song sheds lyrics like, “Should’ve had your back when I swore that I’d be there / I still wear your Crocs around the apartment.” In a vexed attempt to put complicated emotions into words, it confirms that oftentimes our expectations of how things should sound, or how situations should play out, are rarely as embellished as we imagine.

The album’s second single, “Statue,” certainly embodies emo elements, but leans more into alternative rock influences while the lyrics bring the family discourse to a head. Detailing trivial arguments with a forgetful relative, like forgotten passwords and inherited lower back pains, Bulmer sings, “One day we’ll gather to spread your ashes all over the ground / And it’ll be hard not to think about where things went wrong.” A few tracks later, the numbing feeling strung throughout the Aphex Twin-inspired “080808” further captures the convoluted mess of feelings that come with the loss of a loved one.

Under Construction Forever's closing tracks, "Open Ended" and "Glitterbox," tie the album up quaintly, as the band recognize their flaws whilst showing themselves some grace. Bulmer compares his destructive rumination to an oversteeped bag of tea, wonders why water is his number one enemy, and acknowledges that he’s “under construction forever,” before repeating “get used to it.” wakelee wrestles with the troubling realization that we rarely live up to who we expect ourselves to be, our loved ones are often not who we need them to be, and life tends to violently veer off the roads we desperately want to stay on. 

In an interview with SPIN, the band says of the album, “There’s the angle of anger, and ‘you shouldn’t have done this,’ and then there’s the angle of ‘I wish I said more. I wish I listened to you more,’ or realizing that you aren’t that great of a person.” Life is chock-full of what-ifs and should-ofs that we absolutely will dwell on if allowed to. Stephen King's assertion that “The most important things are the hardest things to say” also doubles as a recognition of things left unsaid. As acknowledged throughout this album, there's so much that wakelee (and I) would say if only we could find the right words. 

Brandon Cortez is a coffee, football, and music nerd from Texas. He’s on Twitter @numetalrev.