Embracing The Chaos: An Interview With Laveda

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Photo by Mars Alba

New York City is known as “The City of Dreams” for the hundreds of thousands that relocate there every year with grand aspirations in an even grander city. New York itself has enough main character energy for a whole coastline, making it the ideal setting for an artist. From the hustle and bustle of the people on the streets to the blinding glow of a subway car and the peeled-off paint of a tenement building, inspiration is abundant at all hours of the day. Falling in love with NYC is as easy as acquiring a late-night slice at Joe’s Pizza.

​Enter Laveda, a noisy rock band fronted by Ali Genevich (guitar, bass, synths, vocals) and Jacob Brooks (guitar, bass, synths, vocals). What started out as a project between the two of them in the winter of 2018 evolved into something bigger as they realized the momentum was building. In 2022, with hopes to solidify their sound, Laveda enlisted Dan Carr (bass, guitar) and Joe Taurone (drums) for assistance on their sophomore effort. The resulting album, A Place You Grew Up In, was full of lush, warm soundscapes which felt like an ode to their upstate New York, Albany roots.

The following year, Genevich and Brooks made the jump to migrate a couple of hours south to New York City. The ceaseless energy of their new home inspired their third studio record, Love, Darla. The two were influenced to create new music by the things they would hear on the streets: the clattering of subway cars, screeching of metal on construction sites, and distant sirens. There was never a dull moment in their world or their music.

The songs on Love, Darla have a scrappy chaos within them. The introductory “Care” starts with just a minute of guitar reverb that sounds like grinding metal, then morphs into a dissonant, energetic banger. “Cellphone” has a gentle, melodic, head-bobbing slacker rock appeal with rebellious kiss-off lyrics. The songs come with a real bite to them, but also have a melodic flow that makes them rewarding to revisit, just like Sonic Youth and countless New York bands of yore. Laveda is now about constant movement. Gone is the quiet, suburban life of northeast New York; in its place is the eruptive energy of the city that never sleeps.

I sat down with Ali Genevich and Jacob Brooks via Zoom to talk about moving to the city, getting inspired by live music, and Tim Burton. 

Photo by Mars Alba

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

SWIM: I read that you moved from Albany to New York City in 2023. What inspired that move?

ALI: We had wanted to move to New York for a while, the timing just wasn’t right for us with COVID. Once things were opening back up again, we started doing a lot of gigging and touring. I feel like we were busy in the local scene, just trying to build up our presence as a band upstate. Eventually, I think we reached a point where it felt like we had sort of outgrown the scene there and wanted to surround ourselves with more like-minded musicians and a new community. The scene sort of died out with COVID and my college shutting down. Unfortunately, it took a big hit. Not to say we wanted to abandon it, but we also had always wanted to come to New York, so the timing just felt right when we made the move in 2023.

SWIM: Were you able to adapt quickly to New York City, or did it take some time to settle in?

ALI: I think it was a little of both. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people we already knew when we first got here, so in some ways, it was easier for us to move here than a different city. If we were to move to somewhere that we’ve never been, like Texas, we just don’t know people in those cities, but we had a lot of friends who already lived in New York City, so it was really nice. It was just cool to have people to hang out with, bring you out to things, and show you the cool venues and bars and all that jazz.

SWIM: Is there a difference between creating music in Albany as opposed to New York? Can you feel a difference?

ALI: Yeah, definitely. I’m very inspired by my environment, and New York is a lot different than Albany or Troy, just much more industrial, and there’s so much more noise and energy, and people are surprising you every day. There’s always an interaction that you don’t expect you’re going to have, and it’s really awesome. I think Albany and Upstate are just so much slower-paced, and sometimes you can go about your day without really even talking to anyone at all. That’s interesting to me. I think a lot of the griminess of New York City has found its way into our music for sure, into this new record. It definitely contributed a lot to a sonic shift that was already happening in our sound – New York kind of drove the nail further into the coffin, I guess.

SWIM: I hear that griminess in “I Wish” and “Care,” and it reminds me of mid-to-late ‘80s Sonic Youth. Were they like an inspiration for you? What’s your relationship with them?

ALI: Yeah, I’ve always loved Sonic Youth, but I think I found a new appreciation for their music when we moved here because I just read Kim Gordon’s book, Girl in a Band. I picked it up at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and I started reading it on tour. It was super relatable, and I was like, ‘Well this would be a good time to dive deeper into Sonic Youth’s music after we moved here,’ because I had just finished the book at that time. 

It took me, like, two years to read it because I put books down constantly and pick them back up again. But yeah, then I started listening to their first record, second record, third record, all that, just from the beginning, because Kim had referenced so many different eras in her life, you know? I wanted to have a better idea of what she was talking about, so I just got really into it and eventually was like, wait, these records are some of the best records. I’d only heard some of their more popular stuff, and now some of the random deeper cuts are some of my favorite tracks. They’re an incredible band.

SWIM: Do you have a favorite album from Sonic Youth? 

ALI: I think Sister is probably my favorite.

SWIM: Sister, that’s a good one. I love that album cover.

ALI: Yeah, it’s just, it’s got such a mood, and I’m a sucker for just feeling nostalgic all the time. It really does evoke that emotion in me. But they have a lot of great records. I mean, honestly, what am I forgetting? Goo, that’s it! I feel like that’s a more popular record, but also pretty undeniably awesome. 

SWIM: I read that you guys workshoped “Strawberry” and “Heaven” during live shows. I think that’s really cool. It reminds me of a comedian going to a club just to see what jokes work, trying to add them into their set. How did you decide to workshop these songs together at live shows?

JACOB: At the time, those were our only two new ones, really. I think we had started “Heaven” first. We also had “Tim Burton’s Tower” in our back pocket and “Cellphone” as well, but we weren’t really ready to flesh those out yet.

ALI: Yeah, I think we knew that those songs were too challenging. We just didn’t know what they were gonna sound like yet. We felt “Strawberry” and “Heaven” were just strong. They had really solid foundations, so it made sense to take those out, play them, and just sort of see how they evolved. 

I don’t think the songs fundamentally changed a lot, but it was more the energy that we had when we played them and the little nuances. Things like figuring out what pedals sound good for a certain section of the song and what buzz tone I wanted. For Joe, I feel like the drum part really solidified itself over the course of a month. He would try some new fills here and there just to experiment because we had the time to. I sang the song completely differently in the demo than I ended up singing it on the record. The end result is completely different. If you heard the demo, you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a very different voice and character.’ I think that also inspired a lot of the other songs and the singing on the rest of the record. Finding the right style of singing wasn’t challenging, but it definitely took some time to figure out.

SWIM: Did you notice a crowd reaction to a certain part of the song, like ‘oh, they seemed to be drawn to this, so maybe we should add this into the song’ or something like that?

ALI: Well, yeah, I feel “Strawberry” was really the Catalyst because people just liked the song in general, but they would always say ‘Oh, I really like when you scream’ and enough people said it to where I was like, ‘maybe I should just do that more.’ And because I like when I scream, I was like, great, you like it, I like it, sounds good, let’s just put it all over the place.

SWIM: You guys mentioned the song “Tim Burton’s Tower” earlier. I love his movies – is he an inspiration? Did you draw anything from him for the song title?

JACOB: I think it’s more of a Troy, New York thing.

ALI: Yeah, the lyrics of the song are loosely about someone who just wants to be a movie star, but the song was inspired by this old church that we could see from our apartment in Troy. It had this scary-looking tower, and we would always just call it the Tim Burton Tower. Troy has a lot of really old Gothic architecture and historical buildings from the 1800s, which is really cool. But yeah, and it’s the oldest song on the record, or at least the oldest idea. We were still living upstate when I wrote that, and I think it just stuck. I thought, 'Oh, since it’s a song called Tim Burton’s Tower, I’ll just make it about the movies.'

SWIM: Do you have any favorite Tim Burton movies? 

ALI: Well, we definitely love The Nightmare Before Christmas. I think Edward Scissorhands specifically was what I was picturing while we were writing that song. We actually had a VHS of Edward Scissorhands on in the background in LA while we were recording the song. That scene where he’s cutting the shrubs with his hand, it’s just, like, so crazy.

SWIM: Have you ever seen the movie Sleepy Hollow? Was that in Upstate New York, or am I imagining that? 

JACOB: No, you’re not imagining, there is. I saw it once. It’s good. It’s a crazy movie.

Photo by Julia Tarantino

SWIM: Was there a live band you all saw that was so good that it sparked a competitive fire for you to want to go practice harder and get better as musicians?

ALI: Oh, that’s a really cool question. Yes, I mean, I feel like I have two answers for this. 

I think maybe not in a competitive way, but more just in an inspirational way. We were on our way to record A Place You Grew Up In, out in California, so the whole band was driving across the country with our gear, and my aunt and uncle live just outside of Denver, so we crashed a couple of nights with them on our way to LA. It just so happened that Wilco was playing at Red Rocks, so we went to that. I was like, okay, we have to go to this, and the tickets were like 50 bucks a pop, so no brainer, let’s go. We just had the most amazing time, and we had never gone to a show just the four of us together, so that was really special. Wilco is just an incredible band, and Dan, our bass player, has always been a really big Wilco fan. After that show, I think we were all just like, 'Oh my God, wow, what a crazy, awesome experience.'

Another sort of band that I feel like really ticks this box is Robber Robber from Burlington, Vermont. They’re an amazing band, really sweet people, and friends of ours. We’ve played a show or two with them, but they’re an incredible live band. I remember Joe, after he saw Zack (from Robber Robber) play the drums for the first time, he literally went home and was like, ‘I need to practice more.’ Joe is already such an incredible drummer, so when he says something like that, you know he’s gotta be mind-blown. It was really cool to see how inspired he was by Zack’s playing, and we all love that band. They’re awesome. They put on a sick live show, so you should check them out if you haven’t.

SWIM: For me, music is a lot about scenery and vibes. If you listen to the right album at the right time, it can enhance your experience. Is there an ideal setting you would love for people to listen to your new album so that it might enhance their listening experience?

JACOB: I think it’s a subway record.

ALI: Yeah, I definitely think listening on the subway is really cool because the subway is kind of chaotic sometimes, but especially the above-ground trains, where you can see outside and you can just see everything moving fast and all these random people in the train car that are just on their daily commute or whatever. I do enjoy listening to it then. I think we've both said it can be really noisy when you’re listening with earpods, and you can still hear the sounds of the train and people and whatever else is going on.. It’s almost like the music blends in because it’s grimy and noisy already; it sort of just incorporates those sounds, so it’s like it doesn’t really matter if you have bleed from the outside world. But yeah, I haven’t really found a place that’s beat that experience for me with this record yet. 

JACOB: I think our previous records were made more for the car because we were upstate. Now we never drive.

ALI: Yeah, I don’t know if this is a car album.

JACOB: I don’t think it is.

SWIM: The album is so chaotic and up-tempo and has so much energy. It feels like it’s built for body movement: either you’re walking, you’re running, or you’re on the subway. I think that’s perfect for your guys’ record.

ALI: Yeah, yeah, walking is nice. Walking in any city, I think, would also be pretty nice. Just point A to point B type stuff.

SWIM: Thanks so much for taking the time! See you on tour soon.

ALI: Thank you. Have a great rest of your day.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He’s also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.

Shallowater – God's Gonna Give You A Million Dollars | Album Review

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Thinking about West Texas roots up a string of memories in my mind. One of my earliest was a big family camping trip where my friend’s dad showed us just about every constellation in the sky. He grew up in Dumas and spent countless nights looking at the stars when he was a kid because there wasn't much else to do. For a while, I was going to college in Colorado and making the cross-Texas drive more often than I probably should have. I got to know West Texas by the pit stops along the route and by how much the speed limit decreased from town to town. I eventually transferred to a school in Texas and made friends who had grown up on the left side of the state. One time, we went on a camping trip and stopped in Andrews to pick up some gear from one of their childhood homes. We couldn't use the front door because it was blocked by too many tumbleweeds.

The tumbleweeds blocking my friend’s front door in Andrews, TX.

Shallowater is a three-piece dirtgaze band from West Texas, currently living in Houston. Blake Skipper, Ryan Faulkenberry, and Tristan Kelly made one of the best albums of 2024 with their debut There Is A Well, and I was an immediate fan on first listen. I am an absolute sucker for a band from Texas and feel deeply connected to anyone who grew up there. This thinking may have some validity anywhere other than Texas, where the immense landmass allows for vast differences in culture and experience across the state. There Is A Well is absolutely gorgeous, a beautiful first articulation of the group’s dust-coated take on shoegaze that they’ve built upon elegantly and precisely with their follow-up. As you venture into Shallowater’s sophomore album, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, it feels as if the band figured out how to inject the entirety of the Texas Panhandle directly into their songs. 

Produced by Alex Farrar, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is a smattering of multifaceted epics written from “me” to “you,” showcasing all sides of Shallowater’s sound. This album further solidifies the trio as one of the defining sounds of the modern Texas Panhandle. The album trudges through dust storms, tiptoes across the squeaky floorboards of a shotgun house, and blasts down a pitch-black highway with the windows down. 

The first two songs, “God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars” and “Sadie,” seem to tell the same narrative of an experience with grief after the loss of a grandmother. I imagine the grandma being one to poke fun at her own eventual passing, perhaps with the peace of knowing that what was on the other side would be unimaginably better than that of Earth. She would say that when she dies and goes to heaven, God would give her a million dollars and that all her old friends would be there too. The album opens with Grandma having their million dollars and a handful of roses. The rest of the song captures fond memories and personal quirks, ending at a cemetery on New Year's Eve. In “Sadie,” we see some of the ways one processes their grief. 

I’ve been writing down
Every word
You said to me
Cause I like the way they look
Bad year for me
And the roses
So I hung
Them up
Like a trophy kill

Nestled midway through the album, we’re out of the house and on the road, taking in the southern part of the country the way that so many experience it: through the window of a car. “Highway” is the best country western song I have heard in quite some time. Reading through the lyrics, I can practically hear George Jones crooning the words over a steady strumming guitar. At the beginning of the song, the line “Back where I was just / lights on a highway to you” devastates as the lyrics articulate that feeling of finding out you weren’t anything to them but another passing car in the night. As the song nears its end, the lyrics are whittled down to only the last six words – this solitary phrase repeating and feeling like a promise or a hope for future trips to that same lost love. While Blake Skipper sings with more of a casual air than Mr. Jones does, he finds the perfect cadence and tone to bring the country western feel out from the yearning lyrics into the song. 

We’ve all seen the decrepit house off the highway while cruising along the desolate part of our multi-hour drive. It looks like an island breaching up out of the water, usually surrounded by trees that have grown up taller than what is left of the ruins. It takes a split second to drive by, but years of life have been lived out in that frame. This is the song “All My Love,” except here we have gotten out of the car and are looking through the remains with our adventurous little nephew. It doesn't take long for the detour to turn personal and existential. Nothing is just one thing in this album. We hear a creak come from the framing of the old house, and suddenly we are freshly regretting the unrequited love of years past. Their evocative lyrics remove any chance of gleaning personal information while allowing the beauty of human experience to remain. Every word stretches until it meets the start of the next. It's a long drawl that sounds special on top of the ever-shifting sonic landscape.

Throughout the record, Shallowater exercise a level of skill and restraint that feels increasingly rare to find in “-gaze” bands. These three aren’t just defaulting to a simplistic loud-quiet-loud structure, nor are they pummeling wannabe Deftones riffs through hundreds of dollars of effects pedals. Instead, Shallowater uses these longer song structures to their advantage, exploring the softer side of their sound and executing these changes in sound with careful intention. Sometimes things are rolling along in peaceful post-rock lilt, then suddenly a squall of guitar feedback will rear up and rip you away from the calm. Though it’s more bite-sized in comparison, it’s most reminiscent of another southern rock behemoth: The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. All of this lends to a sense of vision and atmosphere with seven- to nine-minute songs that hold my attention all the way through, either through beauty or force. Equally skilled at filling the track with huge, crushing sound as they are at finding perfect moments for silence. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, and Shallowater’s world is vast, deep, and dusty. 

West Texas is a place where being a cowboy is still a real profession. A place where, when the wind blows just right, and it often does, the air fills with the scent of cow manure from the several million head of cattle that are being raised nearby. Shallowater is a band born from that harsh beauty, and with God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, they consistently and uniquely serve up the Panhandle on a silver platter for any and all to partake.

Kirby Kluth grew up in the suburbs of Houston but now lives in Knoxville, TN. He spends his time thinking about motorcycles, tennis, and music. You can follow him on Instagram @kirbykluth.

Dim Wizard – “Stoicism” | Single Review

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Self-Released

I am still working on learning that people can only give me so much. Nobody can provide me with all that I need. I spend so much time railing against others’ expectations of me that I owe them grace when they fail mine. I know that in coming out as a trans woman, I shattered my parents’ expectations of me as a man, so it is only fair that I accept that, in reconstructing our relationship, I value what they can give me instead of projecting an idealized version of acceptance.

David Combs has been making pop music from the verge for a while now, both in the recently retired Bad Moves and in his collaborative solo project Dim Wizard, which has featured the likes of Jeff Rosenstock, Ratboys, and Ings, among others. Combs’ new single as Dim Wizard, “Stoicism,” a collaboration with the Australian musician Katie Dey, is a piece of clattering synth-pop reckoning with failed projected expectations—those we place on others and those placed upon us. 

Each verse opens with Dey asking, “Do you owe me strength?” before grappling with the fact that, even if the object of her questioning can provide her strength, it’s not always enough to combat what the turning of the world confronts us with. In the final chorus, Dey sings the repeated affirmation that “you don’t owe me nothing / it’s alright,” before the song drops out and the instrumentation comes back with a sense of resignation. 

That final bit, those last twenty seconds, are my favorite part of the song, because it feels like knowing I’ll never get all I need from my parents, but it doesn’t stop me from hoping. 

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on insta @Lilllianmweber.

BOOTCAMP – Time’s Up | Album Review

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Convulse Records

In conversations with friends about our collective feelings of despair watching compounding historical crises from the imperial core, I've been sharing this quote that Sally Rooney gave the New York Times about how she views her job writing novels in the face of calamities: “I suppose I tell myself that in the midst of all of this, people need not become so incredibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that we’re facing as to feel that life itself is no longer meaningful and that there’s no reason to go on.” I worry I’ve been using it as an excuse to justify inaction and complicity in exchange for the comforts of being an American in the face of the final sunset. 

That is the prevailing question driving Iowa City hardcore band BOOTCAMP on their debut, Time's Up. What are you doing as the world burns? The system is content to burn the world to the ground to maintain control as we do just enough to pat ourselves on the back, saying we did all we could as the flood waters fill our lungs. BOOTCAMP doesn’t believe bent ears are enough. 

Throughout the record, BOOTCAMP points fingers at the petit bourgeois class traitors who enable systems of oppression to continue. On “Email,” vocalist Juliette takes the role of a nude HR drone behind a switched-off Zoom camera, masturbating while denying bereavement leave. On “Endless Commute,” they touch on how communities are purposely divided by urban planning and our reliance on cars. On “Ruins,” they point at city folk like myself who step over people begging in the streets because our need to get lotion from Target overrules our innate empathy. I’m reminded of the time I had to kick someone out of the library because they refused to wear shoes, and I watched them get on their hands and knees to beg. I have never felt more inhuman than in that moment. 

BOOTCAMP understands that while the CEOs set the policies, it is in our daily interactions that we enforce the rules because we can’t imagine giving up the slight comforts this dying system affords us. As Juliette screams, “It’s a choice.” That choice is to live in a fantasy, one where the world isn’t built on violence, one where “painting some quirky signs” is enough to enact change. 

That is not to say BOOTCAMP spares those in power their ire. “CEO” evokes what happened outside the Hilton Midtown on December 4th, 2024, “September 11th” denounces American imperialism, and “Asylum” begs for the relief of open borders. 

At the end of the record, Juliette takes stock of what our collective refusal to change means for the future generations. On closing track “Decision,” they grapple with the idea of bringing a child into a world destined to burn. After a record of pointing fingers begging for change, it is legitimately chilling to hear someone as fearless as Juliette shriek, “Don’t want to bring her into this hell,” as the guitars fume towards the end. 

I was watching The Battle of Algiers, a beautiful ode to the freedom fighters who helped overthrow French imperial rule in Algeria, for the first time the other day, and I couldn’t help but think, “when will we have had enough?” BOOTCAMP want you to see that the time has long since passed and find something liberatory in that. In the face of the end, what is left to try but everything.

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on insta @Lilllianmweber.

Greg Freeman – Burnover | Album Review

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Transgressive Records

To pay respect to a record that wastes no time getting right to it, I’ll do the same. Greg Freeman’s Burnover is one of the best projects of the year, and it makes its case in the first five seconds. The initial moments of the first track and lead single “Point and Shoot,” a straight shooting guitar-forward heater that tragicomically evokes the Alec Baldwin disaster, lay out the blueprint that defines the entire record. Freeman’s delivery of the opening lines “Shot down in the shade of cardboard canyons / They cut the scene and saw blood on the Cameraman” lets the listener know exactly what they’re in for. The vocals are idiosyncratic yet immediately iconic. The lyrics are somewhat elusive but evoke vivid imagery rooted in a physical place. Emotionally, there’s a touch of familiar wryness, but his heart is refreshingly on his sleeve. Where many insert a throat-clearing preamble or instrumental intro, Freeman starts with a confident crack and a bang.

Freeman kicks off his sophomore album with an appropriate level of urgency as he tries, and succeeds, to capitalize on the organic ascension he’s experienced since the release of his 2022 self-released debut, I Looked Out. Unlike Burnover, which seems to have built up a bit of a hype train, his first record was released with no label and basically zero marketing. Freeman earned his traction with a once common, now radical formula of involvement in a strong local scene, playing a bunch of kickass live shows, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Now he’s got a record deal, a calendar full of shows opening up for Hamilton Leithauser and Grandaddy, and a Rolling Stone profile. In his words, he’s “not trying to cater to anyone” on this album, but I think it’s safe to say Greg knows he’ll be addressing a larger audience. 

In conjunction with his individual rise to relative stardom, there seems to be a growing appetite for this flavor of indie rock. I imagine anyone reviewing Freeman’s sophomore effort will be playing a version of the “Don’t Mention MJ Lenderman Challenge,” and it’s hard not to see these two as part of the same overarching trend. Though I’m not sure alt-country is the perfect label for Freeman’s music, some of the elements are there, as are the en vogue ‘90s guitar music references spanning the modern music landscape. These influences are connected. The current alt-country boom mirrors a similar explosion in the ‘90s, both of which coincided with a rise in commercialized country music. In a sense, Greg, MJ, and others in this lane are photo negatives of the larger pop country industry, and their respective local scenes are rough and rowdy antidotes to its monolithic polish and sheen. 

In contrast to Lenderman and others who carry this “alt-country” label, Freeman’s style is more freewheeling cowboy than Southern gothic. Greg was nice enough to respond to a few questions I sent over to him, and he was clear that he didn’t have a strict master plan for what his second album was going to sound like. “I let the songs kind of write themselves, and wasn’t too concerned with having them fall into any cohesive sound or style.” That starts to become apparent when the second track, “Salesman,” comes in with its walloping horns and buzzing guitar, then gives way to the plucky piano ballad “Rome, New York.” These two songs flaunt Freeman’s ability to turn his sound on a dime and his trust that the songs “would have some kind of cohesive identity, without putting any rules on [them] sound-wise.” They’re in totally different energetic registers but feel cut from the same cloth.

When I asked him the somewhat cliché “musical influences” question, he indulged my suggestion that Modest Mouse may have imprinted on his sound, and I hear in both artists that lack of concern over sonic cohesion. On some of Modest Mouse’s best projects, like 2000’s landmark The Moon and Antarctica, the band didn’t confine themselves to a particular genre and instead seemed more focused on evoking salient imagery (as exemplified by the album title). Greg seems to take that approach as well. On the brilliant title track, a reference to a region of upstate New York known as a hotbed for 19th-century religious fervor, he sings of a blue frozen morning, smoke on the horizon, a fire station barroom, psychic highways, and glacial lakes. It loosely tells the story of a firefighter’s strike, but the narrative is incomplete and secondary to the pictures the song projects onto my brain. It’s all set to a backdrop of acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica that would sound right at home on a ‘70s Dylan record.

These folk rock arrangements are one of the most obvious ways in which Freeman’s second album progresses from his debut. His band of talented musicians from the local Burlington scene flesh out the album’s “live in the studio” sound, making every track feel as if it’s being brought to life just as it enters your ears. On an Instagram post earlier this summer accompanying the release of the single “Curtain,” Freeman recalled joyful laughter in the studio as his piano player laid down the track’s “honky tonk” riff that was simply “so perfect that it’s kind of funny.” That magic certainly translates to the studio recording. The band’s chemistry is audible as they jam along so effortlessly for seven minutes that I wished it would go on for seventy.

I’ve spent months with Burnover at this point, and it’s still slowly revealing itself to me. Greg and I agreed that the album wasn’t necessarily “accessible,” but it does offer several handholds and entry points in the form of highly memorable melodies, riffs, and lines. The guitar riff on the pop-punkish “Gulch” and the “rusty metal throne” line from “Curtain” are just a couple of tidbits that have stuck with me for weeks now, and I suspect I’ll continue digging up new golden nuggets as I keep listening along with the rest of the world. The album just dropped on streaming as I’m writing this, and it feels like the celebration around Burnover has only just begun. I asked Greg about the future of the industry, specifically in the context of the recent Spotify reckoning and his complicated feelings towards the platform as a sort of necessary, but possibly transient, evil. He left me with his hope that “the freakier the future gets, the stronger our communities and independent movements will become.” He’s certainly doing his part.

Parker White lives and works in Atlanta where he moonlights as a music writer. When not attending local shows or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hiking/running, 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.