Free Throw - Moments Before The Wind Tour

Since forming in 2012, FREE THROW’s story has been simple: keep going. New records, longer tours, bigger rooms—it’s always been another step upward for the Nashville-based quintet, whose 2014 debut, Those Days Are Gone, has become an era-defining classic in the emo-punk genre, launching them onto global tours with Hot Mulligan and New Found Glory and slots at Slam Dunk, Riot Fest, and The Fest. Every milestone has pushed them ahead, but on their sixth LP, Moments Before The Wind (Wax Bodega), that constant charge gradually slows, suspended mid-step, mid-thought, mid-life.

Recorded with longtime producer Brett Romnes on either end of the sold-out Those Days Are Gone 10-year tour, the follow-up to 2023’s Lessons That We Swear To Keep chronicles a surrealist descent into liminality: a period of intense personal upheaval colored by loss, renewal, reflection, and, ultimately, life-altering joy through the impending birth of a child. The 11-song set is disarmingly real, colored by sonic spontaneity—a swirl of Midwest emo, sweat-soaked punk fervor, and crashing alternative rock—but also the sort of achingly vulnerable lyricism fans and critics have come to expect from the band.

Through it all, Moments Before The Wind finds Free Throw still moving, still growing, but now, perhaps more than ever, acutely aware that the path ahead is neither straight nor obvious. There’s a quiet confidence guiding them into a brand-new era, ready for whatever the wind blows their way.

Despite our deepest desires, time only continues to move forward, slowly and incessantly. We attempt to understand the present through our conceptions of the past, and we hope to use that understanding to guide the future. These simple chronological divisions offer us a simple way to organize our lives: where we’ve been, where we are now, where we hope to be. Despite their connections, they feel disparate, always looking at one through the lens of another. On their new record Lost on You, the band’s seventh full-length, Tigers Jaw pose a much more holistic idea: we exist in all of these timelines at once.

Formed in 2005 by high school friends from Scranton, PA, Tigers Jaw have long been an important and revered band. They quickly gained attention for their ability to effectively and cooly capture teenage emotions, with equal parts upbeat angst and mellow moodiness. And now, two decades later, the band is still going. Ben Walsh (guitar, vocals) and Brianna Collins (keys, vocals), alongside the expanded lineup featuring Mark Lebiecki (guitar), Colin Gorman (bass), and Teddy Roberts (drums), continue their legacy into a new era.

Lost on You is a continuation of what we’ve always loved about Tigers Jaw. There’s the powerful and pounding rhythm section, the great melodic leads that shift from instrument to instrument, and, as always, the interchanging and overlapping vocals. With five years since their last release, Walsh noted that the band “wanted to feel confident in the material we have and let things progress naturally.” And so they took their time finding what felt right, even though, of course, life continued on all around them. They reunited with producer and engineer Will Yip (Turnstile, Movements) at his famed Studio 4 in Pennsylvania to capture this moment, this solid and yet very strange period of middle adulthood where we are supposed to have shaken off the uncertainty of adolescence and yet are still plagued by many of the same problems.

The result is a Tigers Jaw record as great as you’d expect. Songs like “Primary Colors” and “Baptized on a Redwood Drive” find the band embracing a driving midtempo similar to alt rock heroes Jimmy Eat World or Weezer, with other tracks like “Head is Like a Sinking Stone” and “BREEZER” feeling so classic that the best reference is Tigers Jaw themselves. They sing about blades and knives, anxieties and intentions, and timeless TJ topics like two worlds and ghosts.

And while this record is decidedly from the present, it is deeply embedded in their history. There are many moments that would feel just as at home sung along to at the defunct Scranton venue Test Pattern as they would in the huge halls of Philadelphia’s Union Transfer, a venue probably ten-times as large that they are now able to sell out. This is not surprising. The scene’s present moment owes a lot to Tigers Jaw; their contributions have helped pave the way for this entire world, and still the group continues on.

And that’s the thing, Tigers Jaw was the band that wrote those songs before and they still are the band writing these songs now. You can plainly hear it. Tigers Jaw show us the possibility of realizing all versions of ourselves. We are our former, present, and future selves in one being, filled with prescience and past. These songs are portals taking us between different parts of the band’s life and even our own lives, showing us how we can understand time not as a linear narrative but as something that is all real and knowable at once. They weren’t able to get here without starting somewhere else—somewhere we as fans can instantly recognize and relate to. And while where they are going may still be unknown to us, we can see traces of it here already. It’s uncertain but true, something we are constantly grappling with as time continues to inevitably pass. But there is beauty in it if we can accept it, finding contentment in just attempting to know ourselves. As Collins sings on “Primary Colors,” “I understand it all now/It’s not supposed to make sense.”

The story of BEN QUAD is punctuated by moments of randomness: a chance meeting via Craigslist bonding over bands like Microwave and Modern Baseball. An out-of-nowhere name drop from indie tastemaker Ian Cohen lauding their debut album, 2022’s I’m Scared That’s All There Is. A one-off sonic curveball that somehow turned into their biggest song – and, without them realizing it at the time, a brand-new freedom to reinvent themselves.

But serendipity has done more than bring Ben Quad here, to the release of WISHER, their first LP for Pure Noise Records: It’s taught them to thrive inside the unpredictable, to harness a no-limits musical mentality and self-effacing sense of humor and turn it into some of the most resonant, captivating emo of today. Well, actually, post-emo.

“This is our love letter to the genre,” singer/guitarist Sam Wegrzynski says of the album. “It’s an amalgamation of all the shit emo kids like: screaming, synths, pop sensibilities all mixed with crazy emotional stuff. What’s post-emo if not the next evolution?”

The Oklahoma City-based quartet have always been evolving. I’m Scared That’s All There Is cemented them as a force in the modern emo movement, landing them on bills with the likes of Hot Mulligan and Knuckle Puck. The standalone single “You’re Part of It” added a harder, screamo-tinged edge to their sound, while an outpouring of support to a social media shitpost declaring “If ‘You're Part of It’ gets 10K streams by Wednesday, we'll put out a screamo EP” took them even further down that road with Ephemera, their 2024 EP. (The song currently boasts more than 4 million streams.) Now, with Wisher, the band deliver a true follow-up to their debut that fully embraces everything that’s followed it since.

The 10 songs on Wisher find Wegrzynski, Edgar Viveros (lead guitar), Henry Shields (bass/backing vocals) and Isaac Young (drums) pulling from every corner of their record collections: jagged punk riffs, glassy math-rock, sticky pop hooks and glitchy production that push toward something futuristic. But rather than a scattershot collage, these elements recur as motifs – a melody here, a guitar line there – stitched together with purpose and intention.

First single “It’s Just A Title” serves up a groove factory complemented by smooth vocals and lifting keyboards, while the frantic “Painless” rips through speakers with the ferocity and melodicism of They’re Only Chasing Safety-era Underoath, if their guitarists spent more time studying Midwest emo than metalcore. “Did You Decide to Skip Arts and Crafts” welcomes Treaty Oak Revival singer Sam Canty – and a well-placed banjo – onto a genre-blending Tumblr-era throwback, “Classic Case of Dead Guy on the Ground” ascends with a preposterously sublime falsetto hook, and the brooding “West of West” brings things full circle for the band with a cameo from Microwave’s Nathan Hardy.

Leaving the Sooner State for New Jersey, the band connected with producer Jon Markson (The Story So Far, Drug Church) to bring the album to life, taking up residence at his farm/studio for their first real studio experience. Amidst barnyard animals and peaceful countryside, the idyllic setting provided the perfect backdrop – full of time and space – to find themselves and the next evolution of their sound.

“Our older stuff was done driving to and from places on the weekend,” Wegrzynski says. “But this time, we had access to rooms full of instruments like banjos and sleigh bells and more amp heads than I could ever imagine. I think it’s a change in sound because it’s a change in scenery. How can you be sad in a beautiful place like that?”

That shift in perspective carries directly into Wisher’s subject matter. In stark contrast to the heavy existential questions the band posed on I’m Scared That’s All There Is, the songs here aren’t about survival but rather savoring life’s small victories – the moments that might not feel like much at the time but can snowball into something bigger if you only allow yourself to find the joy in them. In many ways, it’s much like Ben Quad themselves, their own story built on a string of seemingly minor twists of fate that’s only been amplified by a relentless DIY attitude and instinct to chase every idea, no matter how improbable.

“We really wanted to build a more positive outlook, a more hopeful tone,” Viveros explains. “We’re still talking about love, loss – all the things that emo bands write about – but we wanted to spin it on its head and let people know that things can get better. Life is what you make it, and it’s important to grasp onto the little moments.”

Pool Kids’ third album, Easier Said Than Done, shimmers with emotional clarity and courage. Adrenalizing and irresistible, it captures the dynamism of the band’s live show in the studio while showcasing a sound unmistakably their own.

The band first cut their teeth on Tallahassee’s house show circuit, quickly building a grassroots following. Their 2018 debut, Music to Practice Safe Sex To, earned praise from Hayley Williams of Paramore. Expanding into a four-piece — Andy Anaya (guitar), Nicolette Alvarez (bass), Caden Clinton (drums), and Christine Goodwyne (guitar, vocals) — Pool Kids reached new heights with their 2022 self-titled album, a critically acclaimed blend of pop, emo, and math rock marked by lush, high-contrast arrangements.

They’ve shared stages with The Mountain Goats, PUP, Beach Bunny, and La Dispute, all while holding fast to their DIY ethos: anyone can do what Pool Kids do. Anyone can start a band.

For Easier Said Than Done, the band teamed up with producer Mike Vernon Davis (Foxing, Great Grandpa). They self-funded the record and spent five weeks recording in Seattle, crashing with friends, staying in motels, and even sleeping on the studio floor to keep costs down. “We did a lot of searching, playing each song a million different ways and deciding which one sounded the best,” says Goodwyne. With the finished album in hand, the band signed to Epitaph Records.

Across the album, emotional candor drives each track. On “Tinted Windows,” Goodwyne grits her teeth at the strain touring can place on close relationships. “Exit Plan” captures the bittersweet weight of saying goodbye to friends after a run of shows, knowing those bonds may never feel quite the same. On “Bad Bruise,” she pleads for empathy — “Pretty please, empathy / Got me on my knees” — as the band surges around her.

A powerful sense of collectivity defines Easier Said Than Done — in the dynamic interplay between Goodwyne and Anaya’s guitars, in Alvarez’s gravitational basslines, and in Clinton’s whirling drum patterns. Pool Kids lock together as a unified force, propelling themselves toward hard-won release. The album leaves listeners with one vital reminder: you don’t have to do anything in this world alone.