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 the likes of 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. “The record has this theme of liminality – not just as a place, but in your mind,” vocalist/guitarist Cory Castro explains. “It’s like being stuck in a doorframe or a long hallway that never ends. ”The band – Castro, Larry Warner (guitar), Jake Hughes (guitar/vocals), Justin Castro (bass) and Zach Hall (drums/vocals) – once again returned to longtime producer Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, The Movielife) for LP6. Together, they wrote and recorded the album’s 11 tracks in two sessions on either side of the band’s sold-out North American tour for the 10-year anniversary of Those Days Are Gone. Stepping away between sessions gave them perspective; when they returned to the studio, they heard everything with fresh ears. At the same time, Romnes challenged them to trust their instincts, resulting in spontaneous sonic breakthroughs: “The Need for a Post-Credits Scene” arrived almost fully formed, its lyrics spilling out quickly, while first single “A Hero’s Grave,” juxtaposes a serpentine guitar line and buoyant ’90s groove against Castro’s gruff vocals, helped along by the first-blush energy of writing on the spot. “We wrote it in like 15 minutes,” Warner says of “A Hero’s Grave.” “I was tracking guitars for a different song while Brett stepped out to take a call and ended up coming up with the riff. Zach came in and started working through drum ideas, and we had the whole thing done pretty quickly. If songs come together like that, it’s a pretty good sign for us.” In all, Moments, the follow-up to 2023’s Lessons That We Swear To Keep, chronicles a period of intense personal upheaval in Castro’s life: the dissolution of a long-term relationship and attempts to move on, the slow realization that what he’d lost was actually what he truly wanted and, ultimately, the life-altering moment of finding out midway through recording that he was going to be a father. The closing track, “The Waters Of Life,” written in the afterglow of that news, becomes the push that finally shoves him through the doorway into something new. “There was a lot to write about this time around, but getting over that threshold definitely took some time,” Castro says. “We tend to write albums that have a conceptual arc to them, but you just sort of have to let the songs reveal themselves and figure out what that actually is. When I got the call that I was going to be a dad, I immediately knew what song I was going to write. It just felt right.” Pulled from Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult novel House of Leaves, Moments Before The Wind references a passage that compares life to fragile structures on the verge of being blown apart and rearranged into something unrecognizable. Its artwork mirrors that feeling: a massive crystal head cracked open, its interior filled with surreal, Dalí-esque rooms and corridors that echo the “backrooms” of the mind Castro kept returning to while writing lyrics. The emotional architecture of the album might be abstract, but the stories at its center – the heart of Free Throw’s music for more than a decade – are disarmingly real, exemplified on songs like “The Outlaw Star,” inspired by the anime of the same name and stuffed with dextrous Midwest emo guitar and rough-hewn punk tempos, the album-opening “MissingNo.” and aching, atmospheric “This Dollar General Ain’t Gonna Rob Itself.” Ultimately, 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 there into a brand-new era – both personally and professionally – ready for whatever the wind blows their way. 

The fourth full-length record from Atlanta’s Microwave is a trip. It all begins with the misty synth strikes and cosmic transmission warbles of “Portals,” before hazy, dripping-wet guitar chords settle in. The song, an adaptation of the traditional Christian hymn “Softly and Tenderly,” is true to its new name, as liminal and fleeting as it is gripping and emotional. It’s an enormous, gentle, enveloping introduction to what will be explored: life and death, happiness and freedom, the real and unreal. This is Let’s Start Degeneracy, the long-awaited new album from Microwave, releasing on April 26 via Pure Noise. It's an emo record, but perhaps only categorically speaking. It contains multitudes: ambient, pop, R&B, punk, and experimental sounds float in and out of one another as the record moves through scenes, experiences, and feelings, all of them rippling with a purity of intention and translation that mark the best artistic works of “psychedelia.” Vocalist/guitarist/producer Nathan Hardy, bassist Tyler Hill, and drummer Timothy Pittard have created something that resembles a concept record, but it’s the sort of concept that’s impossible to contain in just one phrase or word or sound. The record’s title, taken from a conservative politician’s take on drugs in 1970, captures this liberated spirit. There are no rules, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. “It’s about letting go of attachments and behaviors that aren’t serving you, and trying to shake off your programming and not be motivated by fear and guilt and shame,” says Hardy. Microwave wrote the songs for Let’s Start Degeneracy over a four-year period beginning in 2019, going through waves of static then bursts of energy. They recorded the bulk of it in Hardy’s Atlanta apartment, where they spent plenty of time rummaging through samples, effects, and plugins to augment, distort, and tweak the soundscapes on the record. Drums and additional layers were laid down in Nashville with Jeremy Ferguson, and in East Point, Georgia with Travis Hill. Josh Wilbur (Korn, Bad Religion) mixed, and Brad Blackwood (Maroon 5, Lamb of God) mastered. “Circling the Drain” was the first taste of this new era, released in April 2022. It’s more classic Microwave: clean guitar chords emerge from a cloud of exhaled breath, and the song slowly builds to cavernous depths and tidal heaviness with gorgeous, gritty production flourishes. Two others, the swimming, synth-driven “Ferrari” and the bright, stoned summer strummer “Straw Hat,” have since been released, expanding the borders of the band’s playing field. The title track is where things really start to get weird. Over a psychotropic beat that Hardy stitched together, a synth sub bass throbs throughout and the vocals wander through an existential plane. By the time the streaking, brain-bloom guitar bends hit after the first chorus, we’re already well and happily lost in some other dimension, each texture and sound a delicious new sensation. The piano-led “Huperzine Dreams,” unravels over philosophical commentary with a nod to Huperzine-A, the naturally-derived supplement that some people use to facilitate lucid dreaming. “That’s one of the wide variety of nü-tropic supplements that Tito and I have been experimenting with over the last several years,” says Hardy. As far as they explore, Microwave are never far from their roots though. “Bored of Being Sad” is a Much Love-era demo that Hardy revisited over the years until it reached its final form here. It’s a perfect slice of what people have come to love and expect from the band: anthemic and guitar-forward, a perfect chemical balance between emo and pop-punk. From start to finish, Let’s Start Degeneracy marks a liberated new chapter for Microwave, one unbound by realities other than their own.