Free Throw

Lessons That We Swear To Keep, the fifth full-length record from Nashville emo-punk outfit Free Throw, opens with a five-second haze of violin-like feedback before it hits the ground at a sprint: a thick, overdriven guitar, drums, and bass all slam in together with tight bursts and a bright guitar lead dancing behind the wall of sound. “It’s so crazy that as you’re aging, somehow things become so complicated,” vocalist and guitarist Cory Castro groans to start the record’s first verse. 

This opener, “A Part is Better Than Zero,” is electric with tension and desperation. Screamed backing vocals and harmonies layer atop Castro’s perfectly-strained roar, and guitars at the edge of fuzz-chaos flicker and rip across dizzying leads. Zach Hall’s drums are furious and precise. Both lyrically and sonically, the song is a sort of thesis statement for a thrilling, thunderous 38-minute LP that’s part-classic Free Throw, part-something new entirely.

In true Free Throw fashion, the record is marked with video game and TV references—Castro’s beloved Pokémon (“Cinnabar Island”), Outer Worlds (“Spacer’s Choice”), and Trailer Park Boys, for starters. But where previous releases centered on a cohesive theme, ready for dramaturgy and narration, Lessons That We Swear To Keep is about something even more immediate and formative, but less discussed: the grayness of everyday life.

“We ended Piecing It Together with this song that talks about how life is just ups and downs, but this record, I kind of realized that life isn’t just ups and downs, because those are the most extreme moments in life,” says Castro. “Most of life resides in that in-between space where you spend most of your time. I think it’s part of human nature that when you think back to memories of the past, you always think about these highs and lows because they’re the ones that stick out, but the majority of your life has been lived in that middle space. I started to kind of find this weird happiness with that idea. The record kind of falls into that realization that sometimes it’s just nice to find solace in the middle ground.”

In partnership with Wax Bodega, Lessons That We Swear To Keep will be the first independent release for the five-piece—Castro, guitarist Jake Hughes, bassist Justin Castro, lead guitarist Lawrence Warner, and drummer Hall. “For the past eight years, we’d always had a label to answer to,” says Castro. “We were free to do whatever we wanted. Usually when it comes to writing and recording, there’s always this stress around it where you want it to be as good as possible but you’re trying to meet deadlines. This time that just wasn’t there.”

The record also marks Free Throw’s first release with Hall since their 2014 debut, Those Days Are Gone. Hall and Castro have been making music together since they were in high school, and now in their 30s, they’ve found that old magic again. “It really unlocked something,” says Castro. “It feels like I’m back in a garage with my buddies writing music again. It’s fucking wicked.”

It didn’t take the band long to write the record. Castro says they began to gather two to three times a week, and after each jam, they’d walk away with a new song (“A hell of a pace,” he grins). Over the course of a month, they assembled eight of the record’s 11 tracks, but the speed wasn’t the product of compromise. Castro says there  “I feel like this record is some of the best songwriting, lyrically, that I’ve done in a long time,” he says. “Something felt special about making this record.”

With those in hand, they recorded in spring 2023 at Barber Shop Studios in Hopatcong, New Jersey with producer Brett Romnes, who produced Free Throw’s second and third LPs. When Castro was trying to think of a record title, he kept coming back to a lyric near the end of “Replacing Leene’s Bell.” “History is doomed to repeat/Unless mistakes turn into lessons that we swear to keep/And never lose,” Castro cries on a spaced-out bridge. “The more I thought about it, the more it just kept making sense, and I kept coming back to it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Okay, my brain is telling me this is what it should be, over and over again.”

Out of the record’s opening blast comes first single “Spacer’s Choice,” with pop-punk vocal anthemics, drum theatrics, and glorious, bright rhythm and lead guitars running neck-in-neck. Castro reckons with aging and feeling like a clunky, refurbished version of his former self, an extra in his own life: “Like the minor characters that populate a game/Repeating dialogue until the goal has been attained,” he snarls. 

Second single “Thanks For Asking,” an emo-punk alt-rock engine, opens with warped synth twinkles and bass while Castro negotiates the pressures of the parasocial relationships brought on by a spotlit life. “People expect me to be this happy person,” he says. “You’re not always having a happy day, but you still have to try to put it on. Sometimes the weight of that can be crushing.”

The mellow, acoustic-forward shuffle of “What Comes Around is All Around”—a reference from Canadian dirtbag comedy classic Trailer Park Boys—gives way to a thrilling, pounding punk rock movement that changes up again, flowing back into an electrified take on the rootsy opening. Finally, the cacophony difts out, and it comes down to just keys, strings, and Castro’s voice: “It took time to understand that/Our lives are spent within the bounds/Ups and downs, they don’t define me/I’ll find solace in the middle ground.”