Every album is a product of the environment in which it was created, and nowhere is that more pertinent than on Cusp’s second album, What I Want Doesn't Want Me Back. While the band’s excellent 2023 debut You Can Do It All was written in transition while they relocated from Rochester, NY to Chicago, What I Want Doesn't Want Me Back comes much more from a place of stability–of roots beginning to form. “With that feeling of being settled comes the space to ask myself new questions about myself and choices I’ve made,” guitarist/vocalist Jen Bender says. As a result, the album feels like both a maturation and a reinvention, with every aspect of Cusp’s sound tweaked and pushed to find new boundaries, and to fill new spaces.

After moving to Chicago, Cusp became the fully-formed and settled five-piece of Bender, Gaelen Bates (guitar), Matt Manes (bass), Tommy Moore (drums, percussion, vocals) and Tessa O’Connell (synths, piano, vocals). This iteration of the band, finally able to all get in a room together, cemented the ideas and energy they’d been honing live on stage over the previous couple of years. The result of these subtle changes to their form comes to fruition on the thrilling What I Want Doesn't Want Me Back. Recorded almost entirely live at Electrical Audio, a number of these 10 tracks peel back the layers on what it means to write songs, and the actual process of music making and being in a band: how and why we seek validation, and the shapeshifting nature of legitimacy. “These questions have come up a bit in some of our previous work, but I confronted them a bit more directly on this record,” Bender expands. “The ultimate consensus is: yes, this is worthwhile and yes, it means something.”