In every way, the music on Piecing It Together, the new album by Nashville rock band Free Throw, defines itself as a hybrid of several styles. Piecing It Together is an appropriate title for the band’s latest foray into emo, itself a somewhat broad label for music and songs that draw from hardcore, punk and pop. It’s Free Throw’s first release in two years, and the pandemic’s chilling effect on social life transpires throughout the album. The title also suggests that Free Throw is dealing with the emotional undertow of both the pandemic’s isolation and their own looming adulthood. The songs play with classic emo tropes of boredom, disillusion and aspiration, and the music is the densest the band has made in their nearly decade-long career.
Free Throw cut Piecing It Together in September with producer Will Yip at his studio, Studio 4 Recording, in Conshohocken, Pa. Yip, whose résumé includes work with emo band Panic! at the Disco and rockers The Fray, beefs up the sound of a group that, on Piecing, artfully combines forward motion with a refined pop-rock sensibility. The tracks sound tense, but the playing, songwriting and production combine to produce complex music that often uses theme-and-variation techniques.
As Free Throw’s singer Cory Castro tells me via phone from his home in Nashville, Yip’s approach to recording proved essential to Piecing It Together. In particular, Castro’s vocals are detailed — every nuance and emo-specific scream is recorded in full color.
“We had worked with the same producer, who is Brett Romnes, for the last two records,” Castro says. “We just wanted to switch it up this time. One thing led to another, and it worked out. I’m used to recording vocals in the booth, away from everyone else, and kind of in my own space. Recording with Will, he does it differently. He likes to have people record vocals in the control room with him, so he’s, like, sitting there.”
Castro brings a new level of interpretation to Piecing, which is the fourth full-length since he started the group in Nashville in 2012. Castro was born in Nashville, and he moved with his family to nearby Fairview when he was in high school. “It was a little bit different for me, coming from West Nashville most of my life, to live in this super-small town outside of the city,” he says.
After releasing their first album, 2014’s Those Days Are Gone, the band began touring regularly, garnering praise for their savvy update of emo. “When we first started the band, [emo] was kind of starting to be really popular again,” says Castro. He’s referring to what some observers dub the fourth wave of emo, one of whose characteristics is its similarities to contemporary indie rock. Starting in the early Aughts, bands like Fall Out Boy and Nashville’s Paramore added pop sheen and indie-derived song structures to lyrics that could be as confessional as, say, Taylor Swift’s.
Piecing It Together owes a debt to the aforementioned Paramore, and you can also hear the massive influence of Pavement throughout. “Worry Seed” functions as a miniature suite that could have come from Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and near the end, the band recaps the song’s theme in 6/8 time. Similarly, “Ocular Pat Down” riffs on the approach of a 1970s boogie band, complete with power chords.
On Piecing, Free Throw sounds energized — bassist Julian Castro, who is Cory’s younger brother, plays fat lines that power the music. Their sprung-rhythm style is less straight and more unpredictable than what you’d expect from a pop band. The Piecing track “Force of Will” even features a modified funk rhythm, while “Dormancy” is tense, ominous pop that leaves you vaguely unsettled. The music matches the lyrics, and Cory Castro’s worldview seems post-emo in its preoccupation with settling down and making sense of adult life.
“The last record we did [2019’s The Past Is Prologue] was a super-introspective record, in a way,” Cory Castro says. “I think this record takes a full-on dive into introspective ideas about things. It’s a lot less about things like relationships … and a lot more about the relationship with myself and learning, as I get older, that I can’t be this young, punk emo guy forever.”
Piecing has its depressive side — after all, this is emo. In “The Grass Isn’t Greener,” Cory Castro sings about his life in unsparing terms: “I look so gray / I’ve spiraled south, somehow / You’re far away / I mope around our house.” Meanwhile, “Ocular Pat Down” is an emo-fied variation on a classic rock theme: fake people who drive you crazy. Piecing takes adulthood as a state of grace that seems almost impossible to achieve, and it’s this duality that makes Free Throw’s new music seem mildly heroic.
