Jawdropped

Jawdropped's Secret to Spare at once feels classic and immediate, with every sunburst guitar hook and sharpened vocal melody hitting the ears like a half-full beer bottle careening towards the brick wall of your favorite dive bar. The Los Angeles quartet have established their sound-a pitch-perfect melange of big-hearted indie rock, the sour-sweet sounds of '90s alternative radio, and the shaggy-and-ragged sound of alt-country-in shockingly quick time, making Secret to Spare one of the most fully-realized debut albums in recent memory. Secret to Spare follows Jawdropped's Just Fantasy EP from last year, underscoring how remarkable it is that this group-vocalists Kyra Morling and vocalists/guitarist Roman Zangari, bassist Sean Edwards, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian-have accomplished so much since forming just two years ago. "We were all in bands that were not really working out at the time," Zangari recalls regarding Jawdropped's origins. "My old band had gotten an opportunity to do a house show, and Kyra convinced me to try some songs I was sitting on. I convinced her to play the show with me, and after we got Sean on board we were like, 'Actually, this could be a band here.'" Indeed, Jawdropped put every last drop of themselves into Secret to Spare; aside from engineer work from Colin Knight (Agriculture) and an expert mixdown from Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Hotline TNT), the quartet self-produced this record to capture just how their live shows feel in the moment. "We wanted it to sound like a band in a room, so we recorded live and tried not to water down what we do," Zangari says. "We wanted to capture the essence of how we play live-the unfiltered Jawdropped sound." The result is a record that's as raw as it is meticulous, right down to bringing in a woodblock for first single "Monday": "It was a months-long battle-do we keep the woodblock?" Edwards recalls. "Eventually, we put our foot down and recorded the woodblock in there. It's an example of us drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'Look whose band this is.'"