When singer and guitarist Anthony Bucci uprooted from Upstate New York and moved to Los Angeles in late 2016, his band Broken Field Runner was already an established indie act with two principal releases—the band’s debut, 2015’s Clear a Heaven So This Earth Can Breathe, which glows like a pop-punk effigy, its chords hot and bright; and the band’s follow-up EP, 2017’s Heavy Hanging Fruit, which smolders, its songs swaying with the weight of its tragic narrative.
Though these releases reveal a songwriter unafraid of confronting the dense and difficult, the move to Los Angeles inspired the sort of introspection and emotion that Bucci had never before experienced—and, subsequently, an album’s worth of music.
Christened Lay My Head Down, Broken Field Runner’s second full-length balances the pop-punk altitude of the band’s debut with the emotional depth of its follow-up as it attempts to reconcile these West Coast-inspired complexities. The album features ten previously unreleased tracks recorded and engineered by Derek Ted (Field Medic, Owl Paws), mastered by TW Walsh (Sufjan Stevens, Pedro The Lion), and featuring Chris Villeneuve of Drug Church on drums, and Chris Tenerowicz of Self Defense Family on trumpet.
The band released the LP today on July 19 via Chicago’s Jetsam-Flotsam Records. Listen to it below.
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