Cusp today shared their dynamic, soaring new single “In A Box,” the final from their forthcoming new album What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back (Exploding In Sound), out this Friday October 17th. “‘In A Box’ is the crux of the record and feels as timely as when it was written over a year ago,” explains singer / guitarist Jen Bender. “The track is a reflection on [my] persistent inner conversations about comfort, art, and purpose – and questions what impact art can have if the artist feels trapped in a box of their own making.” What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back is now available for pre-order.

Every album is a product of the environment in which it was created, and nowhere is that more pertinent than on What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back. While You Can Do It All was written in transition while Cusp 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,” 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, the band became the fully formed and settled five-piece of Bender, Bates, Matt Manes (bass), Tommy Moore (drums, percussion, vocals), and Tessa O’Connell (synths, piano, vocals). This iteration of Cusp, 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.”

Glowing guitars and shifting temperaments sit seamlessly alongside a more vulnerable side that drifts in and out throughout What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back. Bender admits that she finds those songs harder to write and share, but they create a balance here, an unexpectedly emotional disposition that is at times hidden under vibrant bursts of guitar, and allows the overall character of the band to breathe and come to life. This choppiness is reminiscent of contemporaries like Built To Spill and Ovlov, and Bender cites both Sadie Dupuis and Adrianne Lenker as influences on her writing; the two reference points highlight the personal nature of the songwriting here that bubbles away under the surface.

Finding their feet in a new city, in a new home, among new members, Cusp embraced that collective spirit and newfound togetherness to take a leap into a new chapter. What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back thrives within these circumstances, something that is at once as jubilant as it is dynamic.