Cusp shares its bright, snappy new single “Oh Man,” the second from their forthcoming new album What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back (Exploding In Sound), out October 17, 2025. The song follows lead single “Follow Along”and arrives alongside a playful video created by the band’s own Jen Bender (vocals, guitar) and Gaelen Bates (guitar). “Like ‘Follow Along,’ ‘Oh Man’ is a caricature of my (very) late 20s. It captures a heightened and nagging need to be ‘accomplished,’ to pursue the Dream, and to be taken just seriously enough,” explains Jen Bender. “The video is a snapshot of all of us at this time of life: playing music together, enjoying each others’ company, and speeding along into the unknown. There is also a miraculous third and final act.”

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.”