Jawdropped's 'Secret To Spare' Is a Sunlit, Songwriting-First Debut Worth Shouting About
Roman Zangari told Stereogum how Secret To Spare got made: “We tracked live. There’s some vocal overdubs and a couple of guitar overdubs, but we did the core of every song live, no metronome.” You can hear that decision in the first ten seconds, and it never stops paying off.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Sean Edwards’ bass and Cook Lee-Chobanian’s drums were captured as a pair of people in a room rather than a grid, which is why the record breathes where its influences usually stiffen. Dork’s Harry Shaw nailed the effect: the album “benefits from sounding like four people playing songs rather than four hundred individual audio tracks having a meeting.”
The Spatial Dynamics: Colin Knight engineered; Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Hotline TNT) mixed. Paste’s Grace Robins-Somerville heard the result as “bright guitar tones and a certain flavor of punk romanticism, gold glimmering through grit — a sonic sensibility refined by Colin Knight’s engineering and Alex Farrar’s mixing.” The band produced it themselves.
Standout Performance
The Zangari–Kyra Morling vocal interplay. Spectral Nights singled out “Smoglight” as “a hugely infectious and relentless slice of power pop that clocks in at under 2 minutes,” while “High Beams” lands “somewhere between The Cars and early-’90s grunge.” Then closer “Two” goes acoustic and the whole thing resolves.
Why It’s Certified
Because the songs hold up naked. Zangari’s rule, via Stereogum: “We want the songs to really be able to hold up on just an acoustic guitar and the vocal.” No Ripcord’s David Coleman, scoring it 8/10, heard exactly that: “It’s one thing to sound like your idols, another to write like them, and that’s the key to Secret to Spare’s success… In a field of competent soundalikes, Jawdropped stand apart as songwriters with their own unique voice.”
Spectral Nights put the rest of it best: “With this breathtaking album, Jawdropped won’t be a secret for long.”