Waiting to Spill

Joshua Harmon remembers being at his family’s house in early 2019. He was in his childhood bathroom, and he was losing it. Processing a tangle of feelings, the vocalist and guitarist of Utah-based band The Backseat Lovers suddenly heard a lyric in his head — “Do you want to be like your father? /The older you get, your head’s getting hotter.” These words would become the first lines of the song Close Your Eyes, but beyond that, they opened the floodgates for the group’s second album, Waiting to Spill.

It would take eighteen months to record the follow-up to The Backseat Lovers’ acclaimed 2019 debut, When We Were Friends. It was a time of experimentation and revelation, of being stuck together through a pandemic and of traveling to isolated writing retreats in the California woods to drill down on their emerging material. If the first album saw the band synthesizing their influences—from folk-rock singer-songwriters to jam band improvisation to Radiohead-style art rock—this time they broke through to create something uniquely their own.

Tracklist

1. Silhouette
2. Close Your Eyes
3. Morning in the Aves
4. Growing/Dying
5. Words I Used
6. Snowbank Blues
7. Follow the Sound
8. Slowing Down
9. Know Your Name
10. Viciously Lonely