Font American Bully Xl Limited Edition Vinyl

Austin quartet Font announce their new album, American Bully XL, out November 13th via Acrophase, and release the lead single, “Texas.” In writing the follow-up to their “lean, muscular, and immediate” (UPROXX) 2024 debut, Strange Burden, Font found themselves reaching back into the music they grew up around. The result is a vivid collage of Lone Star State songcraft and experimental music — there are dusty country-rock moments, the languid slow-mo atmosphere of DJ Screw, samples of lapsteel, Roky Erickson-style zonked-out sweetheart melodies, a little of Lotic's heat-vision hallucinations, and hymns in electronic form. More than anything, there's a distinctly Texan spirit of independence, curiosity, and self-belief. The band sees the shift in their music as a maturation: “It was time for us to leave more sky in the songs,” they explain.Though its vast sonic landscape may make it hard to believe, American Bully XL is in large part the result of a tightly controlled experiment. The group—Thom Waddill, Anthony Laurence, Jack Owens, Roman Parnell—drove out to Long Beach, California, to escape the Texas summer heat for a three week stint at Dutch Interior's home studio with very little written. Between trips to the beach, the idea was to remove themselves from the familiar, chase sounds in dark rooms, and see if they could shape them into new material. They refined the material on a tour of the South with Dutch Interior that fall, where Davis Stewart began developing what would become the record’s visual language. That winter, they turned Anthony’s house in Austin into a studio and shepherded the recordings into their final forms.The image the band held in mind as they finished the record was of a robot in a log cabin, evoking “the tension between the electronic and the acoustic, the programmed and the natural, the abstract and the confessional,” they explain. This is illustrated by today’s “Texas,” which features a bed of synthetic noise scaffolded by a delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar part. It exemplifies a core element of the songwriting process for this record: to uncover the “four-chords-and-the-truth” song buried within beds of improvised noises and melodies. The liner notes for the track feature Walter Nichols and Sowmya Somanath on harmonies, two stalwarts of Austin’s experimental music scene.“Texas” was written in the wake of the Kerr Country Floods in Texas. Waddill reflects, “Pretty much everyone I know from home was just one or two degrees away from someone who lost a loved one in the flood. So the state was on our minds when we came up with the initial idea together in one of our final improv sessions in the Long Beach studio. The file of the idea that we passed around for months was just called “Texas.” I was intimidated by writing a song with that title. It wasn’t until I moved up to Brooklyn months later that I found the chords and lyrics to put on top of it. I was listening to a lot of country, like a lot of people do after they move away from Texas. There’s a lot of Lyle Lovett in this song.”