The Off Beat: Inside Local Live Favorite Font’s First Studio Album
Austin post-punks talk recording Strange Burden
By Carys Anderson, Fri., July 19, 2024
For a certain Austin demographic – namely, UT indie kids and/or frequent visitors of campus-area venue the Ballroom – the question isn’t whether they’ve seen Font before; it’s how many times they’ve caught them.
Drummer Jack Owens, bassist Roman Parnell, percussionist Logan Wagner, and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Laurence jump between zippy guitar rock and angsty electronica, while vocalist Thom Waddill fronts the quintet with a raucous display of David Byrne dance moves and anguished whimpers. Until recently, the post-punks only had a handful of recorded singles under their belts, but they’ve still developed a devoted live following in the two years since their formation.
Waddill and Owens first launched a shapeshifting cover band in college in North Carolina, where sets of classics by Talking Heads and Amy Winehouse would stretch into hours-long jam sessions. After relocating to Austin, the band’s current lineup coalesced by 2022. Early shows at the quintet’s makeshift headquarters gave way to a 2023 set at Austin City Limits and a tour with Japanese pop band CHAI. As the group performed at the Chronicle’s Hair of the 3-Legged Dog party during this year’s South by Southwest, a friend noted that the show was her fourth Font set that week.
Out July 12 via Acrophase Records, Strange Burden marks Font’s graduation from renowned live act to official recording project. The seven-track, 28-minute LP marries the band’s pop hooks and noisiest antics with a dance-inducing through line.
Completing the project involved a lot of back-and-forth between studio experimentation and live improvisation, Waddill, Owens, and Laurence explain one afternoon at Epoch Coffee. The band recorded numerous demos throughout the writing process to keep a document of their ideas (and to collaborate during their COVID-era early days) but saw those files purely as sketches, not anything ready to be released to the public.
“Even though we had a bunch of recorded material, when we were going into the studio, for a long time, [we] always saw the demos on the computer as kind of a notepad, almost, for us to figure out how to actually perform it and play it live,” Waddill says. Recording with intention, not abandon, was a challenge. “It took us a really long time to work up the courage to make final decisions,” he admits.
Strange Burden features Font’s two earliest singles, which represent both sides of the band’s sonic spectrum. “Sentence I” remains a formidable entry into the classic post-punk canon, a tight sub-three-minute swirl of bass high notes and wiry stop-start guitar. Follow-up track “It,” meanwhile, drives a “Blue Monday”-esque woodpecker beat underneath sterile, bubbling synths.
Other songs on the album try out both styles at the same time. Shimmering synthesizers and a sing-along chorus cement “Looking at Engines” as the band’s catchiest song, even if it does begin with a dissonant, slow-building intro.
Combining those disparate sections proved another recording struggle. Laurence remembers tracking the song at three different studios in different keys and tempos, while Owens adds, “[We] fell in and out of love with it.”
“I think a large battle that we had when recording it initially was having this idea of this back half as this pop song and the front half as this really dissonant preamble to it, and trying to sonically align the back half with a capital-P Polished pop thing,” Laurence explains. The band’s resident producer initially mixed the song to be “very warm, very [the] 1975-sounding ... where it’s sparkly and warm and compressed,” while Waddill says the musicians tried playing to a click track to achieve a nearly “robotic” quality.
Perfection didn’t mesh with the opening’s raw humanity. Instead, Laurence says, “I think it opened up a lot when we realized we could take that picture and bring it into a more real space.” Quirks retained, he calls the final product Font’s “jilted approximation” of a pop song.
Now beloved by more than Austin scenesters, Font wrapped a West Coast tour with Yard Act in June and was preparing to head east with Lifeguard when we met in early July. The band will celebrate the release of Strange Burden locally on Aug. 9, when they play Parish alongside Steven Leftovers and Pelvis Wrestley.
Eyeing their nine-shows-in-10-days run with the Chicago noise rockers, the band shares plans to refine the same set list rather than changing the live order of songs every night. “So that by the end of the tour,” Owens explains, “we don’t even have to think about what the set is, just execute.”
They still leave pockets of their live show open for improv, Laurence clarifies – or as Waddill puts it, “intuition and impulse.” You can put the jam band in the studio...
