Thoughtful dissonance and intentional melodies are the twin engines of experimental rock outfit Font – so it’s no surprise when our interview temporarily devolves into a theoretical debate over vulnerability in music.
“What making a record is, effectively, is showing your ass the entire time,” asserts multi-instrumentalist and producer Anthony Laurence. Whether that record sounds like Elliott Smith or Metallica, the haphazardly chosen diametrical forces for this Socratic discussion, vulnerability is inherent to creation in Laurence’s view.
Bassist Roman Parnell doesn’t necessarily disagree, but he’s thinking about the presentation of those creations, and how it maps onto the differences between the band’s first album, 2024’s Strange Burden, and their upcoming sophomore release. “There’s less inherent vulnerability in an aggressive, dissonant, yell-y song, which Strange Burden had more of, than there is in a lot of the overall themes of the new album,” he posits. “Instead of telling the audience how to feel, it’s more asking the listener to meet you somewhere.”
This sparks another spiral of consideration: Could both seemingly opposing sounds be equally emotionally inviting or instructive at times? Sounds are on the table, but it’s accessibility to a track’s lyrics that seem to be at the heart of the discussion. Fittingly, Thom Waddill butts in with a vocalist’s perspective: Maybe we think of Elliott Smith as more vulnerable because it’s quiet, minimal, intimate, unprotected, while the words of Metallica’s James Hetfield are armored in a wall of sound. Waddill’s own lyricism on American Bully XL, which comes out Nov. 13 on Acrophase Records, is shielded in its own way for many of the 11 tracks via Auto-Tune, which he jokingly describes as “a shirt for my voice.”
Jack Owens cuts through the theorizing with an “I” statement: “I do feel more vulnerable in that there’s one less drummer.” Few bands would be so thoroughly rocked by the departure of a percussionist as Font was when Logan Wagner left the group shortly after the release of Strange Burden. Live and on record, a maximalist approach to percussion characterized much of the band’s first chapter.
“Something that I wanted to achieve on this record is really backing off,” says Owens. He knew trying to double himself wouldn’t serve the new songs. Instead he found himself “aiming for pleasantness and a totally different attitude, while still finding melodic spaces.”
“We were forced to change,” says Parnell. “If I’m thankful for anything from this album, it’s that we really didn’t worry too much about the overall direction of the sound.” Following Strange Burden’s release and Wagner’s departure, the now-quartet returned to an incubative stage of improvising, waiting for ideas to emerge and attempting to follow them through without adopting other bands or genre conventions as touchstones. With a few ideas in their pockets, they traveled to Long Beach, California, to record in the studio of their indie rock pals Dutch Interior.
There, three weeks of a process Parnell describes as “locking ourselves in a windowless room for eight hours” and making non-stop noise gave way to atmospheric Eighties-imbued verses as on “Night Sight,” the pleadingly explosive dance track “You,” and onomatopoeia-embracing poetic numbers like “Cling.”
The songs carry a spacious feeling, often leaning more introspective and somber compared to the frenetic energy and urgent vocal delivery found on much of their debut release. “Noon Room” has the scaffolding of an indie rock lament, but sounds built from a deconstructed club track, with interlocking drum parts, distorted vocal loops, and screeching accents. Waddill’s precise guitar picking peeks through the arrangements of “Bad Faith,” but the album is more digitally rooted, with lead single “Texas” as the decided outlier.
Joined by Sowmya Somanath and Walter Nichols of local experimental duo Felt Out on backing vocals, the home-state love song contains a yearning familiar to a long line of songs about missing Texas. Waddill became a part-time Texan last fall, and now spends months at a time in New York, where his girlfriend is attending graduate school. Even before his move, recording in Long Beach felt like getting away from Texas in order to “see it from afar,” Parnell says. Their recording dates coincided with 2025’s July 4 Kerr County floods, which had a deep emotional impact on the Hill Country- and East Texas-raised band members, infusing “Texas” with a pang of statewide grief. Warbly synths evoke a fiddle or pedal steel and picked riffs serve as punctuation, lending the song a Lone Star feel without actual Americana instrumentation.
While the upcoming record contains new sonic elements stretched across a less-crowded canvas, friction between sounds and an interest in process remain at the core of the group’s music. Leaning into Auto-Tune let Waddill focus less on pitch and more on emotion, but also created a new playing field for discord.
“There’s these moments when using Auto-Tune where you’re maintaining a natural texture and an emotional angle, but then you get these sometimes sporadic, sometimes melodically designed, jagged, digital corrections,” says Laurence, who does a good bit of the group’s post-production work in addition to playing piano and guitar. “That conflict is the interesting part of it to me.” In an extended metaphor the foursome works out in real time during our interview, Laurence dubs himself the plumber of the group, unclogging and streamlining the others’ contributions (Parnell and Owens are the pipes in this depiction, while Waddill, smirking, crowns himself “the shitter”).
The group also let a hot mic perched over Owens’ drum set pick up the behind-the-scenes sounds of stick hitting instrument, finding an endearing quality in the distance between the physically necessary taps and the recorded output.
“If you hear a big sound, that is the result of Jack hitting the mesh net of a drum, and the sound is massively cathartic, anthemic, big cinematic. And then you also mix in the tactile, literal [sound of] him hitting this mesh thing. It gives the sound a sweetness to me, where it’s aspirationally attempting to be this big thing,” Laurence says.
“We don’t want the tools to be transparent. We want to draw attention to them,” Waddill confirms. “The idea of keeping the tools in the finished product is also part of how we wanted to present ourselves as a band,” which he describes as “just dudes who make music.”
For all the intellectual attention lavished on the album’s details and the process of creating them, Font is ultimately just four dudes in a band – whose approach runs circles around that contested V-word synonym of open and honest. Just maybe don’t ask them about it.
Font hosts three RSVP-only events the week of American Bully XL’s release: a listening party on Nov. 7, a live taping on Nov. 9, and a house show on Nov. 13.
This article appears in November 6 • 2026.
