Sweeping Promises trade one microphone for the whole room

Lira Mondal sings like the microphone is an obstacle, and You Say I Romanticize gives her ten chances to push through it. Ten songs, thirty-four minutes, out on Sub Pop. It is the third Sweeping Promises album, and the first one built around a band playing in one room.

Mondal and Caufield Schnug met at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, in 2008 and spent the next decade writing together, first in various Arkansas bands, then as a duo. Sweeping Promises formed in late 2019 after a jam in an abandoned science lab turned art space in Boston. Hunger for a Way Out arrived in August 2020, the first pandemic summer, and became one of the lockdown's breakout punk records. Good Living Is Coming for You followed in 2023 and landed on year-end lists. By then they had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, bought a house, and built a studio into it. Spenser Gralla, their touring drummer since 2019, plays on this record.

You Say I Romanticize was written and recorded in that house over about eighteen months, with no outside producer or commercial studio, the work interrupted whenever Schnug's production jobs for other bands came due. The change is in the microphones. Earlier Sweeping Promises records used one or two; this one uses a multi-mic setup Schnug calls chamber recording, keeping the bleed and the room's natural reverb instead of isolating instruments and correcting takes later. There are more synthesizers here than before. Schnug has said the band grew a little less afraid of pop music. Mondal has said they stayed fixed on melody, and on keeping songs short.

You hear the method immediately. "Shooting Shadows" opens at a sprint: Mondal shouting, roaring, hitting notes that should not be in reach, guitars stacked until the track feels like it is falling forward. The song grew partly out of her thinking about surveillance and safety as ICE activity increased. The panic in it sounds like someone being watched deciding to be loud anyway.

"Last Man" is the best argument for the new approach: nervous and cathartic, loosely built on Mary Shelley's 1826 novel of the same name, a dystopian book written in the wake of a cholera outbreak, and it keeps threatening to come apart without doing it. "My Anchoress" goes further out. It portrays Julian of Norwich and the visions collected in Revelations of Divine Love, one of the earliest works written in English by a woman. Mondal has drawn a line between Julian's seclusion and the private space Patti Smith insists writing needs.

"Cocoon" is the one to play twice. Two minutes fifty-four, smoldering where "Shooting Shadows" sprints, with Mondal shredding her throat in a way that makes the earlier roar sound like a warm-up. The record ends on "Write Lightly", its most driving track, about self-expression in writing being scrubbed away by professional concerns. The album's title comes from a lyric in it, and as a summary of the whole record's worry, it holds: who gets to write, who gets to be heard, and what it costs to keep doing both.

Across the ten, the characters are writers, mystics and narrators carrying on through unstable times, many of them boxed in by isolation and turning into fanatics of one kind or another. Mondal ties the theme to the decline of independent arts infrastructure and the economic pressure on musicians. That is a lot of idea for ten songs, and it arrives as volume.

This is for people who want guitars, speed and a singer who sounds like she is winning something. If you came in on Hunger for a Way Out and lost the thread after the move to Kansas, this brings the live band back into frame. If you file your punk next to the sharp, danceable end of post-punk, it belongs there. It is not for anyone hoping for a quiet one, and there is no quiet one.

The cost is the middle. Between "Abduction On Camera" and "Accent", the chamber method stops being a texture and becomes a fog. The microphone wall thickens and the roar becomes a default setting. The songs are told apart mostly by their titles. Cut two of them and this record hits harder. At ten, you get the full picture and a little drag.

Three albums in six years, and each one has moved. This is the broadest of them, and the first time their studio has sounded like the room the band actually plays in. The middle stretch is a fair price for "Shooting Shadows", "Last Man" and "Cocoon".

The tracklist

Hear it