Jawdropped – Secret To Spare
Jawdropped, the rising band from Los Angeles, announce their debut album, Secret To Spare, due September 18th via Transgressive Records / Canvasback.
Secret to Spare at once feels classic and immediate—a pitch-perfect melange of big-hearted indie rock, the sour-sweet sounds of ‘90s alternative radio, and the shaggy-and-ragged sound of alt-country.
The anthemic jangle of the album’s lead single, “Split Lip,” released today alongside a summery video by Rob Fraebel, captures the emotional grind of being in a band, as well as what it feels like to blow up while trying not to blow yourself up in the process.
“It’s about being in a band and struggling to keep your shit in check,” Roman Zangari explains. “You spend your whole life as a musician striving for success and hoping to experience all these things that the four of us were experiencing for the first time. This song weighs out the excitement of that with the underwhelming reality of it all: We’re still broke, there’s no guarantee that any of this is going to lead to anything. How do you know that these decisions you’ve made are gonna pan out in the future?”
At large, Secret To Spare is lyrically driven by what Zangari defines as “stories you’ve overheard as a barfly.” “I’m always writing based off of things that I hear, or something that happened to a friend,” Morling explains regarding the blend of raconteurish-ness and interior voyeurism that makes up these twin lyricists’ POV. “L.A. is this destination that so many people move to with a dream of having this exciting life in the arts,” Zangari adds. “There’s so many crazy people you meet across that spectrum of failure and success, and I’m really fascinated by those stories. But there’s a self-reflective level too, because we’re also playing that game. We’re no different than the failed actor that’s working at the bar.”
Secret To Spare officially came together across spare days and weekends across 2025, in the gaps between Jawdropped’s increasingly busy tour schedule, including runs with their labelmates Greg Freeman and Rocket, and juggling various day jobs. “The EP were songs that pretty much already existed,” Kyra Morling explains. “This record was the first time where we were building songs together in a room.” Together, the foursome pooled their simpatico inspirations—the Lemonheads’ beautifully messy country-pop sprawl, Paul Westerburg’s wizened raucousness, and the crunchy hooks of ‘90s greats like Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr.—into the ten gems that make up this record.
Jawdropped put every last drop of themselves into Secret To Spare; aside from engineer work from Colin Knight (Agriculture) and an expert mixdown from Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee), the quartet self-produced this record to capture just how their live shows feel in the moment. “We wanted it to sound like a band in a room, so we recorded live and tried not to water down what we do,” Zangari says. “We wanted to capture the essence of how we play live—the unfiltered Jawdropped sound.” The result is a record that’s as raw as it is meticulous.
Secret To Spare brims with the sort of confidence that many bands spend their entire careers trying to locate, especially in a storied scene such as the California coast. “From the start, we wanted to make music that felt like Los Angeles,” Zangari explains while discussing the ambitions that currently drive Jawdropped. “There’s a sensibility of Los Angeles music where, under the sunshine and brightness, there’s this seedier, melancholy, darker aspect. We’re trying to carve out our own niche in that vein.” And Secret To Spare does much more than that, immediately establishing Jawdropped as one of the city’s leading lights in indie rock.
Tour Dates:
07/09 – Denver, CO @ Denver Botanic Gardens ^
09/22 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups *
09/23 – Indianapolis, IN @ Turntable *
10/02 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
10/08 – New York, NY @ Night Club 101
10/22 – Rotterdam, NL @ Left of the Dial Festival
10/23 – Rotterdam, NL @ Left of the Dial Festival
10/25 – Berlin, DE @ Urban Spree
10/27 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
10/28 – Gent, BE @ Ringo
10/30 – Sheffield, UK @ Alder
11/02 – London, UK @ Pitchfork London
11/03 – Southampton, UK @ Joiners
11/04 – Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade
11/06 – Nantes, FR @ Catapult Festival
11/07 – Paris, FR @ Pitchfork Paris
^ w/ Soccer Mommy
* w/ This Is Lorelei
#jawdroppedtheband