Sweeping Promises’ introduction to the global punk underground was their debut album, Hunger for a Way Out, one of the breakout successes in music during 2020’s pandemic lockdown. In 2023, they followed up with the acclaimed Good Living Is Coming for You, which made Album of the Year lists for Pitchfork, NPR, Paste, and BBC, just to name a few. The album found guitarist/producer Caufield Schnug and bassist/vocalist Lira Mondal testing the limits of their home-recording resourcefulness as freshly minted Kansans – new place, new space. Now, the band is back with a frenetic new offering: You Say I Romanticize.

Recorded over an 18-month period, largely prepared and periodically interrupted by Schnug’s non-SP production work, You Say I Romanticize is a tribute to the chaos of creation and collaboration under shifting circumstances. For years now, Schnug and Mondal have embedded themselves in their combination tour house and recording studio in Kansas, annually working on dozens of albums from other bands, hosting tour stops, planning shows, and the like. After an immersive process of tracking and whittling down YSIR demos and carving out an idiosyncratic chamber recording method for the album’s intentional wall-of-sound, the duo brought in touring drummer Spenser Gralla to play the songs like the band would on stage.   

The album’s frenzied execution, akin to the group’s renowned live show, prevails most of all in Mondal’s vocals. Whereas previously, you might have heard a growl here and there on certain Sweeping Promises tracks, the band’s formidable singer shouts, roars, hits all sorts of tricky notes, and shreds her throat all over the record, notably on the pummeling opener “Shooting Shadows” and the smoldering “Cocoon.”  

A shadow side exists along with Sweeping Promises’ love of their artistic community—borne of weirdos channeling their misfit status into vibrant art and punk rock music, often passing through the revolving door that is their home studio. You Say I Romanticize takes the art-by-any-means-necessary ethos Mondal and Schnug have developed over the years and turns the prompt upside-down, landing on a personality epidemic manifesting across all ten tracks. 

A big theme of You Say I Romanticize is hinted at in its title. Taken from a lyric sung on driving album closer “Write Lightly”—a narrative about the importance of self-expression in writing being scrubbed away by “professional” concerns—many of the characters Mondal fleshed out here are outcasts, marginalized by society and morphed into longing fanatics. The personalities depicted on You Say I Romanticize are often writerly types; as writing is, by and large, an art of obsession. To wit, “Last Man,” by equal turns musically nervous and cathartic, loosely takes after Mary Shelley’s literary work of the same name, The Last Man—a dystopian 19th Century novel written in wake of a cholera outbreak. Similarly, “My Anchoress” resonantes in its portrayal of 15th Century author Julian of Norwich—centered around her enduring Revelations of Divine Love (one of the earliest English-written works by a woman), which details her eccentric, sensuous religious visions.

Sweeping Promises have long been progenitors of concept-forward art-punk music that is remarkably immediate and irresistible. For being largely about personalities boxed in by isolation, You Say I Romanticize is carried by an outright soaring energy. —Martin Douglas