Sweeping Promises are back with a new album and a lead single that does not bother easing anyone in. The art-punk duo announced You Say I Romanticize, due August 14, and opened the record with “Shooting Shadows,” a frantic first track that pushes Lira Mondal’s voice further into the red.
The official Bandcamp listing frames the album as the follow-up to 2023’s Good Living Is Coming for You and identifies the core creative pair as guitarist/producer Caufield Schnug and bassist/vocalist Mondal. It also notes that touring drummer Spenser Gralla was brought in to play the songs like the band would on stage, which is exactly the sort of detail that matters with Sweeping Promises: their records tend to sound built, battered, and performed all at once.
You Say I Romanticize was recorded over an 18-month period, according to the album notes, after Schnug and Mondal worked through demos and carved out what the listing calls an “idiosyncratic chamber recording method” for the record’s wall-of-sound push. That sounds fussy on paper, but “Shooting Shadows” is all nerve: clipped punk momentum, a vocal performance that sounds like it is fighting the room, and enough melodic lift to keep the abrasion from turning academic.
The 10-track album runs: “Shooting Shadows,” “My Friend’s An Entomologist,” “Last Man,” “Rapture, Or...,” “Abduction On Camera,” “My Anchoress,” “Cocoon,” “Accent,” “Does He Want To Be The Weatherman?,” and “Write Lightly.” The Bandcamp notes point to a record about isolated, obsessive, writerly personalities, including “Last Man,” which loosely takes after Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and “My Anchoress,” which centers on Julian of Norwich.
That is a heady frame for a band whose best trick is still immediacy. Sweeping Promises have always made punk that sounds like it was recorded inside a locked room with the windows rattling. If “Shooting Shadows” is the entry point, You Say I Romanticize looks like it may keep the concept messy enough to move.