Track-by-Track: Austin's Font Debut With Dance-Punk Fever Dream 'Strange Burden'

A radical reckoning; an all-consuming reverie; a musical revolution. Font’s debut album ‘Strange Burden’ is an uncompromising, unapologetic fever dream that hits hard and leaves an instant, lasting mark thanks to its intensity, its immediacy, and its reflexive, unbound nature.

Stream: “Hey Kekulé” – Font

I see fate is just a cattle prod and the soil of this life’s grown alkaline…

A radical reckoning; an all-consuming reverie; a musical revolution.

Font’s debut album is easy to love, but a challenge to wrap your head around – and perhaps intentionally so. The Austin band’s music is rooted not in alternative, or punk, or pop sounds, but in raw emotion, innate self-expression, and cathartic release – those things for which we often lack the words, but know the feelings all too well. Their songs speak more to the heart and soul than to anything else, each one another spiritual upheaval of urgency and palpable, provocative, visceral passion.

Sonically spellbinding and emotionally charged, Strange Burden is an uncompromising, unapologetic fever dream: An album that hits hard and leaves an instant, lasting mark thanks to its intensity, its immediacy, and its ingenuity.

Strange Burden - Font — Strange Burden – Font

I’m screaming like a baby
I’m crying like a horse
Eternity is composed of me
Won’t you lick me
in the crowded concourse?

Hey Kekulé, I see the snake
Hey Kekulé, I ate it whole
Hey Kekulé, I feel it thicken
Hey Kekulé, I’ll beat it out of you

– “Hey Kekulé,” Font

Released July 12 via Acrophase Records, Strange Burden is a bold, intrepid, and daring introduction to a band who firmly believes that the medium is the message. While not fitting cleanly into any one style or genre, Font’s music can perhaps best be described as “dance-punk” in both spirit and sound.

“Our hope is that it shows a willingness to experiment and take risks and commit,” says frontman Thom Waddill, who formed Font two years ago with Jack Owens, Anthony Laurence, Logan Wagner, and Roman Parnell.

“There wasn’t really a vision,” he explains. “These were pretty much the songs that, after two years or so of playing live, were durable enough to remain in the set. It felt like we were working backwards – forming a record from existing material, rather than having a vision for the record and then writing it. The hope was that there was some through-line between everything that existed because we wrote and kept the songs, even if we couldn’t consciously apprehend that through-line.”

**Waddill candidly describes the album as iterative, exploratory, and clearing-out.**

The title is a lyric from the end of the third track, “Looking at Engines.”

“It was between that (“Strange Burden”) and ‘Body Room,’” he says. “For the album title, we wanted something simple, direct – a primary color. I guess the lyric refers to whatever burden still weighs when you’re thoughtless and naked.”

Your face like a lake and the lake like a dog
Your lake like a dog and the dog like a house
Your house like a mom
and your mom like a face
Your face like a lake
and the lake like a grawlix
The lake like your mother, this pillar,
your brother’s alarmed at my dinner
This burden, your brother strange
and loud, a grawlix
Oh, what a strange burden
A lake, a pillow phase, the twins
Wagging they stare from the door

– “Looking at Engines,” Font

Highlights abound on the spectacular journey from the album’s frenetic, hyper-charged opener “The Golden Calf” to its messy, tight, and turbulent finale, “Natalie’s Song” – a track we previously praised for its captivating kinetic rush. “It’s a pressure cooker ready to go off,” I wrote earlier this summer, “a sonic upheaval ready to be the soundtrack to our emotional eruptions.” In point of fact, these words could apply to any of Strange Burden’s seven tracks; creating moments of drama and tension appears to be Font’s primary mission at this juncture, if not their calling card.

Further standouts include the heated, frenzied lead single “Hey Kekulé” and the aforementioned “Looking at Engines,” a volatile rush of friction and turmoil that spills over into cinematic, anthemic choruses full of lively, infectiously enthusiastic energy. It’s also one of Font’s most accessible songs for first time listeners, more in line with the work of The Killers or Airborne Toxic Event than some of the more experimental, avant-garde, punk, and new wave-inspired tracks (see tracks like “It” and “Sentence I”).

Waddill initially pushes back at the notion of having any favorite lyrics.

“I can’t really see their value – if it’s there, it’s unavailable to me,” he admits. “Writing songs when I was younger, I used to feel great when I’d come up with a couplet that rhymed and was clever. But I’m really suspicious of cleverness now. I’m also really suspicious of confessionalism and the idea of ‘expressing myself.’ Without those criteria, the lyrics just sort of exist alongside me, without certain ones standing out over the others.”

He continues, “These days I see the lyrics more as just the residue of a process. It felt like a breakthrough to write lyrics without recourse to evaluation or judgment. I often feel like I’m closing my eyes to them. I just don’t want them to be recognizable. I try not to think about or hold on to them after I’ve decided a set of lyrics is finished. I don’t know. Maybe that’s all bullshit. Now that I think about it, I’m probably most proud of the line ‘gulls fly half-assed suicides above the beach’ in ‘Natalie’s Song.’”

I wanna meet my apologists face to face
I want to lay down with dogs on an interstate
Scaffolding blows down: The medium wilts
In my dream, a prepubescent
bully came and murdered me
Before it he said, “The weather reports
all is well on the blank full front”
And I understood then
that nothing here is happening
I understood then
that nothing is now happening
And gulls fly half-assed
suicides above the beach
Hummers gorge on heat
My blind spots itch –
a flag, an errant stitch,
flaps cruel and loud

As for the band’s favorites songs, “I know we all really like ‘Cattle Prod,’ Waddill says. “It feels like a complete thought that’s both cohesive and spacious.”

“Cattle Prod” is one of Font’s heaviest, heartiest songs – a sweltering slow-burn filled with emphatic, hypnotic beats, propulsive bass work, roaring guitar and synth drones, and above all the fray, Waddill’s dramatic, expressive, achingly emotive voice.

“This is another one where I think I was trying to make opposites into a single thing. I was going through a brutal breakup when I wrote the lyrics. I think I was trying to invoke the beginning and the end of something simultaneously – imagining the moment of agreeing to both great euphoria and great pain, received as years collapsed into one object that’s impossible to really look at properly. You walk into it, nodding your head ‘yes.’”

What have we done?
Blood in the mirror; champagne in the tub
What have we done?
Blood in the mirror; wet pain in the tub
What have we done?
Dust on the mirror; black paint in the tub
What have we done?
You nodding, yea yea yea yea
Me nodding, yea yea yea yea
When the talon’s gripping tight
Baby I’ve got a lamp to light
You nodding, yea yea yea yea
Me nodding, yea yea yea yea
Two a.m. in an open field
Giving up as the night congeals
And oh my God,
it’s too bright to look at directly
I want this now: Undifferentiated rising

– “Cattle Prod,” Font

**It’s true that Strange Burden defies easy or straightforward categorization, but that doesn’t mean one can’t readily understand this music or connect with it on a deeper level.**

In fact, quite the opposite; Font’s songs, born out of that reflexive, innate, and ephemeral substance that goes beyond words, tap a deeper core piece of our shared humanity. Without traditional genre boundaries or structures to hold them down, they feel truly limitless – primal in their energy and progressive in their nature. In a world that so often discourages eccentric thought and out-of-the-box ambition, Font are a true exception – remarkable, unique, and for all that they are, extraordinary.

“I hope people like listening to it,” Waddill ultimately says of his band’s first album. “That’s pretty much it. It feels good to have something to stand on. We’re excited to write the next thing now that we feel like we’re free of these songs. We’re proud of the record, of course, but we’re looking forward to starting again from the ground up.”

Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Font’s Strange Burden with Atwood Magazine as Thom Waddill takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of their debut album!

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:: stream/purchase Strange Burden here ::

:: connect with Font here ::

Stream: ‘Strange Burden’ – Font

:: Inside Strange Burden ::

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“The Golden Calf”

The vocals you hear on the record are from the demo and were recorded at home. They’re the first full take after I figured out the lyrics. I think something that tends to happen with my lyrics is that past, present, and future tend to lay over one another together to form a single moment. I often try to cast as far back and as far forward as I can at the same time. That’s true for this song.

“Hey Kekulé”

When I wrote the lyrics for this I was thinking about a trip to the beach I took with my family when I was young. I wandered off while they were in line for something and found this awful, threatening note on a Post-it in the sand, written by a livid anonymous partner or friend. There were words on it I didn’t know yet. I put it in my pocket but later swam and lost it in the water. I really wish I still had it.

“Looking at Engines”

Someone said the phrase “I hate looking at engines!” to me and it lived in my head for months. I don’t remember the context. I sensed a funny, unwieldy profundity in it. When the opportunity arose to make it into an anthemic, chanted chorus, it felt like I was finally getting rid of it. I guess there’s an element of bafflement in the song.

“It”

A lot of the lines for this song just came out when I was fucking around and trying to find the vocal part. They all began with “it.” At first it felt like a shortcut or cheat, but then I realized that a pronoun without an antecedent is similar to a ghost. On top of that, Freud got “id” from the Latin word for “it.” I figured I could play around with that sense of indeterminacy and haunting. When we finalized the tracklist, it was like a nice surprise that the previous song ends with the word “door,” which turns the beginning of this song into a knock.

“Sentence I”

This was the first Font song. We also had a “Sentence II,” but stopped playing it a while ago. It’s a story about something that happened to one of my friends. We’ve since lost touch — I hope he hears it.

“Cattle Prod”

This is another one where I think I was trying to make opposites into a single thing. I was going through a brutal breakup when I wrote the lyrics. I think I was trying to invoke the beginning and the end of something simultaneously — imagining the moment of agreeing to both great euphoria and great pain, received as years collapsed into one object that’s impossible to really look at properly. You walk into it, nodding your head “yes.”

“Natalie’s Song”

This was written for a friend. The idea started with the ping-ponged guitars. I tried to write the lyrics as fast as I could. It’s the most political song on the record.

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