Rising folk-pop singer/songwriter Brenn! takes us track-by-track through his intimate, restless, and soul-baring ‘Upstate’ EP – a cathartic, road-forged record of reckoning and renewal that chases closure across highways and hotel rooms, turning heartbreak into motion and faith into forward momentum.

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Stream: “Days on End” – Brenn!

And if you go, I’ll drive my way upstate just to find you…

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There’s a whole world packed inside that promise – one of distance and devotion, of holding on and finally letting go.

Across his latest EP Upstate, Alabama-born and based singer/songwriter Brenn! chases meaning through motion, searching for closure in the same places where love once lived. These songs feel like open roads and unspoken prayers; the quiet ache between faith and doubt, heartbreak and healing.

Built on the bones of folk storytelling and the pulse of modern pop, Upstate is Brenn!’s coming-of-age in real time – a record that turns heartbreak into honesty and motion into momentum. It’s less about running away and more about learning when to stay, and what’s worth leaving behind.

Heard you started drinking
Got tattoos and a piercing
Yeah, you’ve been looking different at me
Took a flight across the country
My first time at the airport
Lost my luggage in Chicago
like I lost you in Utah

Does it ever cross your mind?
I wanna know
Do the mountains call your name
louder than I did?
Oh, I screamed
and I lost my voice for days on end

– “Days on End,” Brenn!

Released May 23, 2025 via Darkroom Records and Westward Recordings, Upstate marks a turning point for Brenn!, expanding the world he first built on 2024’s debut EP County Line. Where that initial collection introduced a small-town dreamer with a knack for heartfelt storytelling, this six-track record finds him stretching beyond Tuscaloosa’s city limits, both musically and emotionally. It’s the sound of an artist outgrowing old seasons while still honoring where he came from – a project born between long drives, empty highways, and the slow realization that some chapters close so that others can begin.

For Brenn!, Upstate marks both an ending and a beginning – the final page of one chapter and the quiet start of another. There’s a sense of closure running through these songs, but also renewal; a recognition that growth often means letting go of the very things that first defined you.

“This EP is about my life and everything I have dealt with over the past two years,” Brenn! shares. “It’s a pivotal point in my career but also shows me, personally, how I’m in the end of this season of my life. I hope the people who care can feel this shift as much as me.”

Before writing Upstate, Brenn! had already lived a full creative lifetime inside his debut EP.

The County Line era taught him what it meant to share his world publicly – and what it meant to move on from it. “I mean, a song is a song. It holds a place in a moment. And after the moment’s gone, the song loses its touch to me,” he reflects. “I don’t tend to hold on to things that super long. I’m off to the next thing, but I’m very thankful that people have resonated with it for so long.”

That tension between gratitude and growth hums at the center of Upstate. Where County Line captured a small-town songwriter processing loss and first love in real time, Upstate documents what happens after the storm – the reckoning that follows recognition. It’s the sound of someone learning to breathe again, to write again, to make something that feels true.

If County Line was about finding his footing, Upstate is about finding his fire again. After months of creative restlessness, Brenn! stepped into a new chapter surrounded by new energy. “I went on a writing trip to LA, and I found people that got me,” he recalls. “I really enjoyed being around that. I feel like when I walk into the session, it’s not like, okay, we have to get something, whether it’s good or bad. There’s a lot of pressure on you. So what happened was I took this demo around to multiple producers in LA and in Nashville, and no one wanted to do it. Not a single person. They were like, let’s just do something new. They hated it, to say the least.”

That demo became “Water” – the song that reignited everything. “I bring it in and I’m like, okay guys, everyone’s hated this so far. If you want to do something else, we totally can,” he says. “Here it is. I show it to them and we pump out ‘Water’ in the first session. As soon as I showed them the demo, Jeremy got up on his feet. He put his hands on his head. He was like, dude, I hear so much for this. I’m so excited. And I was like, oh my gosh, finally somebody who gets it. Who sees the vision.”

That spark carried through the rest of Upstate, as Brenn! teamed up with Jeremy Fedryk (Sarcastic Sounds), Haid, and a small circle of collaborators who helped him rediscover his voice. “Four out of the six songs of the EP were very new and new sounding, new feeling,” he shares. “Almost like a shift into something new, which I feel is a good turning point for this album because it’s exploring a lot. I’m going to take my time and see where it takes me.”

There’s a looseness to Upstate – a freedom that comes from no longer chasing a hit, but chasing truth. “If I’m being honest, I have not had an opportunity to sit down and look at a blank page until right now,” Brenn! admits. “I was caught up in some personal stuff from day one of releasing County Line, basically, and it lasted until I wrote ‘Franklin House.’ I wrote that, had a bunch of songs ready to go, and then went on tour and released the EP. And now I want to write an album talking about being the second pick and being thrown into everything and feeling that I’m obviously not good enough for this, but I got to do it anyway. So now that’s my concept album. That’s what I’m writing towards right now. And I think the title of it will be called ‘Amateur at Best,’ because that’s what I’ve always felt like my whole life. I’m the smaller kid on the field. I’m good, but I’m not great.”

He laughs, describing his journey like a climb he’s still in the middle of. “Think about if you’re climbing a mountain,” he says. “You get to almost the top – what you think is the top – and you’re almost there, but you need just a little bit more to go. I think this is that. I found my footing on this part of the mountain, and I think I’m at the top, but I look up and there’s way more mountain to go. But I got to where I needed to go right now. The EP was the footing that I needed to get to that next level.”

Upstate may close a chapter, but it also clears the path for the next one – a moment of grounding before he takes another leap.

It’s the sound of someone catching their breath, regaining perspective, and remembering why they started in the first place. It’s Brenn! regaining control of his art, his story, and his sound.

Even as he looks toward his next chapter, Brenn! is still processing the journey that got him here. The name Upstate reflects both the miles he’s driven and the lessons learned along the way. “When you’re in Alabama, and you’ve lived there your whole life, you go south to Florida for family trips,” he says. “I’d never been upstate past Alabama, really, other than Tennessee, which is still the Deep South to most people. And when I was finally in a relationship and driving a lot – lots of 10, 12-hour drives for nothing, for absolutely no reason – I got to experience a lot of the Midwest, towards Michigan and Chicago. It was a good eye-opener for me that people are very different no matter where you go. Not everything’s going to be so ‘Alabama,’ and it was a learning experience to meet new people.”

“Culture is so different everywhere,” he continues. “I wanted to call it ‘Upstate’ because being from the South, a lot of people don’t really make it out of the South. They can’t, if that makes sense. I think that having that opportunity is very awesome for me, and I just wanted to include it in there.”

Upstate, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a state of becoming – the upward motion that defines Brenn!’s songwriting.

“Upstate encompasses all of the narrative of the previous EP, as well as this one, because all these songs happened traveling or when I was up there or making an effort to go up there or something like that. All these songs were born on the road,” he says. “I remember literally, literally, I did a day trip on Thanksgiving last year to drop this girl off back home to end the relationship. And I wrote ‘Franklin House’ in my car on the way home. Half the lyrics were no guitar, no singing, just poetry. So it was… most of these songs were born like that. And I wanted to give a word that encompassed everything.”

That search for belonging runs deeper than geography. As a songwriter from Alabama who doesn’t make country music, Brenn! carries an outsider’s lens even in his own hometown. “I feel like there’s not a lot of musicians from the deep South that don’t do country,” he reflects. “Never in my life have I ever fit in with anyone from Alabama. And I love Alabama – it’s my home – but when I have a view on things being from Alabama, it’s ultimately going to be different. Being a songwriter from Alabama that doesn’t do country allows me to have a weird take on things.”

To him, Upstate symbolizes that difference – and that drive. “For me, it’s like, okay, I literally drove up the state,” he laughs. “Yeah, I see it all through a different lens.”

“Days on End” opens the EP with a rush of energy that feels like the sunlight finally breaking through after a long, overcast stretch. “I think it’s a good high-energy song,” Brenn! says. “I don’t have a lot of those. Not yet, at least. It bleeds a little bit from the previous EP. County Line was more so about losing one of my friends – not to death, they didn’t die or anything – but losing one of my friends and them leaving and moving, and then all my friends all of a sudden just moved out of state because of college, and then I’m left all alone.”

That ache of separation still lingers in “Days on End,” but Brenn! transforms it into motion, finding catharsis in melody and movement. When he sings, “Does it ever cross your mind? I wanna know do the mountains call your name louder than I did?” he’s both confronting absence and acknowledging acceptance – how distance reshapes love without ever erasing it. “I think ‘Days on End’ just became something way bigger than I ever expected,” he reflects. “We ran with it, and it’s a high-energy song and people like that. It was a good turning point.”

I don’t wanna watch you go
I don’t wanna see you leave
Maybe you’ve been split apart
Only by the mountain peaks
No one’s gonna make you stay
But no one else is telling you to leave
Maybe you’ve been split in two
Only by the mountain peaks

Does it ever cross your mind?
I wanna know
Do the mountains call your name
louder than I did?
Oh, I screamed
and I lost my voice for days on end

If “Days on End” lights the fuse, “Upstate” is the explosion of feeling that follows. Written in thirty minutes in a hotel bathroom in Koreatown, the song captures raw honesty at its breaking point. “I wrote that one in 30 minutes in the hotel bathroom of the Line Hotel down in LA,” Brenn! recalls. “I brought it to Jeremy the next morning and said, ‘Hey, I wrote this last night, can we maybe pump out a demo today?’”

The track aches with anger and surrender in equal measure, its verses trembling with the sting of self-awareness: “I have all I need in you / But you have all that you want.” By the time he reaches the bridge – “And if you go, I’ll drive my way upstate just to find you / You don’t know how high I have climbed up just to fall through” – the emotion crests like a confession. “It is definitely a song I wrote in a time where I was being honest and angry at what had happened,” Brenn! admits. “I think it fits well in the EP, and it sounds like a folk song, but the lyrics contrast the instrumental in a way that I think it deserves the focus track title.”

And if you go, I’ll drive
My way upstate just to find you
You don’t know how high
I have climbed up just to fall through
For you, oh-ooh, for you

And I don’t wanna watch you waste
Your whole life tryna find a reason
You know I’m angry
And you’re just bitter at yourself

So settle down, dig your grave
Right where you were told to be, and
Don’t come back, just leave me watching
I will die here while I wait for you

Whereas Upstate is about release, “Franklin House” is about reckoning. It’s the song that closes both the EP and the chapter of life that inspired it.

“I got back from a separate 20-hour drive that happened two months after I dropped this girl off for Thanksgiving,” Brenn! explains. “She had texted me, was like, I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore, whatever. So I drove up there 11 hours and I was like, please see me. Drove back after she didn’t want to see me. I dropped everything off and then sat down after the drive and just looked at all my notes app things about what I was writing about when I was thinking. That poetry thing I was talking about from two months before. I was looking at it. I was like, whoa. I just start strumming and I just sing the first verse of ‘Franklin House’ into a voice memo and the rest is history.”

The song captures heartbreak in its purest, most unguarded form: “Thanksgiving was like Hell, but I give thanks that I’m alive.” The lyric alone feels like a thesis for Brenn!’s world – raw pain, met with reluctant grace. “I think it’s one of those songs that’s so honest, so genuine, so for real in the moment,” he says. “You can’t sit in a session and write something like that, or at least I couldn’t.”

I’ve got stories to tell,
but no means to tell ’em
I’ve got words to get out,
but they’ll send me to Hell
I bet you’re drunk at the Franklin,
blowin’ off all that grief that I gave you
It’s cold when you’re here
and it’s cold when you’re not
It hit me like a bullet,
but I took it ’cause I’m strong

And I’m the closest to the man,
the man I never was
And I’m drivin’ home
from the worst night alive
Thanksgiving was like Hell,
but I give thanks that I’m alive
I don’t care that I don’t mean it
I don’t carе that I can’t hide it like I used to
What’s thе use to?

I will survive, but I’ll never recover
The ache comes and goes
like scars with the weather
I’m stuck with the pains in the place
of all the love I still have for you
I’m not mad at you

I thought I could change you for better
All I did was break you forever
You needed saving,
and I couldn’t save you this time
All I did was break you forever

The rest of Upstate deepens the same themes of longing, faith, and self-discovery through different shades. “Water,” the track that reignited his creative spark, stands as Brenn!’s spiritual core – an intimate conversation with God that bridges his faith and artistry. “I am a really big Jesus freak,” he shares. “This song was about a point in my life where I was going through a season of like, okay, I cannot reach the Lord at all. I cannot hear Him. I’m in the dark. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t feel nothing. And that is what was special about it to me.”

“iwbtotsy” – short for I Wouldn’t Be the One to Save You – channels the same emotional urgency through its pulsing drums and yearning vocals, while “Natural Disaster,” one of the oldest songs in his catalog, offers a glimpse into his early songwriting years. “That’s one that people have been asking me for a long time,” Brenn! admits with a shrug. “We finally got it done, and we didn’t have another song to put on the EP. So we threw that on there just because people asked for it.” Together, these songs round out Upstate’s emotional topography – from spiritual drought to renewal, from heartbreak to healing, from running away to finally arriving.

At its core, Upstate is about learning to move – through heartbreak, through doubt, through the quiet spaces that come after something ends.

It’s a portrait of a songwriter growing into his own voice, tracing the distance between who he was and who he’s still becoming. Every song feels lived in, like pages from a journal left open on the passenger seat.

For Brenn!, that journey is as much about faith and forgiveness as it is about self-definition. “I’ve taken away that I should never make something like Upstate again and be one of those artists that just recycles their sounds,” he says. “So what’s done in Upstate is done, and I’ll never go back to it. I’ll always continue to grow in my creativity, hopefully.”

There’s a humility in that admission, but also a quiet confidence – the kind that comes from knowing the road ahead will always be longer, and that the climb is what gives the view its meaning.

Upstate captures Brenn! in motion: Bruised, grateful, and ready to begin again. Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Brenn!’s Upstate EP with Atwood Magazine as he takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of his latest release.

Like the endless climb he describes, Brenn!’s Upstate leaves us where all great stories do – somewhere between the ache of what’s been lost and the quiet promise of what’s still to come.

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:: stream/purchase Upstate here ::

:: connect with Brenn! here ::

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Stream: ‘Upstate’ – Brenn!

:: Inside Upstate ::

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“Days on End”

“I think it’s a good high-energy song. I don’t have a lot of those. Not yet, at least. It bleeds a little bit from the previous EP. Previous EP was more so about losing one of my friends. Not to death, they didn’t die or anything, but losing one of my friends and them leaving and moving and then all my friends all of a sudden just moved out of state because of college and then I’m left all alone, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But this one particular friend was my best friend and then ‘4runner,’ ‘Rearview,’ blah, blah, blah. That’s all. It’s all about this friend. And I think ‘Days on End’ just became something way bigger than I ever expected. And although it’s no ‘moonbeam, ice cream’ big, but to me it’s big and I think we just rolled with it. We ran with it and it’s a high-energy song and people like that. And I put that on the EP as number one because it’s high-energy and it was popular. I think that’s it. It was a good turning point.”

“Water”

“Well, I am a really big Jesus freak. So whenever I’m not on the stage, whenever I’m not traveling, even when I am traveling, actually, all you hear me talking about is Jesus and how He saved my life, how good He is. And I love theology. I love church history. Jesus is just my goat. And I think that this song was about a point in my life where I was going through a season of like, okay, I cannot reach the Lord at all. I cannot hear Him. I’m in the dark. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t feel nothing. And that is what was special about it to me is because it was about the thing that I love the most. All these other songs are about oh, this girl, blah, this other girl, this… Oh, this situation. But this is about my precious, my everything. And I want to do more songs that are not quite on the nose about Jesus and the Lord, but still give an original feel. And that’s something that I’m really working towards and praying towards that I’m able to articulate those things. If you’ve ever heard the song ‘River’ by Leon Bridges. I love that song. It’s great. And it has a lot of Christ-like undertones. I think that’s why I was so excited when someone was like, whoa, this song is so good and we should do it. So I kicked it off and I started promoting it and it did its thing. So I’m very thankful.”

“iwbtotsy”

“I wouldn’t be willing to save you. This is one I wrote all by myself. No one helped me. I arranged it and obviously I had help, but everything final was me and man, I don’t know, I just produced this demo out on my computer. I took it to the studio. They were like, yeah, this sounds sick. And it’s kind of just the same vibe as ‘Franklin House’ just told a little differently and a little more of an urgent feel. I feel sonically, it sounds very yearning and urgent. It’s one that didn’t get as much love as I wanted it to, but at the end of the day, that’s not really what matters. But it’s definitely a fun one to play live because when the drums come in, the whole crowd is like, ‘Oh, okay, wait a minute. This is actually cool.’”

“Natural Disaster”

“That’s one that people have been asking me for a long time. I wrote it around the same time as I wrote ‘4runner,’ maybe like a few months after. And it just sat in the demos for a long time. And then we finally got it done, and we didn’t have another song to put on the EP because I don’t write a lot of songs. And we threw that on there just because people asked for it and then we had it.”

“Upstate”

“I wrote that one in 30 minutes in the hotel bathroom of the Line Hotel down in LA in Koreatown, and it turned out really good. I was like, ‘Yo, Jeremy, I wrote this last night. I wanted to see if we could maybe pump out a demo today or something.’ He was like, okay. And the first demo, the two verses are completely different. They’re different words, different melodies and everything. And I was like, I’m not actually feeling this demo, blah, blah, blah, so I’m going to go work on it again. So the next day I bring it over and I finally found a verse that stuck with me a little bit. So we recorded it and we were dying to get a bridge in there. So we write the chords for the bridge and they gave me some suggestions and I was like, guys, just go downstairs. We went to Target and I bought a Switch so we could play Mario Kart. So they went downstairs, set up the Switch, and they gave me 15 minutes by myself, and I wrote the bridge and we recorded it that night and all the lyrics and the harmonies and everything. So yeah, it just came together really nicely. And I can remember listening to it back on the speakers with them, and they were like, ‘Dude, this is one of your biggest songs.’ It is definitely a song I wrote in a time where I was being honest and angry at what had happened. So I think it fits well in the EP, and it sounds like a folk song, but I think the lyrics contrast the instrumental in a way that I think it deserves the focus track title.”

“Franklin House”

“I got back from a separate 20-hour drive that happened two months after I dropped this girl off for Thanksgiving. She had texted me, was like, I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore, whatever. So I drove up there 11 hours and I was like, please see me, blah, blah, blah. Drove back after she didn’t want to see me. I dropped everything off and then sat down after the drive and just looked at all my notes app. Things about what I was writing about when I was thinking. That poetry thing I was talking about from two months before. I was looking at it. I was like, whoa, I just start strumming and I just sing the first verse of ‘Franklin House’ into a voice memo and the rest is history. It all came to me so cohesively, and I think it’s one of those songs that’s so honest, so genuine, so for real in the moment. You can’t sit in a session and write something like that, or at least I couldn’t.”

“Yeah, and I think it’s way harder to replicate feeling with knowledge of the feeling than just being able to feel it out in the moment when it’s happening. So when you go into a session and you’re like, ‘Oh, let’s write a song about this.’ All they have is knowledge of that moment. Whereas when you’re in the moment, you need to seize the moment and write with the feeling that you have. Don’t even think. If you’re in a moment like that and you’re thinking like, oh, well this verse needs to go here and maybe a pre and then cut the pre in half and then maybe double the chorus. That’s knowledge that doesn’t even work in a moment like that because what comes out in a moment like that is just so… That’s what people want.”

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