Sweeping Promises ditch lo-fi for a loud, abrasive post-punk leap on their third album ‘You Say I Romanticize’ via Sub Pop
For two albums, Sweeping Promises made a virtue of constraint, wringing tension out of lo-fi limitation. On their third, they blow the walls out. “You Say I Romanticize,” released August 14 via Sub Pop, is the sound of a band trading fidelity for force, and it is their most abrasive, muscular record yet. The Kansas duo of bassist/vocalist Lira Mondal and guitarist/producer Caufield Schnug set out to capture the sweat of their live show, and the result is a wall of sound that snarls where earlier work merely simmered.
The pivot was not inevitable. After 2020’s breakout “Hunger for a Way Out” and 2023’s acclaimed “Good Living Is Coming for You,” which landed on year-end lists at Pitchfork, NPR, Paste and the BBC, the pressing question was whether Sweeping Promises would evolve or stay tethered to their signature murk. They chose evolution, and crucially, they did it without lurching toward slickness. Recorded over roughly 18 months and frequently interrupted by Schnug’s outside production work, the album keeps the band’s economy intact while adding raw, bleeding, punk-like heft.
Louder, But Never Slick
The most audible change is Mondal herself. Where her voice once offered the occasional growl, here she shouts, roars and shreds her throat across the record, an unleashing that turns the album into a physical event. The pummeling opener “Shooting Shadows“ is as propulsive as anything in their catalog, while “Abduction on Camera” carries a palpable dread in its rolling toms and grunting bass. Best of all is “Cocoon,” a mid-tempo, curled-lip swagger that ranks among the most hypnotic things they have made.
Much of that new-found weight comes from a lineup change. Touring drummer Spenser Gralla, recording with Sweeping Promises for the first time, augments the core duo and makes a real difference, giving the songs a live-band propulsion that their home-recorded past sometimes only implied. Working in their combination tour house and recording studio, a space where they cut dozens of other bands’ records each year, they have finally captured the ferocity that made them a word-of-mouth live act, without sanding down the angular edges that define them.
Romance For The Obsessed
The title is a feint. “You Say I Romanticize” offers no lovelorn poetry, and takes its name instead from a lyric on closer “Write Lightly,” a track about the way self-expression gets scrubbed clean by professional concerns. Across the album, Mondal populates the songs with writerly characters and marginalized outcasts, misfits turned fanatics for their own private causes. The standout in this regard is “My Anchoress,” which draws on the 15th-century mystic Julian of Norwich and her “Revelations of Divine Love,” one of the earliest English-language works written by a woman, threading her sensuous religious visions into the band’s post-punk churn.
That literary preoccupation is what elevates “You Say I Romanticize” above a simple volume upgrade. The record romanticizes not love but obsession, the compulsion to make things under shifting, chaotic circumstances, and it wears that theme in its very construction. In a post-punk landscape crowded with bands chasing detachment and irony, Sweeping Promises offer something rarer, total commitment. They have taken everything they were and amplified it in all the right ways, expanding their presence while staying true to their roots. It is, simply, the sort of album you want to hear a band make.
