Free Throw Released Their Long-Awaited New album, ‘Moments Before The Wind’ Via Wax Bodega

Free Throw released their long-awaited new album, ‘Moments Before The Wind‘ via Wax Bodega. Alongside the release, they’ve dropped a new music video from their album opener ‘MissingNo.’

The emotional architecture of the album might be abstract, but the stories at its centre – the heart of Free Throw’s music for more than a decade – are disarmingly real and inspired by the anime of the same name and stuffed with dextrous Midwest emo guitar and rough-hewn punk tempos.

Having worked hard for many years and enjoyed global tours with the likes of Hot Mulligan and New Found Glory and slots at Slam Dunk, Riot Fest, and The Fest. Every milestone has pushed them ahead, but on Free Throw’s sixth LP, Moments Before The Wind, that constant charge gradually slows, suspended mid-step, mid-thought, mid-life.

“The record has this theme of liminality – not just as a place, but in your mind,” Free Throw’s vocalist/guitarist Cory Castro explains. “It’s like being stuck in a doorframe or a long hallway that never ends.”

Free Throw have once again returned to longtime producer Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, The Movielife) for this record. Together, they wrote and recorded the album’s 11 tracks in two sessions on either side of the band’s touring. Stepping away between sessions gave them perspective; when they returned to the studio, they heard everything with fresh ears. At the same time, Romnes challenged them to trust their instincts, resulting in spontaneous sonic breakthroughs: 

In all, the record chronicles a period of intense personal upheaval in Castro’s life: the dissolution of a long-term relationship and attempts to move on, the slow realisation that what he’d lost was actually what he truly wanted and, ultimately, the life-altering moment of finding out midway through recording that he was going to be a father. The closing track, “The Waters Of Life,” written in the afterglow of that news, becomes the push that finally shoves him through the doorway into something new.

“There was a lot to write about this time around, but getting over that threshold definitely took some time,” Castro says. “We tend to write albums that have a conceptual arc to them, but you just sort of have to let the songs reveal themselves and figure out what that actually is. When I got the call that I was going to be a dad, I immediately knew what song I was going to write. It just felt right.”

Pulled from Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult novel House of Leaves, Moments Before The Wind references a passage that compares life to fragile structures on the verge of being blown apart and rearranged into something unrecognisable. It’s artwork mirrors that feeling: a massive crystal head cracked open, its interior filled with surreal, Dalí-esque rooms and corridors that echo the “backrooms” of the mind Castro kept returning to while writing lyrics.