Secret To Spare

Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Transgressive
Release Date: 18th September

The band nod in their notes to Lemonheads, Paul Westerberg, Dino Jr and Teenage Fanclub, that's essentially all boxes ticked for me personally. In truth, we're talking a list of vibes, that feel, the special sauce those artists hit in the rise of the alt-rock 90s scene where undeniably addictive melodies were met with a raw punk, where The Byrds met Crazy Horse. It's the kind of fizzy rock, dream pop and shoegaze that lands on first listen and becomes a soundtrack to the times you need pulling up or raising uo further. 

Secret To Spare at once feels classic and immediate - a pitch-perfect 
melange of big-hearted indie rock, the sour-sweet sounds of '90s alternative 
radio, and the shaggy-and-ragged sound of alt-country
Secret To Spare ofcially came together across spare days and weekends across 
2025, in the gaps between Jawdropped's increasingly busy tour schedule, including 
runs with their labelmates Greg Freeman and Rocket, and juggling various day jobs. 
"The EP were songs that pretty much already existed," Kyra Morling explains. "This 
record was the frst time where we were building songs together in a room." Together, 
the foursome pooled their simpatico inspirations - the Lemonheads' beautifully messy 
country-pop sprawl, Paul Westerburg's wizened raucousness, and the crunchy hooks 
of '90s greats like Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr. - into the ten gems that make up 
this record.
Jawdropped put every last drop of themselves into Secret To Spare ; aside from 
engineer work from Colin Knight (Agriculture) and an expert mixdown from Alex Farrar 
(MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee), the quartet self-produced this record to capture just 
how their live shows feel in the moment. "We wanted it to sound like a band in a 
room, so we recorded live and tried not to water down what we do," Zangari says. "We 
wanted to capture the essence of how we play live - the unfltered Jawdropped 
sound." The result is a record that's as raw as it is meticulous.
Secret To Spare brims with the sort of confdence that many bands spend their entire 
careers trying to locate, especially in a storied scene such as the California coast. 
"From the start, we wanted to make music that felt like Los Angeles," Zangari explains 
while discussing the ambitions that currently drive Jawdropped. "There's a sensibility 
of Los Angeles music where, under the sunshine and brightness, there's this seedier, 
melancholy, darker aspect. We're trying to carve out our own niche in that vein." And 
Secret To Spare does much more than that, immediately establishing Jawdropped as 
one of the city's leading lights in indie rock.