Hot Mulligan

With Piecing It Together, their fourth full-length album, Free Throw grapple with hard truths. After three albums and a decade of hard work, including countless performances worldwide, the members — Cory Castro, Lawrence Warner, Justin Castro, Jake Hughes, and Kevin Garcia — have a fresh perspective on life. The band is through obsessing over what comes next and romanticizing the moments that have already passed. Instead, Free Throw is making music about the present and how seeking balance in our lives is far more meaningful work than the endless pursuit of whatever you deem to be ‘enough.’

“It’s very hard when for a band like us to take time off,” drummer Kevin Garcia explains. “We go home to write and record, then we go on tour. Rinse and repeat, you know? When we got into this writing process, we stopped feeling like we existed in a mold or on a path that Free Throw is supposed to keep going on with our contemporaries. We stopped worrying about what tour we may be fighting for next or what someone else does. We were just writing songs that we really like writing. ”

Throughout the album’s twelve tracks, Piecing It Together finds the men of Free Throw abandoning childhood notions of success and happiness through a thorough exploration of personal fulfillment. It’s about reaching the heights that once felt impossible and everything that comes after. How no matter what we do or where we go, we must continue to wake up and find the strength to keep on keeping on despite everything we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Piecing It Together is an exploration of self-acceptance, and Free Throw invites everyone to join

More often than not, artists are only willing to share up to a certain point. They want to maintain some semblance of a life behind the curtain — opting out of divulging too much information and choosing instead to paint with broad enough strokes that they feel like they’ve managed to say something without having to really say anything. That’s not what Cliffdiver is.

Cliffdiver is a set of splayed ribs, a whole lot of heart, and someone you can turn to when the lights refuse to turn on. Late last year, the Tulsa-based band of elevator emo pop-rockers released their At Your Own Risk EP, which featured the stunning single “Cameron Diaz.” Acting as a mission statement for the record and Cliffdiver as a whole, the pastel tones and feelings of both reassurance and self-empowerment are something that fans new and old can find a sense of comfort in. The band is set to return with a new song called “The water temple is filled with my tears and now I am drowning in sorrow” that has further cemented their place as the kings of elevator emo pop. A playful intro softens the blow of opening lines “Don’t be so dramatic has probably been said to me so many times/It feels like my brand is overreacting and losing my shit and yelling about how I’m doing just fine/but I’m not fine.” The first minute of the song shows us Cliffdiver at their very best — taking us on a journey through their kaleidoscopic brand of genre-fluidity.

We shuffle through sounds at breakneck speeds without ever feeling lost in the shuffle. It all feels organic and tied to the complicated nature of the subject of mental health. A subject that Cliffdiver refuses to shy away from. Apart from members of the band actually being fathers, it’s clear that this is the reason that they’ve jokingly been referred to as dad-rock on Twitter. The label absolutely suits them and the comfort that they bring to their listeners. There’s something magical about hearing someone someone that is so willing to share their stories with no personal details spared in the name of helping you pull your head abovewater. That’s what Cliffdiver is.