Best of What's Next: Free Energy

Photos by Rachel Leah Woliansky

Hometown: Philadelphia
Album: Stuck On Nothing
Band Members: Geoff Bucknum (guitar), Nicholas Shuminsky (drums), Paul Sprangers (vocals), Evan Wells (bass), Scott Wells (guitar)
For Fans Of: Tom Petty, Thin Lizzy, The Hold Steady

Free Energy’s debut album, Stuck On Nothing, starts with a cowbell, but really gets going when the good-time electric guitars launch into an extended harmonized solo. “We’re breaking out this time,” Paul Sprangers sings on the opening track. “Making out with the wind.”

Roll over, Leadbelly. Here comes America’s new folk music. “I don’t know what else is,” says Scott Wells, the quintet’s guitarist. “I think our national folk music is different types of pop music and probably the most perennially successful [pop] music is classic rock. It’s something everyone has in common. Even if you don’t like the music, you know it.”

Wells and Sprangers hail from tiny Red Wing, Minn., on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. They cut their musical teeth in Minneapolis before moving to Philadelphia, where they formed the band. It’s an appropriately blue-collar history for a group whose fist-pumping rock anthems induce visions of tie-dye and jean vests, beer in red plastic cups, and a general sense of some really memorable Friday night in suburban U.S.A. circa 1976. “We’re trying to make dance music—fun party rock,” Wells says, “stuff that’s unabashedly going for it, with a good beat, good groove and hopefully a catchy hook.”

It’s true that dance music has evolved since the end of the Vietnam War. But if you play “Bang Pop,” with its primal, pounding drums, high-neck guitar interludes and “oh-oh” harmony breakdown, you just might be inclined to shake a flared denim-clad leg, too. Free Engery wears its influences like a low-cut V-neck—thus the cowbell that kicks off the record. “I think a cowbell in rock ’n’ roll—it tells you right away it’s time to party,” Wells says. “Hopefully.”