A little over a year ago, Free Range’s Sofia Jensen hinted to Paste that their band’s second album would be more subdued than its first, 2023’s quietly brilliant Practice.
And it is. Except when it isn’t. When it is, it’s predictably terrific. But when it isn’t… it’s thrilling.
“It” is Lost & Found, the new full-length from the aforementioned Free Range, a Chicago band that has, for the past few years, stood apart from the city’s rockin’ youth movement (a movement fronted by bands like Friko, Lifeguard and Horsegirl) by turning down the volume and turning up the emotion. Practice, for example, brought together gentle, Waxahatchee-style twang, up-close, Adrianne Lenker-ish intimacy and a hushed impressionism that echoes one of Jensen’s avowed favorite musicians, Elliott Smith. Together, they added up to one of that year’s best albums.
In its first half, Lost & Found sounds like more of the same—a compliment, to be clear. The opening track, “Tilt,” is a pillow-soft lullaby built on a simple piano accompaniment and heightened by Macie Stewart’s beautiful violin work. “Big Star” is a road song or a love song (or both), countrified by its rubbery guitar accents, swaying rhythm and harmonica. “Service Light” is definitely a love song—to someone who feels just out of reach and, with its quick acoustic strum, to Smith’s whispery indie-pop. And the title track might be the prettiest moment on a pretty album, and it contains a stanza that feels central to Jensen’s perspective:
You show me all of your doubts
I tell you all of what I was singing about
I heard the sound of a fire truck
It made me reach out to touch your arm
Sometimes I’m scared that I lean on you too much
Lost & Found is a set of songs, Jensen says, about that time of life when you’re transitioning out of adolescence and into adulthood, grappling with self-discovery and self-acceptance, and feeling alone but seeking connection. Those themes surface regularly on the album’s back half, as Jensen sings about isolation and fear (“Faith”), distance and loneliness (“Clean”), doubt and longing (“Conditions”). If you love country music, proceed directly to “Storm,” a bonafide honky-tonker packed with love, lost love, wanderlust and great pedal steel guitar.
All of these songs are good: honest, open-hearted, effortlessly tuneful and highly relatable, whether you’re 21 years old or you just remember what it was like to be 21 years old. But the thrilling part of Lost & Found is two back-to-back tracks called “Hardly” and “Concept,” wherein Free Range cranks up the energy a bit and engages in nearly seven minutes of propulsive, fuzzed-out rock ‘n’ roll. Here, Jensen’s voice is still lithe and lovely, but it’s also expressive enough to hold its own alongside louder guitars and Jack Henry’s heavier drums. This is not shocking, but it is a revelation of sorts, given the band’s output to this point.
I use the word “thrilling” for these two songs not because they will overtake your body and catapult you into ecstasy; this is not the sweaty pit at the OSees show we’re talking about here. They’re thrilling because potential is thrilling. Growth and development are thrilling. New, unexplored paths are thrilling. Does Free Range need to change direction? They do not; Lost & Found is further proof that they are very good at what they do. But it’s good to have options.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.
