Renny Conti Lets Us into His Weird and Wonderful World

Did you know the shrew is the smallest of mammals? I didn’t, until Renny Conti posed that question on a song called “Looking at the Geese.” A quick fact-check confirmed his assertion—yes, the shrew is the smallest of mammals. The Etruscan shrew, if you really want to get into it.

Unless you harbor a special interest in the undersung insectivores, this is a chunk of knowledge that’s utterly valueless, a fact that can hardly be classified as “fun.” But it isn’t so in the world of Conti’s freshly-minted eponymous album. Across a sweeping sonic palette that evokes dream-folk textures one moment and pummels into shoegazey clamor the next, the record fleshes out life’s in-betweens: the glimmering fragments of wonder, fear and amazement buried beneath the gray mundanity of the day-to-day. It’s the rare album that recognizes how gigantically important the question of which mammal is the smallest of all becomes when the answer is housed inside a lover’s Notes app. To put it more broadly, it recognizes how all our inconsequential thoughts, feelings and passions are stars in the constellations of ourselves, and that life’s liminal moments—all the minutes upon hours we rush through—are the ones we end up yearning for most when those hours turn into days, and when those days turn into years.

Being a self-titled album, Renny Conti could be understood as an introduction to the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter. His first full-length release since 2022, it was a long time coming—Conti spent the last two years refining its tracklist, with some songs dating even farther back. The thoughtfulness and precision poured into each arrangement, however free-flowing they may feel, is both evident and impressive, and the payoff is Conti’s most polished, intentional record to date. Take, for example, the tension held by each tap of the drums on the tightly-coiled, almost hypnotic “Formspring,” or the push-and-pull between waves of acoustic strumming, hazy reverb and crashing percussion on “I Find it Hard,” or the pleasure in how lackadaisically Conti’s reflections on love and extraterrestrial life roll over the nimble fingerpicked melody on “Workhorse.” I find Conti’s songwriting somewhat redolent of Elliott Smith’s—not merely because he’s a folksy, acoustic-leaning singer-songwriter who lives on the quieter side of the street, but more so because of his innate ear for melody and penchant for building simple arrangements from the ground-up into layered, lofty constructions. Indeed, at the heart of both Conti’s loosest ditties and most blown-out rockers is a smart pop sensibility that’s undeniably magnetic.

In an email interview for The Family Reviews in 2019, Conti described his songwriting process as a fluid endeavor, noting that he’d often pull lyrics from his poems and thoughts jotted down while waiting in line at a coffee shop or train station. This practice seems to have been carried over to Renny Conti, as Conti regularly narrates in streams-of-consciousness, his kaleidoscopic lyrics oscillating between poetically wrought pictures, heartfelt confessions and miscellaneous musings. It doesn’t come as a surprise when he alludes to ADHD on “Future Burning”—he’s a wanderer, finding some evocative image or irresistible hook at the corner of nearly every line.
To listen to Renny Conti is to stroll through the winding roads in Conti’s head and meet his thoughts as they occur to him. Some such thoughts—like that line about the shrew—might initially seem inconsequential or simplistic, but they come to life in big ways when translated into song. For example, you feel his narrator’s internal storm of chaos and frustration when distortion-drenched riffage—which follows a blunt appraisal that a relationship “could’ve been this way, but it’s not”— rips through the airy acoustics of “South Star.” On “I Find It Hard,” you can hear the weariness weighing down each bullet point in Conti’s laundry list of tasks on a day spent with nothing better to do than counting his toes and folding his clothes. If you’ve lived them, you know those sorts of days really are hard; you can hear this brand of quotidian exhaustion shake through Conti’s breathy voice.

He gets that being so attuned to the magnitude of the little things around you can wear down the soul, because, if we break life down into its most basic elements, “people walk and people talk and then people die.” That line, sung on the poignant piano ballad “Life on Earth,” lands even more heavily in the context of the death of Conti’s brother, Andrew, the album’s dedicatee, and for whom closing instrumental track, “Andrew’s Song,” is named. Conti’s lyrical and musical sensitivity are conducive to these weightier tracks, but it’s also what makes other vignettes so infectiously joyful to follow—it’s what makes the album, as a whole, so unmistakably Renny. When he professes that he’d “rather burn out than never light” on “Future Burning,” it sounds like a mission statement.

Conti’s aptitude for phrasing is also elemental to his gripping compositions: He knows exactly when to let a word sit or stretch, when to cut a thought short or let it trail into the next. See, especially, “Room to Room,” the album’s lead single, and by far its strongest track. The pauses between each word are integral to the verses’ momentum, and the way Conti teases out the end of each line over flashes of crunchy guitar chords reels you in and refuses to let you go; you rise and fall along with the melody, catching on every undulation. The verses’ lyrics are straightforward, but how Conti breaks them up so carefully reveals the magnitude of affection and desire that they express. You feel the meaning behind every syllable as he sings, “I feel / Your pain / I too want every…thing / Want…ing the world to stop / Or just for life to change.” The tension builds as the music swells, beautifully unraveling in the chorus as Conti delivers a markedly abstract proclamation from out of left field: “We’ll bury the blue.”

It’s hard to say for certain what Conti means here, but it feels rapturous—it just works. Conti’s trains of thought often lead to unexpected destinations—a pond of geese, an Austin bar, the color blue and whatever that might conjure for you—but, regardless of how unclear the path is, you always end up where you need to be. And, something tells me, “Room to Room” is the song Conti was always meant to write. There aren’t any particular weak points on the album as a whole, but with its tantalizing ebbs and flows, Conti’s lush yet subtly gritty voice and the blistering guitar solo that spirals through its clean, punchy rhythm, “Room to Room” is a cut above the rest. It’s one of those songs that is simply perfect, and, in some alternate universe—mark my words—it’s a major hit.

The music video for “Room to Room” follows Conti partaking in a handful of activities: shoving shark-shaped gummy worms into his mouth, strolling through an amusement park, rocking back and forth inside one of those rickety cage rides. None of these actions are particularly riveting, and yet, Conti finds something jubilant about them, beaming with a smile he can’t help to suppress, tearing off those sharks’ heads with gusto. The video footage is slightly slowed, amplifying the sense that Conti wants us to pause, to watch and listen closely. It feels fitting, as this is the triumph of Renny Conti—its exultation in and attention to the seemingly mundane, and its ability to enrapture as it meanders from “room to room” inside Conti’s mind.

Its songs are delightfully whimsical, sometimes bordering on silly, but Conti’s songcraft is mature and solid nonetheless. He seems aware of his own growth and trusts in the strength of his sound: At the start of the second verse of “Room to Room,” Conti sings, “Wake up / Sit down,” pointing decisively to the ground with a gummy dangling between his fingers, as though he knows he already has your attention. He smiles confidently, and that confidence is absolutely deserved—it’s even reflected in the album’s name. With Renny Conti, he has defined himself as a singular artist, with subtle self-assurance and a contagious, audible grin. As sure as the shrew is the smallest mammal, Conti is a human with big talent. These conclusions aren’t mutually exclusive (after all, who else has made that sort of line so melodic and meaningful before?) and both linger long after the album resolves.

Anna Pichler is one of Paste’s music interns. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University. You can find her on Twitter @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social, where she mainly shares her work and reposts her favorite Bob Dylan memes.