When I was not yet 18 years old but disastrously and acutely aware of my own pronounced and misshapen uncoolness, I stood in the back of a pit at a Front Bottoms concert in Cleveland, Ohio. It was Devil’s Night in 2015 and I fell madly in love with someone hovering around the front row of the Agora Theatre. At that age, nobody said the L-word in a way that wasn’t knowingly—and perhaps tragically—fleeting. With a T-shirt that I bought from the merch table tied around my waist, I watched Brian Sella sing “You were my girl homemade mashed potatoes, biscuits and gravy / You were too good, I should have known / You were a prize my hands could never hold” while a spotlight hit the crowd ever so perfectly in that moment.
And there it was, the hand of someone I had loved dearly, piercing through the bodies and up towards the heavens—like some talismanic, biblical statue in the brief drench of brightness that washed over everyone. I’d come to the show with her but, through the moshing waves of a chaotic organism, we ended up separated for the entire show. A year before that night, we had dated—but only briefly. It was one of those relationships born out of the adrenaline and romance of a small town homecoming dance, and the time we spent talking about how much we liked each other beforehand lasted much longer than the time we actually went out. My use of the word “love” towards her was admittedly rooted in not truly understanding what it really meant to care for another individual without idealizing them.
She and I rarely talk these days, though sometimes we will both hit a checkpoint of quick reconnection on Instagram, as a couple of Zoomers tend to do. And often, that is always enough. I don’t share that same distanced interest with any of my other exes, and I’ve long been removed from the love I tumbled into in that mosh pit eight years ago. I was still growing, still learning how to remove the cloak of enduring immaturity. I still had a way-too-early curfew, guilted my of-age friends into buying me cigarellos I’d only half-smoke and woefully wound up ghosting all of the people I flirted with at some point or another. To that end, I don’t think I was equipped to hold a high school romance close forever. My perceptions of heartbreak and joy were manufactured through chronically online engagement rates and overshares; the wounds of my Tumblr era had not yet scabbed over.
If you were like me in 2013 and you learned how to code your own Tumblr layout through copy-and-pasting someone else’s, perhaps you are also familiar with the website’s emo ecosystem. You are likely also familiar with the Front Bottoms’ album Talon of the Hawk, which came out that same year and, through rigorously reblogging lyrics pasted atop royalty-free photographs, became a phenomenon. I’ve been thinking about the album’s 10th anniversary since last fall—how it doesn’t just return to a monumental chapter in the discography of one of most-enduring folk-punk acts of the last decade, but how it’s an olive branch extended to us 20-something-year-olds who can now leave the enclosure of adulthood and have a good, familiar and worn-in crisis about getting older.
Talon of the Hawk was a huge success, at least in the indie sphere. It didn’t top the Billboard 200 or win a Grammy, but it did inspire hundreds of dudes—most of whom couldn’t really sing all that well—to buy cheap acoustic guitars and start their own bands, which is, like, nearly the same accolade. For the Front Bottoms, they always had an inkling that their sophomore album was destined to blow up. “I knew it was gonna be a smash banger,” Sella tells me over the phone from his place in New Jersey. “Everything was happening [at the] right place, right time. Everything was perfect, in terms of making a piece of art that represented what was going on at the time. We had been making a lot of music before then—making it, recording it and putting it out—but [Talon of the Hawk] was a different way of doing it, [we] made it a special event.”
The Front Bottoms—formed by Sella and Mat Uychich in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., in 2006—first caught a gust of attention with their self-titled debut in 2011. Songs like “Flashlight,” “Maps” and “The Beers” became immediate setlist centerpieces and endure as such in 2023. Perhaps the most-poignant example of who the band was in that era arrives on the song “Father,” when Sella opens the song sharply: “I have this dream that I am hitting my dad with a baseball bat / He is screaming and crying for help / And maybe halfway through, it has more to do with / Me killing him than it ever did protecting myself,” he sings over some off-paced horns, acoustic strums and Uychich’s crunchy percussion. That is the ethos of a Front Bottoms cut; Sella’s songwriting is often as absurd as it is wholesome; one violent image cascades into a breath of familiar heartache.
Inspired by Sella’s infatuation with pocket knives and the character Hawk from Twin Peaks, the band recorded Talon of the Hawk at the Bubble, a studio in Austin, Texas, with Chris “Frenchie” Smith and Sean Rolie. They camped out at the engineer’s parents’ house, sleeping on the floor there for the month they spent recording the album. “I was doing the vocals upstairs and Mat was doing the drums downstairs,” Sella says. “At the end of the day, we would come together and listen to what we had done. Everything was a good step in the right direction, and everything just felt good.”
There was no doubt as to whether or not Talon of the Hawk would register with the Front Bottoms’ fanbase. The album naturally progressed from their choppy acoustic presentation to an instrumentally dense, rich movement. It didn’t hurt that Sella and Uychich had been road-testing some of the songs many months before they were even laid them to tape. “The good vibe was there, and that’s what we had been operating off of until that point. And we continued very naturally with that energy,” Sella adds. “We had been shopping these songs—playing them for an audience—seeing where people would cheer, seeing where people would clap. I knew that was a certain guarantee that the people that liked our band were going to like the songs, because I had played [the album] for them.”
The Front Bottoms were often put in company with other similar acts of the time, like AJJ and Modern Baseball, and engagement from fans online had put them into the stratosphere. Tumblr was a hub; Facebook was a good place to find like-minded groups who dug the same shit; Twitter was still finding its bearings. But Sella and Uychich never paid much attention to the buzz through their phones, nor were they all that hip to cultivating interpersonal connections with fans on the internet. “I wasn’t really on Tumblr, I was a little older. We toured a lot, so that was how I gauged things. It was more of a live audience thing,” Sella adds. “We never really were up on the social media game. We would tweet stupid things, but I caught on very early that there is so much power in the mystery of it.”
The mystery of the internet caught up with the Front Bottoms early. Sella tells me a story about a time when he and Uychich played a gig at a pizza place in St. Lous (which was likely the now-closed Firebird, but Sella isn’t 100% sure). This was very early on in their career, not long after The Front Bottoms came out, and the reverberations of the band’s budding online ecosystem had begun to slowly unravel and tumble into their actual touring experiences.
“This was even before Talon of the Hawk. A lot of people would play there, they’d make pizza with root beer, or something like that. We got there early and we saw these kids show up. It’s hours early. They’re chillin’ around the parking lot and then come up to us and they go, ‘We’re excited to see the show.’ And then, we realized that they got there early because they thought there was going to be a big line. We were just like, ‘What? Nobody’s really coming to these shows. I don’t understand.’ And that’s when I was figuring out what the internet meant for me. I was like, ‘Oh, so nobody has any idea what’s going on,’ if people think that we’re a famous band that’s going to sell out this pizza place and they show up four hours and they’re, like, one of 10 people in the audience. The internet helped us, for sure, but I think it helped us in a different way—where it was a lack of information on our part that allowed people to fill this void [with] an interesting energy,” Sella explains.
That’s the crux of the Front Bottoms. How they got huge doesn’t always make much sense, but, if you were there in 2013 when Talon of the Hawk arrived, then you completely understand why they exploded and landed at the forefront of a genre Sella had long been a fan of. “When Talon of the Hawk came out, we got to participate in the special thing that was happening,” he notes. Even then, it was a curation of vibes. The Front Bottoms never put themselves in that box; the box migrated to wherever they were and realigned accordingly. “I was just like, ‘Oh, this is, like, what I’m doing. We’re making music and it’s a lot of fun,’” Sella adds, emphasizing his and Uychich’s hands-offness.
For a decade now, Sella has been plugging his own personal stories into the songs with perfect restraint. Never does he go too far into the details, allowing for fans to interpret the narratives in whichever manner they choose. A song like “Lone Star” has long been perceived as being about someone in Sella’s life getting an abortion. But the frontman has never divulged the actual truth behind the lyrics, and that’s still the mission, even to this day. “People are just going to make up a story in their head to go along with the songs, to go along with the characters. Allow them to do that, don’t inject my personality into stuff and don’t try to make it about me,” he says.
Talon of the Hawk is a no-skip album, even 10 years later. From “Au Revoir” to “Everything I Own,” the album dares to ache and revel within the joy of Sella’s own unspecific, impressionable musings. He’s always blurred the line, and that’s what keeps the songs fresh a decade on. He recalls a lyric in “Summer Shandy,” the second track off of Back On Top—the project that succeeded Talon of the Hawk: “I was saying everybody called Brian instead of Steven and, in interviews, people would be like, ‘Oh, what’s your real name?’ And I’d say: ‘I think it’s Steven. I don’t know, my mom called me Brian.’ And my mom’s like, ‘You should tell people the truth. Why don’t you just be honest about it?’ And I was like, ‘Mom, the less true information these people have about me, the better,’” Sella says.
And thus, the enigma of the Front Bottoms has morphed into something mythical at this point. Returning to Talon of the Hawk again and again, I’m constantly trying to untangle what Sella meant—or what he didn’t mean—in his songs. A line like “I wanna be stronger than your dad was for your mom” on “Santa Monica” is personal and so simplistically immense that what follows it a few lines later—“Emotional baby boy, emotional man”—likely signifies a greater metaphor than any of us will ever be made privy to.
Perhaps that is the greatest gift Sella has given us during the time he’s spent on Earth writing these songs: His genius gets shrugged off as an all-over-the-map brain, but his imagery is often at the intersection of brutality and heartache in ways that engage affectionately with both equally. Now, I’m not saying that there’s something gravitationally poetic about “I know CPR, I know mouth-to-mouth / When your legs give in and your lungs give out / I will blow air into your open mouth / Baby, I can spit this game all day,” but, maybe, there is something ethereal and magical and unknowable about a sequence of lines like that.
Clearly, people who’ve loved the Front Bottoms—whether it’s been for 15 years or 15 months—are just as entranced by Sella’s storytelling as I am. In March, he came down to Austin to close out the first day of Paste’s SXSW showcase. The five previous hours had been a bit more low-key; nobody brought the house down with any riotous set theatrics. It was very much a good, alcohol-induced vibe, and Sella arrived determined to keep it going with some tight, phat jams washed down with a few cans of beer. He put on a Western shirt to blend in with the Texan crowd and took to the stage barefoot, like always, to deliver a 30-minute acoustic set of slammers that spanned the entire Front Bottoms discography.
No time slot at Paste’s showcase was as electric as Sella’s. He masterfully commanded the crowd, all of whom had crawled out of whatever dorm, Airbnb, bar or house they called home to hear him sing. When he kicked into a rendition of “The Beers,” I think Austin fell closer to sea level. “Any time I play, if I can just get to ‘The Beers,’ I know I’m in good shape,” Sella told me backstage afterwards. There was a moment, near the end of his set, where he said: “I’m going to play a short one and then a long one.”
Everyone knew what he meant by that, as he quickly careened into “Au Revoir” with the showmanship of a dude who’s been in the game long enough to know that holding your big-hitters until the end is a reward best delivered in the wake of patience. When I went to snap a picture of him for my SXSW diary, after he closed the show with “Maps,” he opted to not have his can of beer in the frame. “I like to keep it clean and up to the imagination,” he said. The mystery endures.
And, of course, it would not be a proper anniversary celebration of Talon of the Hawk without mentioning “Twin Size Mattress,” the track that has become so emblematic of the Front Bottoms’ career altogether. From that familiar opening strum, few songs have conjured the ethos of an era fueled by screen-time, endless sharing and doom-scrolling quite like that one. Titanic, auspicious and just as beautiful, tragic and unrelenting as it’s ever been, “Twin Size Mattress” has never left the band’s setlist and, after “The Beers,” it’s the song they’ve played the most over the last 12 years.
“After I did the vocal delivery on ‘Twin Size Mattress,’ it did feel special,” Sella says. “Mat was upstairs with me when I was trying to write the second verse, trying to finish it. There was an awkward amount of spacing, but I had the imagery of the Jaws theme song and swimming. Water is always in my head—bodies of water—stuff like that is always there, and it very naturally came together. I did the vocal take and looked at Mat, and he always keeps it real cool. He’s like, ‘That was great, good job.’ And I was like, ‘Aw, dude, I think that was really good!’ And he was like, ‘Oh, no, no, that was sick.’”
When it came to assembling the album, Sella and Uychich knew that putting a track like “Au Revoir” at the beginning was going to be, as Sella puts it, “a very special thing.” But, despite songs like “Peach” and “Backflip” being touchstones of their own accord, “Twin Size Mattress” very often transcends the project altogether. It means something different to everyone who loves it, and few lines are as timeless as this sequence: “Make sure you kiss your knuckles before you punch me in the face / There are lessons to be learned / Consequences for all the stupid things I say / And it is no big surprise you turned out this way / The spark in your eyes, the look on your face / I will not be late.”
“It was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really special song on top of all this other incredible self-discovery that we were having in the studio. It was thought-out. There was shit we had to fight back on. There were wacky effects that were put on. There were a couple of fart sounds I had to take out, unintentional stuff. But it was a good project,” Sella says, chuckling.
Without “Twin Size Mattress,” the Front Bottoms wouldn’t have been able to play NPR’s Tiny Desk later in 2013, nor would they have linked up with Joe Chiccarelli—the record producer who’s been behind the boards on albums by everyone from Tori Amos to the White Stripes to Elton John to Beck—at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles for Back On Top two years later. Talon of the Hawk gave the band the tools to make their heaviest shit to-date. Chiccarelli’s mantra was: “Get the electric guitar and turn it the hell up.”
You can hear hints of that on Talon of the Hawk, but Sella and Uychich sketched out the beast in full on Back On Top and rarely looked back, despite the recording process pushing them to the edge. “It was an intense experience. I was over it by the end. I was ready to go home,” Sella says. “With that stuff, it’s a conflict in yourself. You gotta friggin’ really be in the moment for, like, five weeks. I look back now and I really, really appreciate the sound. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll album, you know? It’s cool.”
Whenever a band makes something so definitive at such an early part of their career, there are always expectations for what they do next—and, possibly, even a fear that it’s going to be impossible to outrun those pigeonholes. The Front Bottoms and Talon of the Hawk made the band household names in indie rock and emo, and Sella and Uychich have never been all that caught up in what the industry has expected from them in any given chapter since.
“I’m totally cool with that. I mean, I feel so lucky! I can’t even believe it,” Sella says. “If those are the two albums that connect with a certain particular, in terms of defining something, I mean, shit, that’s what I want to be defined by. It’s all an experiment, and I’m so glad I made those albums when I made them. I wouldn’t have been able to make those records now.” He even goes as far as to say he believes the Front Bottoms are a “catalog band” at this point, that their setlists will never be bound to any particular era. And he’s pretty copacetic with that, enjoying the art of pairing deep cuts from underloved projects like Going Grey or the Ann EP with something classic and awing like “West Virginia” or “Rhode Island.”
When they made The Front Bottoms, Sella and Uychich smashed two EPs together and, after signing with Bar/None, they said, “Here’s 12 songs, put these out.” On Talon of the Hawk, things started to shift. “It was the first organized project that we did,” Sella says. “We got in a rehearsal room with the label and we played the album straight through, live, for them and they were like, ‘Whoa, that’s awesome.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, right on!’” In a whirlwind month of recording, the songs came together. COVID forced him and Uychich to recalibrate how they approach an album, especially after In Sickness & In Flames’ press cycle was killed by lockdown. Pivoting into the next project, they took it one week at a time spread across five months, writing around burnout and spending more time at home.
Where the Front Bottoms go next is with a project called You Are Who You Hang Out With. It’s their sixth studio album, kicked off by the lead single “Outlook,” and arrives later this year. Upon first listen, it feels like an amalgam of everything the band’s fanbase enjoys: There are acoustic elements from the self-titled album in there; some heavier textures from Back On Top; lyricism pulling from the same place as In Sickness & In Flames. The single’s artwork features uncanny knife imagery reminiscent of the cover of Talon of the Hawk. And none of that is accidental. “I have been trying to work on techniques,” Sella says. “What makes the Front Bottoms good? It’s about capturing those cool parts and telling a story.”
There was a time when I—and a handful of others—were so deeply indebted to the Front Bottoms. Even though I’m not in that same headspace anymore, I still return to the songs with curiosity and grace, just as I did when I was 15 and 16 and 17. But I suppose I, at some point, finally made it to the place of growth that Sella and Uychich were in when they made Talon of the Hawk. After Devil’s Night in 2015, I was threatened with detention by my English teacher for wearing the shirt I picked up at the gig to school, which featured two mouths French kissing.
I quit going to big, messy shows for the sake of not wanting to get chewed up in the machine of a mosh pit. My ex kept going to see the Front Bottoms play for years after that; I still come back to a song like “Everything I Own” in the solitary of my own bedroom or car and feel the affection and fascination that glazed over the crowd that night. Friends and beloveds kept exploring that romance without me, but the magic I had with them in that moment is still there, across the tracklist and in Sella’s voice when he cries out “This is not the way I plan on living for the rest of my life / But for right now, it gets me by, it gets me by” at the end of Talon of the Hawk.
Sella returns to that same energy every night on tour, and he loves how it’s become another member of the band. A song like “Skeleton” or “Au Revoir” or “The Feud” endures not just because it’s killer and memorable, but because people are still discovering and falling in love with it 10 years on. “The feeling of us all being there together, when the song starts and people recognize the guitar riff and go crazy, it’s such an incredible feeling of connection,” he says. “It’s like, you know this song—you have memories that you have associated with this song—and I’m here and I’m playing it and we’re singing it together. There’s something very primal and very natural about having these nostalgic feelings about life when you hear a particular song that is special.”
What a gift to always have a record like Talon of the Hawk to return to, a soundtrack that has both saved parts of people and helped them fall in love with others. I’ve fallen out of touch with the people I discovered the Front Bottoms alongside. And that love I had with them beyond the music is gone now, too. But, when I listen to Talon of the Hawk, I can still feel, viscerally, how much I adored someone to the tune of “Peach” and “Twin Size Mattress.” And, perhaps, you feel that, too.
There’s a verse in “Swear To God the Devil Made Me Do It,” where Sella sings: “I wanna make tear-jerking, shower-curtain / Cameras-running genius / I wanna make them think they’re seeing something / They ain’t ever seen before / But I am full of shit, I’m a plagiarist / As a liar, I’m a 10 / I just want this to mean something to anyone / Even if they don’t know who I am.” Sure, he and Uychich foresaw Talon of the Hawk as a lynchpin; but who could’ve ever predicted that so many of us would project our own tragedies into the stories until we found community through it ? What an unshakable, sanguine truth, one that a decade’s time only strengthens.
Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s assistant music editor. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, but you can find him online @yogurttowne.
