Nihilistic Easyrider is the brainchild of Narrow Head frontman Jacob Duarte—but make no mistake, he’s not going solo. DELUXE EDITION is a mixtape of sorts, a collection of songs written at various intervals throughout Duarte’s career. These songs traverse a wide-range of stylistic references, from saccharine Y2K emo and young-dumb-and-full-of pop punk to Soviet fuzz fueled alt and pure Evan Dando-core verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done pop rock. Brought to life by a cast of characters including Narrow Head drummer Carson Wilcox, producer (and former tour-mate) Graham Hunt and features from Momma’s Allegra Weingarten and Ella Friedman, this debut album still provides with masterfully crafted and hook-drenched renditions of Duarte’s signature songwriting aesthetics.
In both lyrics and sonic sentimentality, DELUXE EDITION shares much Narrow Head’s affinity for examining the tortured substratum of human emotion. These songs still wade in the messiness of romantic misfires and burnt brain synapses, but from the perspective of the moment when the drudgery and deflated disappointment of real, day-to-day life comes crashing back in. Hunt’s production smarts help to further bring Duarte’s tales of loneliness, anticipation, and fraying sanity into the richness of real life’s mired complexities, providing a vibrant backing cast of drone-bee synth swells, barroom piano stabs, rattling acoustic guitars, and tribal-tat coded record-scratch aesthetics.
Lead track “Getaway Plan,” which Duarte wrote during a 2021 stay at a Florida apartment, plunges us straight into the heat of the matter, weaving together a daisy chain of jubilant pop rock hooks before culminating in a Billy Corgan-worthy display of arena-sized guitar theatrics. The lyrics spin a simple tale of botched late night meet-ups and dashed fantasies of suburban escape, evoking feelings of dejection with the charming irreverence of a red Solo Cup littered front lawn.
DELUXE EDITION’s earliest piece (“Facedown”) began as a joke between Duarte and Wilcox when they were just 19, while the most recent (“Well Kept Secret”) emerged midway through the recording of the record itself. During a brief touring intermission in February 2024, Duarte and Wilcox absconded to Wisconsin for 10 days to track DELUXE EDITION with the engineering assistance of Graham Hunt and Shannon Connor, both of whom can also be heard playing bass and keyboards throughout the album. Hunt (another recent addition to Run For Cover’s roster) took on the additional role of producing DELUXE EDITION, which Duarte credits as a driving force behind the record’s sonically lush arrangements: “Graham didn’t really change the song structures at all—those were all pretty much set going into recording—but he played a big role in moving the record away from being a straight forward pop punk LP, mostly through encouraging me to experiment with different types of arrangement and layering.”
The touring cycle in support of Narrow Head’s 2023 acclaimed LP, Moments of Clarity, has been nothing short of non-stop, including dates alongside such acts as Interpol, Snail Mail, High Vis, Citizen, Basement, Senses Fail, and Saves the Day. Paradoxically, the road wear seems to lend DELUXE EDITION an added warmth and richness, providing a space for Duarte to recenter his songwriting in a more organic and off-the-cuff studio setting, while also finding many of Duarte’s tour companions. As Duarte puts it, “Narrow Head and this project are equally big parts of me, and I need to do them both, but I always know if a riff is going to become a Narrow Head song or a Nihilistic Easyrider song the moment I first write it. In a funny way, these Nihilistic Easyrider songs are closer to the music I always wanted to make growing up — they’ve got that real ’90s and 2000’s emo feel that I grew up loving and wanting to channel. When I write for Narrow Head I’m writing for what the band needs, whereas these songs are more like, a personal diary of growing up through music.”