Jawdropped

Jawdropped’s Secret to Spare at once feels classic and immediate, with every sunburst guitar hook and sharpened vocal melody hitting the ears like a half-full beer bottle careening towards the brick wall of your favorite dive bar. The Los Angeles quartet have established their sound—a pitch-perfect melange of big-hearted indie rock, the sour-sweet sounds of ‘90s alternative radio, and the shaggy-and-ragged sound of alt-country—in shockingly quick time, making Secret to Spare one of the most fully-realized debut albums in recent memory.

Secret to Spare follows Jawdropped’s Just Fantasy EP from last year, underscoring how remarkable it is that this group—vocalists Kyra Morling and vocalists/guitarist Roman Zangari, bassist Sean Edwards, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian—have accomplished so much since forming just two years ago. “We were all in bands that were not really working out at the time,” Zangari recalls regarding Jawdropped’s origins. “My old band had gotten an opportunity to do a house show, and Kyra convinced me to try some songs I was sitting on. I convinced her to play the show with me, and after we got Sean on board we were like, ‘Actually, this could be a band here.’”

“We'd all beaten the dead horse of being in a local band, booking DIY tours and sleeping in

punk houses,” Edwards adds. “Narrowing in on 30 years old, shit ain't never worked, and you

could either go work for Facebook or be a waiter—but we were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it.’” And as

he explains, as Jawdropped gigged locally and put together the Just Fantasy EP, word began to

spread and led to the band’s recent signing to Transgressive/Canvasback, home to fellow rockers like close pals Rocket and indie rock up-and-comer Greg Freeman, the latter of whom they recently toured with as well.

Secret to Spare officially came together across spare days and weekends across 2025, in the gaps between Jawdropped’s increasingly busy tour schedule and juggling various day jobs. “The EP were songs that pretty much already existed,” Morling explains. “This record was the first time where we were building songs together in a room.” Together, the foursome pooled their simpatico inspirations—the Lemonheads’ beautifully messy country-pop sprawl, Paul Westerberg’s wizened raucousness, and the crunchy hooks of ‘90s greats like Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr.—into the ten gems that make up this record.

“We all had a Venn diagram of bands that we were influenced by, which made it really easy to understand how to write songs together,” Lee-Chobanian states. “That's not always the case with a band, because a lot of the time there's a lot of push-and-pull influence-wise—but we found a shared language. It’s easy to communicate because we all love a lot of the same bands.” “Songwriting is the ticket for us,” Edwards adds. “If it doesn't work on an acoustic guitar with just Kyra and Roman singing, it doesn't work at all. We try to shed any pretension and mysteriousness in favor of to-the-point sincerity. So much shit is ironic right now, but we mean it.”

Indeed, Jawdropped put every last drop of themselves into Secret to Spare; aside from engineer work from Colin Knight (Agriculture) and an expert mixdown from Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Hotline TNT), the quartet self-produced this record to capture just how their live shows feel in the moment. “We wanted it to sound like a band in a room, so we recorded live and tried not to water down what we do,” Zangari says. “We wanted to capture the essence of how we play live—the unfiltered Jawdropped sound.” The result is a record that’s as raw as it is meticulous, right down to bringing in a woodblock for first single “Monday”: “It was a months-long battle—do we keep the woodblock?” Edwards recalls. “Eventually, we put our foot down and recorded the woodblock in there. It’s an example of us drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘Look whose band this is.’”

The anthemic jangle of “Split Lip” captures the emotional grind of being in a band, as well as what it feels like to blow up while trying not to blow yourself up in the process. “It's about being in a band and struggling to keep your shit in check,” Zangari explains. “You spend your whole life as a musician striving for success and hoping to experience all these things that like the four of us were experiencing for the first time. This song weighs out the excitement of that with the underwhelming reality of it all: We're still broke, there's no guarantee that any of this is going to lead to anything. How do you know that these decisions you've made are gonna pan out in the future?”

At large, Secret to Spare is lyrically driven by what Zangari defines as “stories you’ve overheard as a barfly.” “I’m always writing based off of things that I hear, or something that happened to a friend,” Morling explains regarding the blend of raconteurish-ness and interior voyeurism that makes up these twin lyricists’ POV. “L.A. is this destination that so many people move to with a dream of having this exciting life in the arts,” Zangari adds. “There's so many crazy people you meet across that spectrum of failure and success, and I'm really fascinated by those stories. But there's a self-reflective level too, because we're also playing that game. We’re no different than the failed actor that's working at the bar.”

Perhaps there’s some modesty at play in those words, though—as Secret to Spare brims with the sort of confidence that many bands spend their entire careers trying to locate, especially in a storied scene such as the California coast. “From the start, we wanted to make music that felt like Los Angeles,” Zangari explains while discussing the ambitions that currently drive Jawdropped. “There’s a sensibility of Los Angeles music where, under the sunshine and brightness, there’s this seedier, melancholy, darker aspect. We're trying to carve out our own niche in that vein.” And Secret to Spare does much more than that, immediately establishing Jawdropped as one of the city’s leading lights in indie rock.

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