Before their first ever tour of Japan in 2023, Grady Allen sat his bandmates in Anxious down and told them he wasn’t sure if the band could continue. He’d fronted Anxious since he was 14; he was now 22. He’d been immersed in the aggressively all-or-nothing world of hardcore punk all through his teens and into early adulthood. He wanted to go back to school, live a life that wasn’t all wrapped up in this one thing — and maybe that meant he wanted out of the band right as it was blowing up.

Needless to say, that was tough for his bandmates to hear. Allen is quick to make it clear that they were never fighting. Tension, arguments, anger — these are words that he uses only to explain that he’s not using them. But for a while there was definitely some lingering weirdness. Hurt feelings. Long and loving conversations. Oasis or Fleetwood Mac, this was not — just five sensitive, sensible young adults who had some stuff to work out.

“Over the past few years we’ve become brothers, and we’re so tethered in this indescribable way. To say, ‘Hey, part of this has caused me some unhappiness that I think I need to work through’ — I think it’s hard for it not to feel like rejection in some capacity,” Allen recalls now on a Zoom call, home for the holidays in Connecticut. “In hindsight, I regret how binary I made the conversation, of ‘I think I feel this way so the band is all off now’. I have a lot of regrets about that. But I’m very thankful for everybody throughout that whole process. I always felt like I was understood.”

Obviously, Anxious (completed by guitarist/co-lead vocalist Dante Melucci, who joins the call alongside Allen from the gym, plus guitarist Tommy Harte, bassist Sam Allen, and drummer Jonny Camner) didn’t break up. And thank god, because instead they made Bambi, the kind of sophomore album that you always hope a young emo band will make. That means it’s bigger, catchier, follows more threads, yet doesn’t sand down the rougher edges that were on their also-awesome debut, 2022’s Little Green House — it just makes them hit harder through more sophisticated songcraft.

The record’s name is one they almost chose for the band in its earlier stages and later realized would have been way better than the one they did choose. The concept of thinking about other roads you could have taken, wondering who you might have become, was a potent one, given the questions Allen was dealing with at the time. Speaking of which, he did go back to college. When the band is off the road, he’s in Boston, majoring in history; when they’re on tour, he takes online classes. There was no big epiphany or decision to keep going; the balance just worked itself out in the end.

Why exactly did it feel so important? Firstly, it was beginning to feel a little Peter Pan, he says, piling into hotel rooms with seven other people every night, “using a towel that’s been used by three other people to shower,” while his friends graduated and got jobs. But it was more than that. Hardcore was all he’d known in his adult life, and something about the insular, tribal mindset that abounds in that scene was really starting to bother him.

“It feels like a hard thing to verbalize without it seeming either pretentious or a little bit mean-spirited, but I didn’t wanna arrive at a point where I was a full adult and my only reference point to interact and perceive the world was through touring or alternative music,” he says. “[I realized] that there were people older than me who I felt hardcore hadn’t elevated their life, it had in fact compromised it. And these people seemed unhappy and mean-spirited to some extent. There’s so many fantastic things about living this really weird, unconventional life, but to decide that’s the singular lens through which to view the world and everything else is somehow negated, and if somebody doesn’t know Agnostic Front or something then they’re not fucking worth your time — wow, what an unfortunate, shallow perspective to have. If that’s how you feel, hardcore didn’t save your life, it ruined it.

“I also think I had a distinct moment where I realized that I had embraced a lot of negative aspects of hardcore,” he continues. “A decent amount of my late teens and early 20s, I was incredibly mean-spirited and shallow and contemptuous of other people. And I’m not sure exactly when that realization turned on, but I definitely did have some realization of, man, I feel like the most negative parts of my personality have been elevated by hardcore’s ‘you’re all in or you’re fucking out’ mentality’.” College, he says, felt like a much-needed way to be around people who didn’t only care about hardcore (or even know what the hell it was) and to figure out a more three-dimensional personality for himself.

Bambi itself is a pretty telling rebuttal to that purist mindset. Beyond just an emo album, this is a distinctly emo-pop album; the band’s biggest reference points were Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab For Cutie, and Blink-182’s Untitled, all of which shows. Tracks like “Some Girls” (out today) and “Tell Me Why” have unbelievable, sugar-rush melodies; lead single “Counting Sheep” could be straight off of Bleed American. “Next Big Star” is (appropriately for its name) a straight-up power-pop song. Even on the more aggressive tracks, like “Never Said” and “Bambi’s Theme,” the melodies are still the most important part.

If the songs are sonically irreverent to hardcore ideals, there’s a confrontational streak lyrically too. “Never Said” is a putdown of the mean-spirited snobs Allen was talking about — “You will never know what this all meant to me when you’re spending all your time trying to see through,” he yells on the bridge — and so is “Head & Spine,” a particularly biting track which verbalizes the insecurity that that kind of negativity inflicts.

Much of the promotional material around the record has described it as the band’s “big swing” moment, but Allen isn’t totally sure about that description. “To me — when listening to this record, putting the record together — I haven’t once consciously been like, ‘This is it, this is our big swing. This is us fucking doing it,’” he says. “I don’t see Bambi as we really wanted to be ambitious. To me it’s just, no, we are ambitious, and that was the product that came of it. It feels very much like the next step from Little Green House.”

Melucci explains things a little differently. He definitely sweated over the record; he was “obsessive,” he says. “I wanted us to do new things and try new ways of writing songs, and just experiment with all of it. And that was kinda difficult to talk to everyone about, to convince everyone was something we could do,” he says.

Part of the problem was that suddenly, since they broke out with Little Green House, there were a lot of voices in their ear about how they should best keep that momentum going. “You’ve got managers, you’ve got the label, you’ve got booking agents. There’s all these new people who have opinions about what’s the smartest thing to do, what people would want you to do,” Melucci says. “We put out a couple songs in 2022 at the end of the year after we put out Little Green House, and we had people working for us saying, like, ‘That’s not what you should sound like, you wanna sound like this.’ And all of a sudden just trying to make music and trying to do something that’s supposed to be fun, supposed to be self-expressive, turns into like… a commodity.”

But once the band got in the studio, the stress dissipated. The album was sketched out, but it wasn’t top-to-bottom outlined; they got the chance to experiment, trusting each other and their own instincts. “I think that was the most exciting time, because we were just having fun with it, instead of overthinking it or strategically thinking about it. We were just letting ourselves show in the songs,” Melucci says.

Melucci had a bigger role on Bambi than Little Green House, not only acting as its main songwriting engine but writing more lyrics and taking lead vocal on roughly half the album. He’s got a slightly rawer, rougher voice than Allen does, but he’s also got a really sweet falsetto, which he shows off on the ballad “Audrey Go Again.”

“To a certain extent, in the early stages, I think [Melucci’s bigger role] did create some anxiety for me,” says Allen, who’s been best friends with Melucci since they bonded over Blink-182 at a rock school program aged 12 and 11. “Not out of a lack of faith in Dante in any respect, but in a [way of], where does that place me, where does that frame me? But I think it’s really cool. Anxious is more than just my story to tell or my things to say, and I think it’s cool to share with somebody, let alone somebody that I’ve known for so long.”

“Grady was really gracious in letting me take over at times, and there were moments where I felt super bad,” Melucci adds. “I feel like Anxious has always been Grady’s band. For four years of us doing it, I played drums and he booked the shows, he took us out of state. The whole thing is really his universe. And when I started writing for Anxious, a part of it was, how can I write the kind of songs that would impress Grady? That’s what I feel like a big part of this record was.”

“It’s funny to hear Dante say that,” Allen says, “‘cause to me, this record, I think there’s so much, and the most that there’s ever been, of Dante and who Dante is. The things he feels and the things that he likes are all over it. And I think that’s fantastic.”

It was after a somewhat strained — again, not tense — conversation about Melucci’s expanded role in the band that Allen wrote the album’s final track, “I’ll Be Around.” It’s a touching, shoegazey song about the pair’s long-lasting friendship. “If you say “leave me be”, I’ll be around,” Allen coos; “Where you begin, I’ll be the end/ I’ll be around.” The chorus sums up the band’s last couple of years: “We’ll fall around the conversation that we have to have/ It won’t feel right but we’ll be gentle/ And we’ll talk about the situation where we find ourselves this time/ Isn’t that special?”

“Even when there are these moments of growth and having to navigate these dynamics, it’s like, the nature of our friendship and this thing that we’ve created never really feels compromised. [The song] has this very reconciled, very peaceful nature to it,” Allen says. That vulnerability and lovingness, apart from being sweet to hear, is a sign of how Anxious ended up making a record as great as Bambi. In circumstances that would have driven a permanent wedge between a lot of bands, they doubled down on being open to each other’s growth; and so the triumphantly expansive, ambitious sound of Bambi is not that of a band breaking down, but spurring each other on.

TOUR DATES:
02/01 – Boston, MA @ Something in the Way Fest
03/11 – Philadelphia, PA @ Ukie Club *
03/12 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd *
03/13 – Richmond, VA @ Richmond Music Hall *
03/14 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle *
03/15 – Atlanta, GA @ Aisle 5 *
03/16 – Nashville, TN @ Drkmttr *
03/18 – Dallas, TX @ Club Dada *
03/19 – Austin, TX @ Empire Control Room *
03/21 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge *
03/22 – San Diego, CA @ Voodoo Room *
03/23 – Los Angeles, CA @ Echoplex *
03/25 – San Francisco, CA @ Brick & Mortar
03/28 – Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall *
03/29 – Seattle, WA @ Madam Lou’s *
03/31 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court *
04/02 – Denver, CO @ Globe Hall *
04/05 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St Entry *
04/06 – Chicago, IL @ Cobra Lounge *
04/07 – Hamtramck, MI @ Sanctuary Detroit *
04/08 – Lakewood, OH @ Mahall’s *
04/10 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom *
04/11 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair *

* w/ Ultra Q, Stateside

Bambi is out 2/21 via Run For Cover.