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In Greg Freeman’s music, every passing second is an emergency, another last chance not to be alone forever. Even the tender sentiments on his fierce, heart-cracking new album, All Set the Bone—“When I’m alone, I can be anyone, but when I’m with you, I’m me,” for example, from “Loser’s Prize,” or “All I wanna do is look at you looking at me with your moonlight in your eyes” from “Indu”—come out sounding panicked and bewildered, like Freeman’s fending off loan sharks in a back alley.
Freeman sings this way by design. The tone and grain of his voice tends to invoke comparisons to Jason Molina, but the Vermont singer/songwriter has talked about his love of blues hollerers like Skip James, Charley Patton, and Howlin’ Wolf, singers whose voices sound like disruptions or warnings. Freeman lets his voice splay and skid, cracking and skating past the pitch center, because this is the sound his characters’ nervous systems make. He stumbles into his own immaculately composed rock songs like he’s blind drunk at a party, eyeing everyone unsteadily and warily, fight-or-flight hormones coursing through his system and a load of condemnations on his tongue.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Those condemnations flow thick and fast. As on his 2025 breakout, Burnover, Freeman’s lyrics cram so much human disappointment and dashed hopes into small spaces that each song seems to gaze out at you, coyote-ish and hungry. “Everything you look at/Looks back at you,” he warns on “Indu,” and across All Sets the Bone, Freeman introduces us to dozens of souls, all nameless, who fix their beery, hardened stare on us.
Freeman recently left his longtime home of Burlington for Chicago, but his songs often take place in specific upstate New York towns—your Romes, your Vestals, your Rennselears. These are places where the economic strain of spiraling city rent meets the crumbling infrastructure of American small-town life, where the only thing everybody can agree on is that “these are the days of one thing after another.” On the opening song, “Cahokia,” he sings about the feeling that “doomsday came and went for everybody else,” and this is the default setting for Freeman’s music: His characters are angry and they feel alone. In the words of one song, they are “Marooned.”
Isaac Brock wrote about these same lives once upon a time—the malls that were the “soon-to-be-ghost towns,” the drunk in a cowboy hat firing rifles in the sky in the desert, yelling at God. Freeman has Brock’s eye for detail, for place and setting: “Turn on the radio, the service here is crap/Hear the Christian hearts clank around like lobsters in a trap,” goes a stunning couplet on “Loser’s Prize.”
Out of the recent clutch of writerly indie-rock songwriters competing to pen the most quotable line, Freeman might be best in class. He can summarize a bender in under a dozen words: “As the night got pricey/Things got dicey inside of me” (“Costs”). He coins new verbs, like “I won’t spaniel you around.” He makes incredible things happen with simile, and there are multiple similes on All Set The Bone that vie for his best-ever: “Your tongue was tied like an ampersand,” “I wanna feel like a drummer, felt but not shown”; “This life works like a palindrome.”
Beneath the weight of Freeman’s lyrics, the music claws against hopelessness, surging over its confinements. With his focus on guitars, upright piano, and organ, Freeman’s songs sound like bar rock, but his compositional ambitions are more in line with chamber pop or prog rock. Without emphasizing their complexity, “Next to Nothing” and “Totaled” churn through more chord progressions, instrumental breakdowns, tempo changes, and hairpin dynamic turns than most bar audiences could tolerate. Freeman said he wrote All Set the Bone on a tear, possessed by momentum but unsure of his destination, and the best songs on the album tremble with the thrilling energy of something that might fall apart.
With production from John Congleton, the sound is darker and more violent than Burnover, the atmosphere more menacing. The distortion is heavier, and the guitars have sprouted fangs, and the spirit of the old Pixies 4AD records hangs heavy, both in the unpredictability and the raw-nerved, free-floating dread. Hearing Freeman cut his way through the din is oddly touching, like watching him fight in vain to reach you through a crowd. Everything is a struggle in Freeman’s songs, but there are moments to be stolen: “Get in the backseat, we’ll be nowhere by sunrise,” he says on “Decade,” followed by the truest sweet nothing he knows to offer: “Whatever you’re scared to lose, I promise there was nothing coming anyway.”
