Splitsville - Mobtown
It is with great pride that BIG STIR RECORDS announces the July 18 release of the new album MOBTOWN from veteran indie rockers SPLITSVILLE – the first album since 2003 from the revered Power Pop Hall Of Famers, already heralded by strong global airplay for the lead single “Beth Steel” with “A Glorious Lie” to follow in the coming days. MOBTOWN, a ten-track love letter to the band's hometown of Baltimore, is up for pre-order and pre-save now:
From its first track, the supercharged literal re-introduction “Cold Open”, MOBTOWN is immediately and viscerally striking as a hooks-forward, radio-ready collection of stellar power pop. That's evident from the driving guitars, immaculate melodies and big harmonies ringing through loud and clear on the early singles, and in fact on all of the tracks offered up here. To the longtime fans who've waited for over two decades for new material, it all sounds like SPLITSVILLE at the top of their game; to the uninitiated it might evoke Fountains Of Wayne or the most melodic work of '90s alt-rockers like Weezer. But a deeper dive starts to reveal textures and ambitions, both musical and lyrical, that make the record much more than “just” a pitch-perfect guitar pop album.
It's clear that the band hasn't reunited for the sake of nostalgia, although their legacy would allow for that: formed in 1994 by identical twins BRANDT and MATT HUSEMAN of the beloved power pop band THE GREENBERRY WOODS along with bassist/keyboardist PAUL KRYSIAK and later adding lead guitarist TONY WADDY, SPLITSVILLE was one of the leading lights of the turn-of-the-century guitar pop revival. From their home-recorded debut through 2003, their initial run yielded five critically acclaimed albums including genre classics like Repeater (1998) and the retro-focused concept record The Complete Pet Soul (2001). They've been missed, but the audacity of the new album indicates that SPLITSVILLE have returned not only with their melodic gifts and powerful sonics intact, but with heady new ambitions.
Between the title of the album and the lyrical concerns of the singles “Beth Steel” (an urgent character study of a former employee of Maryland's now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant) and “A Glorious Lie” (drawn from a tale of Baltimore's Belvedere Hotel and a 1926 visit from the Queen of Romania), the overarching themes of MOBTOWN have already begun to declare themselves: this is a hometown affair for SPLITSVILLE. “It's a concept album, but all of our albums have been at some level. We still focused on the best songwriting, this time using Baltimore as a mirror or microcosm to address societal and personal issues,” explains Matt Huseman. A quote from novelist Richard Price -- "Baltimore, in fact, is chaos theory incarnate" – was included in the band's writing manifesto for the album, and local landmarks and neighborhoods lend their names to a number of the record's songs. “On Federal Hill”, a soaring tune with appropriately martial drum flourishes, takes the loss of historical awareness as its key concern, while the ridiculously catchy consumerism takedown “I Hate Going To Hutzler's” borrows the name of the defunct Maryland department store chain whose flagship store appears on the album's sleeve art. Both “Gray” with its soulful swagger and the jangling “Southern Hospitality” address the long-standing racial divisions that continue to shape the city's cultural landscape. Heady stuff for a pop record, but Splitsville have been challenging themselves to push such boundaries all along.
The time-tripping ambition to document Baltimore in all its contradictory splendor via what the band calls “a magical realism or at least a historical mash-up approach to the lyrics” inspires some surprising musical exploration as well. Thus “Fallsway”, inspired by Paul Krysiak's love of Carole King and Christine McVie, spins off into overt nods to Elvis Costello and Steely Dan, and the string-laden coda of “Fallsway” is simply jaw-dropping. And with each listen to MOBTOWN, the listener picks up on even more influences. There’s big '90s-sounding rock, Prince-influenced soul, bits of Van Halen, Flaming Lips, Johnny Cash, Cheap Trick, MGMT… the list goes on. Nonetheless, it all sounds like one effortlessly cohesive whole; perhaps that, too, is a function of holding up a mirror to the diversity of Baltimore itself.
The record closes with a pair of heartbreaking slower tunes boasting some of the strongest melodies on a record overflowing with them. The titles of both, unsurprisingly, namecheck Baltimore geography: “Perry Hall” with its harrowing refrain of “all that's left is emptiness”, and the more celebratory (albeit unflinching) “Penn Station”. Here we find the conceptual and emotional core of MOBTOWN laid bare, expressed firstly in one couplet – “This city’s gonna fall apart / But I love it anyway” – and then in a single word, the last one heard in the song and on the album: “home”.
MOBTOWN, then, is an album that not only marks the return of a crucial band from the late-century power pop renaissance, but easily stands with their finest work. In its detailed portrait of a singular place and its history and culture, it approaches the lyrical heights of the peak period Kinks while sonically representing a Tarantino-esque melange of the best records of the last 60+ years of popular music. It's fueled by an audacity that one wishes more indie pop bands on a too-often backwards-looking scene would take to heart. As that scene welcomes back one of its own, it's more than enough that, in MOBTOWN, SPLITSVILLE have brought us something of a masterpiece, and one of the best albums of any kind that 2025 is likely to offer.
