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American Bully XL (Acrophase Records)
Add date: 11.17.2026
Release date: 11.13.2026
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Font’s new album, American Bully XL, is dedicated to Texas. Let's sit with that a sec and let all of your ideas and feelings about what “Texas music” might be come to the surface. Get past its loudest and most obvious signifiers and Texas is wildly diverse, artistically cutting-edge, and, most of all, a deeply weird place. It’s that spirit, that Texanness, that plays out every day in At the Drive-In’s El Paso, Bob Wills’ Fort Worth, UGK’s P.A.T., and Font’s own Austin that the band is both celebrating and channeling on their sophomore release. While the tightly wound prog and post-punk of their 2024 debut Strange Burden was hailed for its “sophisticated flair” and “non-conformist brilliance” by Paste and was called “a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning” by Pitchfork, American Bully XL is softer, sweeter. Sometimes it feels like a drone record being played atop an album of alternative R&B. Sometimes it begins to head in the noisier direction of Strange Burden, then turns around to collapse into amorphous, emotionally bruised abstraction. Like a dream, it’s both familiar and disorienting.
If it is a dream, it’s one that unfolds in a place where the stars at night are big and bright. Like so many Texans before them—Lyle Lovett combining country with big band jazz, BigXthaPlug twisting a dobro through a trap song, Teezo Touchdown cobbling together everything he can think of—Font ignore the idea of what a rock band “should” sound like in pursuit of unexpected juxtapositions. It’s a natural impulse to arise from a place that’s home to so many different kinds of people and so many cultures. With its Texan, Southern, and French heritage, singer Thom Waddill’s hometown of Beaumont has given birth not just to Teezo Touchdown but to decades’ worth of blues, zydeco, rap, and country intertwined; it’s not surprising to learn that collagist painter Robert Rauschenberg is also a Beaumont native.
Sure, there are some dusty country-rock moments here, some pedal steel and acoustic fingerpicking that wouldn't sound out of place at the Armadillo World Headquarters. But there's also the languid slow-mo atmosphere of DJ Screw's most humid experiments. There are some Roky Erickson-style zonked-out sweetheart melodies. A bit of Billie Joe Shaver’s woozy emotional clarity. A belief shared with Pauline Oliveros that artistically serious music can also be emotionally devastating. A little of Lotic's heat-vision hallucinations. And really, more than anything, there's a spirit of independence, curiosity, and self-belief that's apparently implanted in every baby born in Texas. “We feel that a lot of what sounds like idiosyncrasy in the music is a result of certain cross-sections of Texas music,” says Waddill. “It’s a desire to recast it in different lights.”
Though its vast, aqueous landscape may make it hard to believe, American Bully XL is in large part the result of a tightly controlled experiment. The group drove out to Long Beach, California, for a three week stint at Dutch Interior's home studio with very little written. The idea was to remove themselves from the familiar, explore the sounds they found interesting, and see if they could shape them into new material. The music they made is emotionally direct, supple, vulnerable. It has little in common with Strange Burden, but that wasn’t intentional; it just kinda worked out that way.“It’s really a result of a change in process rather than a premeditated decision to expand and refine our songwriting or open the production,” multi-instrumentalist Anthony Laurence says. Between trips to the beach, they managed to shape their swirls of sound into something that much more closely resembled songs, then they hit the road for a tour of the South with Dutch Interior that helped them refine what they generated in California into more legible structures. They finished the album in Austin, tweaking the rawer material into something closer to the road-tested versions.
The image the band held in mind as they recorded, shaped, and recorded some more was of a robot in a log cabin. “The image evokes the tension between the electronic and the acoustic, the programmed and the natural, the abstract and the confessional,” they say. It sometimes sounds like recognizable indie rock, at least until you notice the pleasantly fingerpicked guitar is no longer being fingerpicked and has been processed into a glitch that sounds like fingerpicking. Patched-together samples of live drumming form the beat of “Noon Room.” Paired with a redlining sawtooth synth, they give the song a hard industrial edge, while within those boundaries the rest of the song seems to be floating on a sad, soft wind. And then a song like “Night Sight” feels like Joe Jackson, slightly noir-ish synth-pop that would’ve worked on late-80s radio—at least until all the glitches start running up against the rumbling of a voice that’s positioned close to the mic but impossible to understand, giving you human connection but not communication.
Things come in and out of focus; listening can feel a bit like waking up and trying to blink the blur out of your eyes. Waddill sings almost exclusively through autotune, his damp voice a perfect match for the album's murky texture. Much of American Bully XL centers around loss, broken love, loneliness, and the persistence of attachment. Sometimes, as in "Cling," they sound like they’re being played to an empty warehouse on a hot afternoon, such as the one in which the band held its first rehearsals—so spacious, but all of it gaseous and full. "Cling, cling, cling go the bells of everything," Waddill sings, a fascinating malapropism that turns the idea of celebration into a burden, the same way another person's expectations and history stick to your skin even when you don't want to think about them.
As the band finished work on the record, Waddill moved to New York and found himself drawn directly back to Texas music, and in particular to the homesickness that animates so much country music. Loss and change permeate this record, the bewildered feeling that comes with the kind of grief deep enough to shift your identity. Partly that feeling comes from the band’s personnel shift: percussionist Logan Wagner departed between records. But across the album, in a multitude of contexts, people fall to pieces and try to hold on to what they can. They pine; they yearn.
The intertwined abstraction and intimacy give you the sense of light coming through tear-burned eyes, something reflected in lyrics that, like John Ashbery poems, eloquently express deep emotion without using obvious emotional language. The narrators of these songs are “belly up inside of wide-eyed meat,” they have “diamonds in my conscience” and experience “life in concrete/paranoia rub.” In “Texas,” the narrator offers up not just their anger, hatred, lovers, and money to get back home, but also their medicine, their language, and “like 80 bucks in magazines.” It’s a mournfully cheeky song that—unsurprisingly, given the title—captures the spirit of the record as a whole. Even when shrouded in hazy synths and intercut with glitches, American Bully XL’s songs rarely depart from country music’s “four chords and the truth” ethos.
It's not hard to see why a group of Texans would identify with the American Bully XL, a dog breed with such a strong reputation for being dangerous they're now banned in the UK but who tend to be absolute sweethearts; you just have to spend time with them to find that out. The song itself took a couple of years to write, and at one point it was something like a stadium rock song—big, full of bravado, a beer-drinkin' and hell-raisin' song. In its final form, it's soft, plaintive. “That song is about difficult love and the sense of exile that comes with its loss,” Waddill says. “It was the first example we had that the vessel of Font could hold more directly emotional material.” “I pace the slats/And I watch you through the cracks/Like an American Bully XL,” Waddill sings, voices behind him echoing the breed's name in a way that aches with ambiguous sadness. At first glance, you might view it as a threat. Perhaps it is a threat, but perhaps the dog paces because it wants to protect what it loves. Their music, like their home state, is charged by the friction of contradiction and difference. American Bully XL shows the band doing what they do best: digging for, and finding, the bones of emotional truth hidden in the soil of those contradictions.
Font is Anthony Laurence, Jack Owens, Roman Parnell, and Thom Waddill. American Bully XL was recorded in Long Beach, CA, and Austin, TX.
Acrophase Records
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
Font’s new album, American Bully XL, is dedicated to Texas. Let's sit with that a sec and let all of your ideas and feelings about what “Texas music” might be come to the surface. Get past its loudest and most obvious signifiers and Texas is wildly diverse, artistically cutting-edge, and, most of all, a deeply weird place. It’s that spirit, that Texanness, that plays out every day in At the Drive-In’s El Paso, Bob Wills’ Fort Worth, UGK’s P.A.T., and Font’s own Austin that the band is both celebrating and channeling on their sophomore release. While the tightly wound prog and post-punk of their 2024 debut Strange Burden was hailed for its “sophisticated flair” and “non-conformist brilliance” by Paste and was called “a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning” by Pitchfork, American Bully XL is softer, sweeter. Sometimes it feels like a drone record being played atop an album of alternative R&B. Sometimes it begins to head in the noisier direction of Strange Burden, then turns around to collapse into amorphous, emotionally bruised abstraction. Like a dream, it’s both familiar and disorienting.
If it is a dream, it’s one that unfolds in a place where the stars at night are big and bright. Like so many Texans before them—Lyle Lovett combining country with big band jazz, BigXthaPlug twisting a dobro through a trap song, Teezo Touchdown cobbling together everything he can think of—Font ignore the idea of what a rock band “should” sound like in pursuit of unexpected juxtapositions. It’s a natural impulse to arise from a place that’s home to so many different kinds of people and so many cultures. With its Texan, Southern, and French heritage, singer Thom Waddill’s hometown of Beaumont has given birth not just to Teezo Touchdown but to decades’ worth of blues, zydeco, rap, and country intertwined; it’s not surprising to learn that collagist painter Robert Rauschenberg is also a Beaumont native.
Sure, there are some dusty country-rock moments here, some pedal steel and acoustic fingerpicking that wouldn't sound out of place at the Armadillo World Headquarters. But there's also the languid slow-mo atmosphere of DJ Screw's most humid experiments. There are some Roky Erickson-style zonked-out sweetheart melodies. A bit of Billie Joe Shaver’s woozy emotional clarity. A belief shared with Pauline Oliveros that artistically serious music can also be emotionally devastating. A little of Lotic's heat-vision hallucinations. And really, more than anything, there's a spirit of independence, curiosity, and self-belief that's apparently implanted in every baby born in Texas. “We feel that a lot of what sounds like idiosyncrasy in the music is a result of certain cross-sections of Texas music,” says Waddill. “It’s a desire to recast it in different lights.”
Though its vast, aqueous landscape may make it hard to believe, American Bully XL is in large part the result of a tightly controlled experiment. The group drove out to Long Beach, California, for a three week stint at Dutch Interior's home studio with very little written. The idea was to remove themselves from the familiar, explore the sounds they found interesting, and see if they could shape them into new material. The music they made is emotionally direct, supple, vulnerable. It has little in common with Strange Burden, but that wasn’t intentional; it just kinda worked out that way.“It’s really a result of a change in process rather than a premeditated decision to expand and refine our songwriting or open the production,” multi-instrumentalist Anthony Laurence says. Between trips to the beach, they managed to shape their swirls of sound into something that much more closely resembled songs, then they hit the road for a tour of the South with Dutch Interior that helped them refine what they generated in California into more legible structures. They finished the album in Austin, tweaking the rawer material into something closer to the road-tested versions.
The image the band held in mind as they recorded, shaped, and recorded some more was of a robot in a log cabin. “The image evokes the tension between the electronic and the acoustic, the programmed and the natural, the abstract and the confessional,” they say. It sometimes sounds like recognizable indie rock, at least until you notice the pleasantly fingerpicked guitar is no longer being fingerpicked and has been processed into a glitch that sounds like fingerpicking. Patched-together samples of live drumming form the beat of “Noon Room.” Paired with a redlining sawtooth synth, they give the song a hard industrial edge, while within those boundaries the rest of the song seems to be floating on a sad, soft wind. And then a song like “Night Sight” feels like Joe Jackson, slightly noir-ish synth-pop that would’ve worked on late-80s radio—at least until all the glitches start running up against the rumbling of a voice that’s positioned close to the mic but impossible to understand, giving you human connection but not communication.
Things come in and out of focus; listening can feel a bit like waking up and trying to blink the blur out of your eyes. Waddill sings almost exclusively through autotune, his damp voice a perfect match for the album's murky texture. Much of American Bully XL centers around loss, broken love, loneliness, and the persistence of attachment. Sometimes, as in "Cling," they sound like they’re being played to an empty warehouse on a hot afternoon, such as the one in which the band held its first rehearsals—so spacious, but all of it gaseous and full. "Cling, cling, cling go the bells of everything," Waddill sings, a fascinating malapropism that turns the idea of celebration into a burden, the same way another person's expectations and history stick to your skin even when you don't want to think about them.
As the band finished work on the record, Waddill moved to New York and found himself drawn directly back to Texas music, and in particular to the homesickness that animates so much country music. Loss and change permeate this record, the bewildered feeling that comes with the kind of grief deep enough to shift your identity. Partly that feeling comes from the band’s personnel shift: percussionist Logan Wagner departed between records. But across the album, in a multitude of contexts, people fall to pieces and try to hold on to what they can. They pine; they yearn.
The intertwined abstraction and intimacy give you the sense of light coming through tear-burned eyes, something reflected in lyrics that, like John Ashbery poems, eloquently express deep emotion without using obvious emotional language. The narrators of these songs are “belly up inside of wide-eyed meat,” they have “diamonds in my conscience” and experience “life in concrete/paranoia rub.” In “Texas,” the narrator offers up not just their anger, hatred, lovers, and money to get back home, but also their medicine, their language, and “like 80 bucks in magazines.” It’s a mournfully cheeky song that—unsurprisingly, given the title—captures the spirit of the record as a whole. Even when shrouded in hazy synths and intercut with glitches, American Bully XL’s songs rarely depart from country music’s “four chords and the truth” ethos.
It's not hard to see why a group of Texans would identify with the American Bully XL, a dog breed with such a strong reputation for being dangerous they're now banned in the UK but who tend to be absolute sweethearts; you just have to spend time with them to find that out. The song itself took a couple of years to write, and at one point it was something like a stadium rock song—big, full of bravado, a beer-drinkin' and hell-raisin' song. In its final form, it's soft, plaintive. “That song is about difficult love and the sense of exile that comes with its loss,” Waddill says. “It was the first example we had that the vessel of Font could hold more directly emotional material.” “I pace the slats/And I watch you through the cracks/Like an American Bully XL,” Waddill sings, voices behind him echoing the breed's name in a way that aches with ambiguous sadness. At first glance, you might view it as a threat. Perhaps it is a threat, but perhaps the dog paces because it wants to protect what it loves. Their music, like their home state, is charged by the friction of contradiction and difference. American Bully XL shows the band doing what they do best: digging for, and finding, the bones of emotional truth hidden in the soil of those contradictions.
Font is Anthony Laurence, Jack Owens, Roman Parnell, and Thom Waddill. American Bully XL was recorded in Long Beach, CA, and Austin, TX.