Secret To Spare

Secret To Spare at once feels classic and immediate – 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. Secret To Spare officially came together across spare days and weekends across 2025, in the gaps between Jawdropped’s increasingly busy tour schedule, including runs with their labelmates Greg Freeman and Rocket, and juggling various day jobs. “The EP were songs that pretty much already existed,” Kyra 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 Westerburg’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. 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 (MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee), 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. 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.