Photo by Rosie Clements

Artist: Font, the five-piece of vocalist Thom Waddill, drummers Jack Owens and Logan Wagner, bassist Roman Parnell, and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Laurence

Location: Austin, TX

Buzz: Born and cultivated out of a DIY arts space in their native Austin, Font are a fever dream of art-pop sensibilities set to react and released into the wild to take on their own life. That being said, don’t anticipate the certainty of a concrete form from where their music takes you, as the band’s style never stays put in one linear direction. It’s like hearing sound being scribbled all over a wall or being jolted by fluctuating electrical charges with no guess as to where the pattern ends.

Following two promising singles since forming in 2022, their debut album, Strange Burden, sweeps you into the hallucinogenic spirit of the band’s vocalist and lyricist, Thom Waddill. With him as the band’s conduit, Font shape-shift through influences of electro-clash (“It”,) LCD-beaming disco-punk (“Hey Kekulé”,) gleaming synth-rock (“Looking At Engines”,) and post-punk spikes (“Sentence 1”) that sync stream-of-conscious musings, poetry, movement, and white hot flashes of light into varying intensities of energy. It translates just as well to fuel for their live presentation, having just wrapped up a tour with the equally uncontainable noise of the rising Lifeguard, and now in a momentum to continue enveloping the world around them.

Sound: Smashing the timeline distance between the Talking Heads’ weird contortions and Model/Actriz’ grand, feral theatrics for the dance-fueled warehouse scene.

Recommended: “Hey Kekulé”, “Looking At Engines”, and “It” from their recently released debut album, Strange Burden

Font’s Strange Burden is available now on Acrophase Records.