Briefs

In September 2014, Luca was 22 years old. He had just dropped out of university and started working as an office employee in a company, a job he would quit shortly after. Sam had just returned from a year in Italy, and perhaps nothing would ever be the same. On September 27, 2014, the first cassette from Baseball Gregg was released on La Barberia Records: an EP that made a small but lasting mark among indie pop fans between Italy and the United States. This duo would go on to release ten albums – both EPs and full-length – over the next ten years.

Today, exactly ten years after, the band announces "Briefs", their fifth LP, due out in November, again on La Barberia Records. The album consists of ten tracks that have taken shape and matured over two years, and were finally recorded at Colle Ameno, in the countryside near Bologna, during the scorching heat of the last summer.

Briefs as in "short ones," because it's a short album, just over 20 minutes, with ten small sketches that capture the sonic legacy of the duo and the imaginative world the band has built over the years. But also Briefs as in "letters," as the album opening track takes the form of a letter (with the title itself "Brief" drawing from Kafka’s "Brief an den Vater") and, in its brief journey, grapples with the many challenges encountered in adulthood.

Finally, Briefs also refers to 'underwear': it’s an album that at times feels liberating and sensual, finally able to sincerely explore the erotic side of life. The very first single is "Penetration", a cathartic track that Sam wrote in 2022, shortly after the Club Q massacre in Colorado Springs, where a 22-year-old man killed five people in a gay bar. During that period, they reflected on how their own experience with gun violence affected their intimate relationships. “In moments of stress and fear” Sam said, “my body would react as if there was a gun pointed at me”. Penetration was written to confront those emotions, but also to shout a defiant "fuck you" to fear.

Baseball Gregg offers these ten briefs, sharing bits of their lived experiences. We get the memo.
(Riccardo Re)