Sweeping Promises’ introduction to the global punk underground was their debut album, Hunger for a Way Out, one of the breakout successes in music during 2020’s pandemic lockdown. In 2023, they followed up with the acclaimed Good Living Is Coming for You, which made Album of the Year lists for Pitchfork, NPR, Paste, and BBC, just to name a few. The album found guitarist/producer Caufield Schnug and bassist/vocalist Lira Mondal testing the limits of their home-recording resourcefulness as freshly minted Kansans – new place, new space. Now, the band is back with a frenetic new offering: You Say I Romanticize.

Recorded over an 18-month period, largely prepared and periodically interrupted by Schnug’s non-SP production work, You Say I Romanticize is a tribute to the chaos of creation and collaboration under shifting circumstances. For years now, Schnug and Mondal have embedded themselves in their combination tour house and recording studio in Kansas, annually working on dozens of albums from other bands, hosting tour stops, planning shows, and the like. After an immersive process of tracking and whittling down YSIR demos and carving out an idiosyncratic chamber recording method for the album’s intentional wall-of-sound, the duo brought in touring drummer Spenser Gralla to play the songs like the band would on stage.