This was a tough one to pick just one track from. It comes from nouns’ sophomore record still and let me tell you it’s a treat on repeat. The group formed in high school in Conway, Arkansas. Much of still is informed by the band members’ experience with mental illness, according to an interview with the band’s lead songwriter Hunter Clifton Mann conducted by Mark Garza, who runs the label/site Funeral Sounds:

Q: Mark was telling me there were stories behind Still and I’m not sure if that means musically or lyrically or? I notice for example with all the lyrics are attributed to a different person. I was curious about that.

That is an interesting question. I wasn’t sure how people would take that. I pitched this a month or two before the record came out. Once all the songs had been really fleshed out we kind of noticed, like I wrote all the lyrics and they’re all honest, we were adamant about making something honest but all the lyrics seemed very jumbled. And then, my roommate and I were talking about it. I live with two other people who have severe bipolar disorder and I have bipolar disorder as well and kind of what happened with the record is that the different names attributed to the songs are kind of personas I’ve created in my mind for my most immature state of mind that’s vengeful and angry and completely cynical, then the more mature part of me that some days understands that life isn’t shitty and I’m not cynical about it but at the same time is this complete understanding that I don’t wanna fucking be here. Then there’s the fourth persona on the record who is Oliver and his songs didn’t actually happen, but they were obsessions of mine in high school so Oliver is kind of the most innocent of my personas but also, I don’t know man, I was just obsessed with this one idea in high school that I ended up talking to a lot of people about it over the last year and then it kind of hit me that I should write a fucking song about it and we ended up writing two songs about it just to see if people would relate to it. And, I don’t know. What was the question again?

Mann is joined by Kyle Parker on guitar, Keyton Gill on bass, and Austin Clark on the drums. still was released in 2014 by three different labels, Known Pleasure Records, Funeral Sounds, and Broken World Media on vinyl, with each label producing a different color variant, which is a pretty neat idea. The whole album starts at a buck for a digital download, which is pretty nice, so I’d suggest snapping it up. If your headed down the Ozark way, they update their Facebook with info about shows, which I bet are pretty fun too.