Carly Cosgrove

A sitcom joke with a serious floor under it

The band is a trio: Lucas Naylor on guitar and vocals, Helen Barsz on bass, Tyler Kramer on drums. The name is a collision of the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly and Miranda Cosgrove, the actress who played the title character, and the conceit runs all the way down — every song title the band has written points at either iCarly or Drake & Josh. Both were created by Dan Schneider, and the band's Bandcamp page opens with a flat statement of opposition to him, which is the first sign that the joke is load-bearing rather than decorative.

They describe themselves as "Philly nostalgiacore". In September 2024, WXPN put them roughly five years into their run on the local circuit, which places the start of the band around 2019, and set them in a line that runs through Algernon Cadwallader, Modern Baseball and Sweet Pill — the Philadelphia habit of writing plain, self-lacerating lyrics over guitar parts that refuse to sit still. What arrives on record is tight rhythmic playing and interlocking guitar figures under a voice that sounds like it is arguing with itself.

See You In Chemistry

The debut album, See You In Chemistry, came out in March 2022 on Wax Bodega. The title is lifted from a Drake & Josh line, but Naylor has explained it as something closer to a note-to-self about neurochemistry and the possibility of improvement: "The idea behind the title is that I'm going to be someone else later when I figure things out." That gap — between the reference and the thing it is standing in front of — is the band's whole method.

The release show was on 16 April 2022 at First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, with Sweet Pill, Harmony Woods and NIQU on the bill; the church basement is where a good deal of the city's guitar music has been broken in. The record's singles, among them "Really Big Shrimp", established a pattern the band has kept since: a song that changes shape two or three times inside four minutes without losing the thread.

The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty

The second album followed in June 2024, again on Wax Bodega. The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty deals with ambition, depression and the business of getting older without having worked anything out, and it moves from small, close-miked writing towards songs plainly built to be sung back in a room. Swim Into The Sound described instrumentation with enough kinetic force that it borders on a live recording, and Naylor's habit of turning odd, unglamorous metaphors into melodies delivered almost as punchlines.

The songs that have since become fixtures are on here: "You Old Dog", "Here's a Fork", "Fluff My Pillow", "Zoloft", "The Impact of This Exit" and "North Star Bar", the last named for a Philadelphia venue that closed years ago. The closing admission — "The world I know is not the one I hoped it was, but it was there" — is about as close as the record comes to resolution.

On 26 September 2024 WXPN published a Key Studio Session recorded with the band, four songs: "Steered Straight", "You Old Dog", "What Are You, A Cop?" and "Fluff My Pillow". At that point they were on the road with You Blew It! and lined up for a lengthy autumn run with Real Friends — two years of opening slots that did more for the live show than any amount of studio time.

Putting the room on tape

On 6 March 2026 the band released Live from Union Transfer, recorded at the Philadelphia venue and issued alongside a multi-camera film of the set. It runs fifteen tracks and about forty-six minutes, mixed by front-of-house engineer Tyler Floyd, and it is structured the way the band actually plays: full songs separated by four short instrumental passages titled "philly 1" through "philly 4".

The running order pulls from both albums without treating either as the main event — "The Great Doheny" and "You Ate My Enchilada!" from the first record sit next to "You Old Dog", "Here's A Fork" and "Fluff My Pillow" from the second — and it ends on "Really Big Shrimp" and "Not My Job". As a document it makes the case the band had been making from stages for years: the records are compressed versions of something louder and looser.

Headlining, then back to the support slot at scale

The live album was tied to the Spring Cleaning tour, the band's first proper headline run, which crossed North America in spring 2026 with Leisure Hour and Summerbruise opening. The Seattle date at The Vera Project on 31 March 2026 gives a fair picture of the format: doors at 6.30pm, Summerbruise on at 7.00, Leisure Hour at 7.45, Carly Cosgrove from 8.35 to 9.40, nineteen songs in sixty-five minutes.

Having proved they can carry their own bill, they spent the second half of 2026 on a much bigger one. Exclaim! reported on 24 June 2026 that Free Throw and Microwave had booked a North American co-headline tour opening on 9 October in Asheville, North Carolina, with Carly Cosgrove among the support acts alongside Puddle Splasher, Kerosene Heights and Flycatcher. The band takes all four Canadian dates — The Pearl in Vancouver on 26 October, the Palace Theatre in Calgary on the 28th, Pawn Shop Live in Edmonton on the 29th and the Park Theatre in Winnipeg on the 31st — plus a long list of US shows including Athens, Kansas City, Boulder, Las Vegas, Pomona and the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis on 1 November.

Europe comes next. Rock Sound reported on 21 September 2026 that Spanish Love Songs will headline their largest UK and European run in early 2027 behind the album Future Nausea, with Carly Cosgrove and Michael Cera Palin supporting throughout and Bike Routes added on the UK dates. That routing opens in Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna between 28 and 31 January and runs through February via Bologna, Zurich, Munich, Karlsruhe, Nijmegen, Antwerp, Southampton, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, London, Madrid and Barcelona. A limited run of £20/€20 "cost of living" tickets went to band presale on 23 September 2026, with general sale on the 25th — the first UK shows most of the band's British listeners will have had a chance at.