Free Throw

Nashville, April 2012

Free Throw formed in Nashville in April 2012, shortly after the founding members finished high school and found each other through the local scene. Cory Castro has described the starting point plainly: a couple of beers, a couple of ideas, and a shared stack of Topshelf Records releases. The reference points were the twinkly Midwest emo of Snowing and Algernon Cadwallader crossed with the pop-punk the members had grown up on, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Runners among it — a combination that still explains the band's split personality, half spidery guitar figures and half shouted chorus.

The core has barely moved in thirteen years. Castro sings, Lawrence Warner plays lead guitar and Justin Castro plays bass, all three from the 2012 line-up; Jake Hughes joined on rhythm guitar in 2013. Drummer Zach Hall played from 2013 to 2015 and returned in 2022. Three guitars is the defining structural fact about the band, and it is why the records rarely sound like a single riff being hammered — the parts interlock rather than stack.

A self-titled EP arrived in 2012 and the Lavender Town EP in 2014, the latter the first public sign of a running habit: Castro is a Pokémon obsessive, and the franchise turns up in song titles across the catalogue.

Those Days Are Gone, and the decade it took to come back

The debut album, Those Days Are Gone, came out in 2014 and did the thing bands spend careers hoping for — it outlived its release cycle. Its songs about drinking, self-loathing and the wreckage of early twenties relationships became the band's calling card, and a decade later the band were still building tours around them.

In December 2024 Free Throw announced a tenth-anniversary tour, playing the record in full alongside material from the rest of the catalogue, opening on 28 March in Austin with Ben Quad and Harrison Gordon in support. It was paired with a tenth-anniversary edition of the album that re-recorded five songs with guests from the band's own scene — Pat Miranda of Movements, Christine Goodwyne of Pool Kids, Yvette Young of Covet, Nathan Hardy of Microwave and Tades Sanville of Hot Mulligan — plus five live recordings.

The guest list doubles as a map of where Free Throw sit. They are not the biggest band in that room, but they are one of the ones everyone else in it grew up listening to, something the support acts on the 2026 tour have said from the stage.

Five albums, one producer

Bear Your Mind followed in 2017 on Triple Crown Records, produced by Brett Romnes — the start of a working relationship that has now run the length of the band's mature catalogue. What's Past Is Prologue arrived in 2019, Piecing It Together in 2021, and Lessons That We Swear to Keep in 2023, the last of them for the Philadelphia label Wax Bodega, where the band remain.

Across those records the writing widened out from the first album's specific subject matter — alcoholism, addiction, body image, the mechanics of a relationship falling apart — without softening. What changed was the delivery. The screamed passages that once carried most of the emotional weight became one option among several rather than the default.

Romnes has been a co-writer as much as an engineer on the recent material, and the continuity shows in how quickly the band can work: the sixth album was cut in two sessions slotted around touring.

Moments Before the Wind

Moments Before the Wind was released on 27 March 2026 through Wax Bodega, preceded by the single Mike Nolan's Long Weekend in 2025 and then A Hero's Grave and The Outlaw Star in early 2026. Castro had been writing about the end of a long relationship and about eighteen months to two years of general unravelling when he took a phone call in the studio telling him he was going to be a father.

He has been direct about what that did to the record. In an interview published in June 2026 he described the call as the thing that gave the songs a shape they did not have before: he had been writing about the previous two years, and the news landed as the moment the material had been circling. Elsewhere in the same conversation he framed the band as a form of therapy, and noted the cost of that — certain songs require him to go back to the place they came from every night, and he has learned when to disassociate instead. He also offered the least dramatic summary of thirteen years in a band: he is not as angry these days.

Reviews split roughly where that description suggests they would. Punktastic called it a great record and argued that evolution is not always about big changes, singling out The Need For A Post-Credits Scene as the centrepiece and the closing The Waters Of Life for its post-rock drift. Distorted Sound gave it 6 out of 10, praising the jangle-pop turn on Floaroma Town and the distorted vocals and drumming on Deviancy while arguing that the brighter production keeps the rest of the album from landing harder, and that the two-session schedule left some tracks underdeveloped.

On 14 September 2026 the band announced a deluxe edition for 2 October, adding four songs recorded during the original sessions and led by the single You've Met With A Terrible Fate, Haven't You?

Where they stand in September 2026

The album has been on the road almost continuously since release. A North American headline tour with Macseal, TRSH and Wakelee opened on 12 April 2026 at Delmar Hall in St Louis and ran through the spring, taking in Union Transfer in Philadelphia on 9 May, Chicago on 17 May and a hometown Nashville date on 30 May.

Europe followed in summer. Free Throw played Outbreak Festival in Manchester on 26 June and Jera On Air in the Netherlands on 27 June, then a headline run through Cologne, Berlin, Nuremberg and Stuttgart into the Electric Ballroom in London on 4 July, Norwich on 5 July, Glasgow's Garage on 7 July and Newcastle University on 8 July, closing at 2000trees in Cheltenham on 10 July. Saturdays At Your Place supported the headline shows.

The autumn is a co-headline North American tour with Microwave, announced in late June with general sale on 26 June. It opens on 9 October in Asheville, North Carolina and ends on 12 November in Greensboro, with four Canadian dates in between: the Pearl in Vancouver on 26 October, the Palace Theatre in Calgary on 28 October, Pawn Shop Live in Edmonton on 29 October and the Park Theatre in Winnipeg on 31 October. Support rotates — Carly Cosgrove on all the Canadian shows and selected US dates, Flycatcher early in October, Kerosene Heights through November, Puddle Splasher on the last two. Festival dates at Aftershock in Sacramento and Warped Tour in Orlando sit alongside the run.

The band as a live proposition

Free Throw have settled into the tier where headline sets run about an hour in 700-to-1,200-capacity rooms, and longer where they are carrying the night alone. The new material has integrated quickly: MissingNo. has opened shows since April, and three or four songs from Moments Before the Wind sit in the middle of sets otherwise weighted towards Those Days Are Gone and Bear Your Mind.

The autumn pairing with Microwave is the more interesting test. The two bands share an audience and a scene — Microwave's Nathan Hardy sang on the Those Days Are Gone anniversary re-recordings — and a co-headline means shorter sets from both, which usually pushes Free Throw towards the older, faster material rather than the quieter end of the new record.