Oklahoma’s BRONCHO are back with their third album Double Vanity, (due out May 27), a record that finds the band slowing into a darker and hazier groove. “We wanted something low and slow on this record; that’s the way we’ve been living these days,” says frontman Ryan Lindsey. The Fader broke the news this morning and also premiered Double Vanity’s wistful first single “Fantasy Boys.” “Double Vanity is somewhat of a tonal shift from their last album – they’ve gotten a little smoother, a little slower, and a little sexier,” writes The Fader. “‘Fantasy Boys’ sounds like the space inside my head when I’ve got a crush. It sounds like the romantic final slow dance scene from a sexy late ’80s movie.”

I want to eat you up, I want to drop your name…
Double Vanity, BRONCHO’s third album, veers gleefully from its roots, moving from graffiti-sprayed back rooms into a sleeker, plusher sound, a place bright with the polished gleam of chrome and bleached white sunlight. Close your eyes and what you feel is the raw wound pulse of adolescence, what you see behind your lids is suburban shopping mall wastelands, glazed eyes, dead grass, lips glossed in bubblegum pink.

“We wanted something low and slow on this record,” BRONCHO’s Ryan Lindsey said, “that’s the way we’ve been living these days.”

Beneath it all, the music has always been constantly mutating and ceaselessly experimental. What began as an ode to ramshackle, high-energy early punk has become something deeper, weirder and much more nuanced.

Double Vanity finds Ryan Lindsey and bandmates Ben King (guitar), Penny Pitchlynn (bass) and Nathan Price (drums) steadily moving ahead, transforming the raw angst of their first record (2011’s Can’t Get Past The Lips) into a sound decidedly more layered and complex. And while there were hints of certain things to come on their sophomore release (2014’s Just Enough Hip To Be Woman), this third album is that fresh direction fully realized, the band exploring a rich trove of new influences.

“I think in my mind I never wanted to stay specifically in that world,” explains Lindsey, “I wanted to move from there. And as soon as I began starting to think about BRONCHO as an artistic character, it felt really natural progression.”

For Double Vanity, Lindsey worked again from the gut, developing songs in his head, creating landscapes and scenes, a visual guide to accompany the melodies and lyrical concepts. The result feels decidedly moodier, dreamier – tracks swaying lazily out of a haze of fuzz and effects. The undercurrent of early 1980s punk is still there, but The Ramones pogo has been replaced by a kind of Love and Rockets-inspired, honeyed, cotton-mouthed drift.

Double Vanity evokes a shared nostalgia, for the past and for the unknown future, as BRONCHO takes a turn off the wide freeways and into a world of intimate, intricate – but always universal – emotion.