Just two years into their life as a band, FREE THROW were already reflecting on the past. The Nashville emo quintet’s debut album, the aptly named THOSE DAYS ARE GONE, took the underground by storm when it was released in September 2014 via Count Your Lucky Stars, with Brooklyn Vegan hailing lead single “Tongue Tied” for its ability to “successfully bring together Tell All Your Friends dual vocals with American Football’s shimmering guitars.”
The sepia-toned emotional resonance of songs like the 6/8 “Two Beers In,” loud/soft dynamism of “Hey Ken, Someone Methodically Mushed the Donuts” and riff-ready “Pallet Town” painted a portrait of the uncertainty and growing pains of life in your 20s: a veritable Groundhog Day of bad luck, bad love, and bad habits, set atop a bed of inventive rhythms, Midwestern-inspired guitar lines, ambient instrumentation and tightly wound catharsis.
It’s this unfiltered honesty, surveying the wreckage of a failed relationship with a yearning to turn back the clock to kinder, more carefree years, that helped Free Throw – Cory Castro (vocals/guitar), Larry Warner (guitar), Jake Hughes (guitar/vocals), Justin Castro (bass) and Zach Hall (drums/vocals) – immediately connect with a new generation of listeners, rolling into a swelling wave of modern emo that’s spawned tens of millions of Spotify and Apple Music streams and gigs the world over.
Now, to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Those Days Are Gone, Free Throw will embark on a North American/U.S. tour in early 2025, performing the record in full alongside fan favorites from their five-album catalog – melding these timeless songs with the band’s reputation for delivering raucous sing-along live shows.
“We’ve been playing some of these songs since the record came out, and I think we’ll be playing songs like ‘Two Beers In’ for the rest of our lives,” Castro says. “But we have fun playing those songs. Free Throw has always remained the same in terms of our ethos and ideology.”
Following a pair of EPs (2012’s Free Throw and 2014’s Lavender Town) the album’s 11 songs found the group leveling up as musicians, unlocking a more technical approach while not losing the heart that anchored their songwriting from day one. That push and pull is ultimately what makes Those Days Are Gone such an enduring listen: a lightning-in-a-bottle snapshot of a band finding themselves in real time. A rough-around-the-edges recording, made in a sweaty basement studio for $600 and a case of Coors, that’s great because of its imperfections.
“It’s crazy to think back to it now in comparison to how we work on records now,” Warner adds. “None of us had any expectations of what or how to write – we just wrote songs that we thought were cool and interesting. Sometimes they didn’t have a chorus or a linear path, but that didn’t matter. We just wrote what we wanted to and had fun with it.”
Add Castro: “We didn’t quite know Those Days Are Gone was going to be as special as a lot of people consider it today, but we thought that we had something really good.
There’s been so much that’s happened since we made the record, but in some ways, it still kind of feels like yesterday.”
