As Jawdropped tell it, Los Angeles isn’t such a bad home for aspiring musicians. Practice spaces are generally easy to come by. Transporting gear to the gig is no problem—you’re already used to sitting in your car all the time. For every DIY venue that shutters, there’s a new one ready to pop in another neighborhood just a touch less gentrified. And most importantly, cutting your teeth in such a sprawling creative hotbed means there’s a good chance of crossing paths with likeminded people who each have their own complicated feelings about what it means to “make it.”

That creative hotbed is where Jawdropped met, anyway, and its characters serve as the nexus for the quartet’s debut album, Secret to Spare. Vocalist Kyra Morling, vocalist/guitarist Roman Zangari, bassist Sean Edwards, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian are longtime Angelenos who, all in their 30s, have accumulated plenty of experience across a slew projects that never quite took off. They formed Jawdropped a little over two years ago, solidifying their early friendship by attending an Evan Dando show together and exploring crunchy power-pop of their own on their 2025 EP, Just Fantasy. But the Lemonheads’ influence becomes even clearer on Secret to Spare, as early as the first ten seconds of opener “The Line,” where Morling counts off a rush of sunny, major-key guitar chords that feel lifted straight from It’s a Shame About Ray.

But where Dando’s narrators were often disaffected or passive, Jawdropped pride themselves on wearing their hearts as blatantly as their influences on their sleeves. They’re far from their generation’s first band to namecheck Paul Westerberg, Teenage Fanclub, and Dinosaur Jr. in one breath, but there’s a refreshing sincerity to their ’90s revivalism: “I’m just not interested in coming off mysterious or cool,” Zangari has said, distinguishing himself from the myriad zoomers who made cribbing Deftones fashionable. “Monday,” a pop-punkish early single about overcoming hesitance toward telling somebody how you really feel, forges some transparent urgency: ”If I wait one more day/I might go insane/Cause I’m just wasting time,” Morling and Zangari sing in unison, their overlapping vocals lending a bar-band warmth to their self-produced fidelity.

Across Secret to Spare, Jawdropped couch these interpersonal, observational stories in the trepidations of the big-city grind. The muscly, melodic “Cup” reflects on feeling sidetracked after finding temporary fulfillment in ill-advised habits: “Late to arrive/To the first day/That you had to try.” The pummeling, frenetic riffs of “Smoglight” juxtapose its narrator’s exasperation due to overworked nights and dull mornings; over time, Morling’s repeated declarations of “God, it’s so romantic” feel like a last-ditch effort to remind herself it’ll all be worth it.

But the highs, Jawdropped argue, can prove just as formidable as the lows. The jangly “Split Lip” reckons with the harsh truth that getting everything you thought you wanted can’t always eclipse your shortcomings, although lines like “Lay your cards on the table/Sign your soul to a major label” feel a bit on the nose. More effective is the midtempo anthem “Whiplash,” where gentle ups-and-downs become nauseatingly consequential without warning, or the balladic “Cellulite,” which measures passing time in clothes outgrown and tattoos acquired in lieu of traditional milestones. “Summer’s a forever feeling, I’m sure,” Morling sings. Add that to Jawdropped’s list of reasons to move to L.A.: At least it always feels like summer.