We are living after the end of the end of history—both in the sense that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 theory of a democratic finish line has come and gone, and that it feels disconcertingly like we’re living through the end times themselves, alive after everything and left to make a life in the wreckage that optimism left behind. We are living post- everything: post-liberalism, post-language, post-hope. On “Culture,” Greg Freeman adds two more to the list: post-culture and post-rock-and-roll. The current moment, he says, is simply beyond analogy. When all our words are “plagiarized before they’re written,” as he puts it on “Loser’s Prize,” even art itself begins to feel mind-numbingly futile. Everything that’s worth saying has already been said, but if we say nothing at all, what good are we? We might be suspended in this strange purgatory of life-after-social-collapse, but we’re still living, and doesn’t that have to mean something? All Set the Bone captures this modern predicament in all its grim nuance: a life amid an emotional and philosophical apocalypse. He announces as much on the first line of the record: “Time to join the world you fucked up.” Then again, on the second song: “The end is running ahead of time,” he sings, reedy and insistent, on “Totaled,” a track that simultaneously grieves his towed, crushed Toyota—a stand-in for loved ones lost—while also self-flagellating for having the gall to grieve that kind of small-scale tragedy while large-scale devastation reigns. But the truth is that the globe keeps spinning on its axis, no matter what we’re mourning. And Freeman knows this, too; he backtracks from that original claim in “Next to Nothing”: “It’s not the end of the world / But it sure as hell might be yours.” The mid-album pair of “Withdrawn” and “Indu” chronicle the struggle of reconciling our personal heartbreaks with the bleak bigger picture. Breakups are never easy, but they’re all the more difficult when a newfound lack of love leaves you with little else to live for. Freeman renders all of this with empathy and self-awareness in equal measure—his lyricism has always been one of his greatest strengths, but perhaps never more so than on All Set the Bone. He volleys between universally incisive truisms and lived-in specifics with Berman-esque ease. On his tongue, the mundane becomes grand and symbolic (“I couldn’t pick my Toyota out of a lineup / Lost in the uniformity of violent death”), while the existential is shrunk into quotidian detail (in a subtle reference to the 1968 French uprisings: “Down below the paving stones, the beach has turned to glass / And everybody who’s come to party is now a bug in an amber cast”). Each line feels simultaneously labored over and the product of immaculate conception, brought into being by raw feeling and unbound by language’s limits. Connection and intimacy matter more now than ever, but they’re also harder to come by. But that’s all the more reason to try. If it really is the end times, then we might as well leave it all on the table. “Whatever you’re scared to lose,” Freeman warbles on “Decade,” “I promise there was nothing coming anyway.” Aphorisms to this effect litter the record: as he puts it on “Costs,” “But this life works like a palindrome / You’re spit out or spitting up into the great unknown / At both ends of it.” If we die either way, we might as well go out living. Freeman walks the walk, too. The best way to describe All Set the Bone is that it feels alive. It, not unlike Freeman’s definition of life itself, is a fuse burning at both ends—and when the currents converge, the resulting spark explodes into fireworks. “Hail Mary” takes this literally, spending the first two minutes in a slow, experimental instrumental limbo before bursting into gritty, wild riffs. “Untitled 10” takes nearly the opposite approach, opening on heavy, fuzzed-up guitar before shrinking into a painfully earnest ballad in its second half. And no matter the style, Freeman’s band—bassist Garrett Linck, percussionist Joey Sullivan, guitarist Carney Hemler, violinist Scott Daniel, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Atallah—move through the chaos as a single organism with a mind and pulse of its own. They’re locked in the pocket on lead single “Indu,” a perfect pop earworm; they function as a character in their own right on the uptempo yet melancholy “Loser’s Prize”; hell, the horns during “Decade”’s instrumental bridge call to mind Dexys Midnight Runners in their prime. There’s more range than on Freeman’s last album, too—“Tortured” is undoubtedly Freeman’s most aggressive song to date, all roiling distortion and pulsing percussion, and “Culture” is syncopated and cruel, a military march toward certain doom. Meanwhile, producer John Congleton keeps everything immediate and close to the surface; for all the album’s talk of self-imposed distance, All Set the Bone itself feels almost uncomfortably intimate. “Withdrawn” is anything but, starting out with Freeman’s distinctive, squeaky warble rendered harsh and raw against a backdrop of only light acoustics and sparse percussion—and even when the song blooms into a horn-filled anthem by its end, the vulnerability in Freeman’s voice remains on full display. “Marooned” similarly kicks off with a minor-key dirge before building into full-throated, complex arrangements. Freeman’s voice feels like it’s in a perpetual state of danger, always on the verge of breaking, of slipping off the right note onto the wrong one. The words often feel ripped from his throat without his consent, as if he never had any choice in the matter and was cursed to always bleed onto the tape. These days, it’s easy to look out the window and decide to stay indoors, to hide from this hell of our own making. In times like this, isolation feels like a respite. But Freeman questions this instinct, recognizing its true source: fear. “Do you feel your world will shatter at the slightest touch?” he croons, imperfect harmonies buoying him from below, on “Marooned.” “Is it the child in you that’s scared to feel too much?” He takes this mindset to task on “Loser’s Prize,” all twangy hooks and knowing derision: “So full of yourself / Your fortress will become your prison / With your passions as your cell.” We made our bed. It’s our job to lie in it. The powers that be benefit from our passivity, our preoccupation with our own misery, our prioritization of mundane gripes and stressors. That’s what modern capitalism’s about, really: keeping us so distracted doing other people’s work that we never arrive at real class consciousness. “We’re so busy cutting costs,” Freeman strains out on “Costs,” “That by the time we noticed just how much we had lost / We was already on our own.” We spend our days “in the dog food factory / with a mouth full of teeth like piano keys,” working ourselves to the bone for some faceless suit, and that is very much the point. The ruling class puts us on hamster wheels and tells us to run, leaving us to power a society in return for nothing save for more loops ‘round the wheel. “Time’s doing laps while you’re punching the clock / And history rubbernecks at each of our darkening thoughts,” Freeman wails at the end of “Decade.” “You gotta lean into the skid, kid, to get back on the road again / Before it’s too late.” And is it too late? It feels like it most of the time. But Freeman doesn’t really bother affirming one way or the other—perhaps the closest he gets to an answer is in the alt-country ballad “Bury Me the Shovel,” which closes out the record. It’s perhaps the most naked moment on an album full of them, Freeman’s voice trilling precariously above twangy acoustics and Mike Bolger’s accordion. There’s very little that feels salvageable on All Set the Bone, but its final moments reach out, for the first time, in a plea: we might live in a cracked snow globe, a frozen museum of a city filled with rats and “empty sky scrapers [that] stab constellations,” but Freeman grasps toward community anyways—and finds it, at least musically, in Trinity Ace and Anna McClellan’s harmonies. “Won’t you help to bury me the shovel, my friend?” He asks, warm and sincere. In the end, Freeman isn’t laying corpses to rest, but the tools we use to inter them. Perhaps there is life left to live. [Transgressive/Canvasback] Casey Epstein-Gross is Features Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].