B-Side Guys

Michael Zapruder makes music from California now, but the band he founded still rehearses in Austin. This geographical split isn’t a logistical inconvenience—it’s the album’s central condition. rrunnerrss, the self-titled debut from Zapruder’s new project, documents what happens when a place you love becomes somewhere you can’t safely stay. Texas’s draconian policies pushed him west, but the connections he built over decades in Austin’s music scene remain. So he flies back for shows, coordinates recording sessions, and leads a quintet of veteran players through thirty-eight minutes exploring exile, belonging, and resistance.

The lineup reads like an Austin music family tree. Mike St. Clair played with Okkervil River and White Denim. Andy Beaudoin anchored Nori and Star Parks. Carolyn Trowbridge backed Adrian Quesada’s Boleros Psicodélicos and Black Pumas. Lauren Gurgiolo toured with Heartless Bastards and Okkervil River. Wiley Green worked with Pocket Sounds and Food Group. Together under Zapruder’s direction, they fuse North African desert rock’s pentatonic patterns with psychedelia and improvisational guitar work, creating hypnotic grooves and mantra-like refrains that feel ancient and immediate simultaneously.

Calling this a supergroup isn’t hyperbole. Each member brings substantial credits—they’ve backed Roky Erickson, Polyphonic Spree, Bill Callahan, among others. But the collaboration transcends resume stacking. These players share vocabulary from years navigating Austin’s interconnected scenes, understanding how to support Zapruder’s vision while contributing their own exploratory instincts. The chemistry shows in how the music breathes, how improvisation never feels indulgent, how the North African influences integrate organically rather than as exotic garnish.

Zapruder’s songwriting evokes Big Thief’s intimacy and Wilco’s adventurous spirit, dwelling in vivid poetic detail. A Carolina wren. A mosquito in a cup of tea. A leaning tree. These specific images anchor songs addressing abstract concepts—safety, freedom, home. The opening track, “Carolina Wren,” establishes this approach immediately, finding universal resonance through particular observation. The small becomes monumental when the large feels overwhelming.

“Home” and “Of Course You’re Crying” continue exploring what belonging means when geography and politics misalign. The album doesn’t traffic in abstract political rhetoric but instead examines the personal toll of living somewhere that legislates against your existence or the existence of people you love. For progressives in Texas—the “blueberry in the tomato soup” as Austin gets called—the calculation becomes stark: stay and fight, or leave for safety. Neither choice feels victorious.

“Keep It Safe” and “In Return (A Certain Thing)” build on the album’s central tensions. The titles themselves suggest the dual impulses driving the record—protecting what matters while questioning what you receive in exchange for that protection. The band’s desert rock influences surface strongly here, the pentatonic scales and repetitive structures creating trance-like states that mirror the psychological loops of contemplating major life upheaval.

“Leaning Tree” provides the album’s visual metaphor—something still rooted but no longer standing straight, compromised by forces beyond its control yet refusing to fall completely. The image works on multiple levels: individuals, communities, the state itself, all leaning under pressure, survival uncertain. The guitar work here demonstrates the band’s improvisational strength, players comfortable enough with the framework to explore its edges without losing the center.

“Ruins” confronts what remains after structures collapse, whether political, social, or personal. The track doesn’t wallow but doesn’t offer false hope either. Instead, it examines the rubble honestly, asking what gets built from wreckage. The musicianship throughout the album reaches its peak here—each player fully present, the North African influences and psychedelic exploration merging into something that sounds like neither genre individually but couldn’t exist without both.

“Get Me Out of Here” closes the album with somber acoustic folk rock recalling Paul Simon’s early solo work. Released as the latest single, the track distills the album’s themes into a direct statement. The sweetness in the arrangement contradicts the desperation in the title, creating the same productive tension that defines the entire project. Zapruder’s compositional skill shows in how he balances these opposing forces—the music beautiful enough to soothe, the content urgent enough to unsettle.

The album’s February 2026 release on Howells Transmitter Records arrives at a moment when conversations about leaving Texas—or the U.S. entirely—intensify among progressives. Post-election anxieties compound existing concerns about safety for queer people, women, immigrants, and anyone existing outside the lines drawn by increasingly authoritarian governance. rrunnerrss speaks directly to this moment without being trapped by it. The themes of exile and resistance will outlive the specific political circumstances that birthed them.

What makes the album powerful isn’t just its political relevance but the quality of the music itself. These are legitimate players making sophisticated work, the kind of interlocking arrangements and exploratory passages that reward repeated listening. The genre fusion never feels calculated or trendy—desert rock and psychedelia share DNA in their use of repetition, drone, and expanded consciousness. Zapruder and his collaborators understand this instinctively, building on shared ground rather than forcing disparate elements together.

The project’s name—rrunnerrss—suggests multiplicity and movement, the doubled letters implying both distance covered and plural perspectives. Five musicians from different backgrounds finding common purpose. An artist in exile maintaining connections through collaborative creation. A band documenting what it means to make liberated music in the face of oppressive politics, to find freedom in sound when geography offers constraint.

Texas remains beautiful—the food, the parks, the landscapes, that Southern hospitality. H-E-B really is that good. But beauty doesn’t guarantee safety, and for some residents, staying has become untenable. rrunnerrss documents this rupture while refusing to surrender to it. The music itself becomes the liberation, the act of creation in exile a form of resistance more powerful than any explicit protest anthem. Eight tracks, thirty-eight minutes, proof that sometimes the most radical political act is simply continuing to make excellent art with the people you trust, regardless of which state lines you have to cross to do it.