Nihilistic Easyrider is the brainchild of Narrow Head frontman Jacob Duarte—but make no mistake, he’s not going solo. DELUXE EDITION is a mixtape of sorts, a collection of songs written at various intervals throughout Duarte’s career. These songs traverse a wide-range of stylistic references, from saccharine Y2K emo and young-dumb-and-full-of pop punk to Soviet fuzz fueled alt and pure Evan Dando-core verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done pop rock. Brought to life by a cast of characters including Narrow Head drummer Carson Wilcox, producer (and former tour-mate) Graham Hunt and features from Momma’s Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, this debut album still provides with masterfully crafted and hook-drenched renditions of Duarte’s signature songwriting aesthetics.
These songs wade in the same messiness of romantic misfires and burnt brain synapses that longtime Narrow Head listeners have come to know and love, just from a different, new perspective. Duarte’s tales of loneliness, anticipation, and life’s mired complexities on songs like “Getaway Plan” and “Well Kept Secret” are surrounded by a vibrant backing cast of drone-bee synth swells, barroom piano stabs, rattling acoustic guitars, and tribal-tat coded record-scratch aesthetics that subtly nod to both Incubus’ hardest moments and Deftones’ softest.

With DELUXE EDITION, Duarte provides us with diaristic vignettes of a life in perpetual motion, offering a more introspective view into the preoccupations of a songwriter whose life revolves around the stage but is ultimately lived elsewhere. To Jacob, “Nihilistic Easyrider songs are closer to the music I always wanted to make growing up,” he says, “a personal diary of growing up through music.”