Bike Routes is David Lawrence Osterhout. Deeply intimate, earnest, and heartfelt expressions of anxiety, heartbreak, and acceptance lie within deceptively sugary melodies and hooks. David’s acoustic guitar is the anchor, inviting listeners into a notebook full of emotion and authenticity.
The Garden State gave the world Bruce Springsteen, The Misfits, Lifetime, and The Gaslight Anthem. There’s perhaps a bit of the essence of each of those trailblazers within the Bike Routes sound. While the South Jersey singer/songwriter conjures the spirit of the iconic troubadours of indie rock, classic emo, and postmodern pop-punk, he distinctively carves a singularly unique identity all his own.
Songs like “You Want It You Got It,” “World Apart,” and “Airplane” are modern ready-made anthems. Bike Routes performances of stripped-down versions of Tigers Jaw, As Cities Burn, Death Cab For Cutie, and Springsteen songs stretch back to before his first EP, Just Let It Go (2020), arrived. His debut album, Love is an Action (2022), was written and recorded, at first, as an acoustic record. However, producer Zach Tuch (Touché Amoré, Silverstein, Movements) helped expand the sound.
The Rush of Energy EP, the first Bike Routes release via Blue Grape Music, crackles with urgency and energy without losing the intimate feel of the earlier work. “You Want It, You Got It” and “World Apart” are ready-made anthems for audiences who share Osterhout’s diverse tastes and passions.
Bike Routes excels in the live environment, as evidenced on a Spring 2024 tour with Hawthorne Heights. “Reading books is my hobby,” David says. “And I’ve always loved writing. Learning how to say what I want exactly the right way throughout the years has been a joy. Playing shows is the payoff. Performing these songs that I feel fully connected to and connecting with the crowd.”
Wherever you go, there you are. It’s a familiar adage to anyone who’s ever tried to outrun their demons, but it feels particularly cruel for a traveling musician.
No one knows this better than Noah Rauchwerk, whose life on the road as a touring drummer offers him precious little stability and plenty of time for reflection. Thanks to his work with artists like Samia, Willow Avalon, and Renny Conti, his days are chopped up between long drives, crowded venues, and strange hotels. His years are chopped up between monthslong nationwide tours and sporadic, meandering stays back in New York and New Jersey while he waits to leave again.
“I’m home and I’m away from home,” he explains. “And every time, I promise myself ‘When I’m home, I’ll finally do this.’ Or ‘When I’m back on tour, I’ll finally do that.”’
This sense of lacking a permanent home permeates much of Rauchwerk’s own music as Wormy, the artist project he’s been writing for since 2021. His discomfort with impermanence comes to a head on his second album Shark River, which finds Rauchwerk grappling with the splintered friendships, shattered relationships, and stagnating uncertainty produced by a life in constant motion.
The album isn’t unlike a tour itself, full of hyper-detailed vignettes sewn together by introspective, window-gazing musings on life, love, and regret. In “Cocaine Bear,” Rauchwerk contemplates his own death in between trips to Costco and aimless movie marathons during a day off on tour. In “27 Days,” he questions the future of a brief but intimate relationship he leaves behind in a foreign country. And in “I Hate You,” he laments the fragmented nature of adult relationships as people recede into their busy lives.
Skillful production and backing vocals from his bandmates Renny Conti and Samia Finnerty drench most of the record in a sepia-toned indie glow complete with the occasional pedal steel, but Rauchwerk’s vocals betray his fondness for emo-leaning folk luminaries like Bright Eyes and the Mountain Goats. Sometimes, his singing feels more or less like melodic speaking, a friend telling you about a hard day over a couple of beers; other times, you can feel his panic as he shouts into the microphone.
Interestingly, the album’s moments of calm reside mostly in songs about past relationships, recollections of brief emotional homes Rauchwerk built, lived in for a time, and then lost or dismantled. As he recalls long conversations in the hot tub and pajama-clad Love Island marathons, you can feel the pain in his recognition that these moments were fleeting. When, he asks, will something finally be permanent?
“I think a lot of the album is about not realizing that something is good until after it’s over,” he says. “Exploring these beautiful moments you had and being like ‘Oh, maybe they were just good.’”
Rauchwerk is adept at dressing up his fears in self-deprecating humor, self-aware enough to recognize that many of his problems are of his own creation. But he also struggles with the idea that safety and comfort elude him, even in the places he assumed he could reliably find them. This sentiment inspired the album’s title, the name of a town in New Jersey but also a potent metaphor for feeling unsafe in a supposedly safe place.
“I remember hearing this story as a kid where a shark got into a river in New Jersey, and it always terrified me because when you go into a creek, the one thing you’re thinking is ‘At least there are no sharks in here,’” Rauchwerk says. “You go back to a familiar place and feel like it’s gonna solve your problems, but your problems follow you.”
The album asks many of the questions that haunt people as they grow shakily into adulthood. Will I ever find love that endures? Will my friend ever call me back? What’s the difference between building a life and just living a life? But amidst the self-doubt and regret that flow through Shark River, there are glimmers of optimism that keep Rauchwerk afloat. Even when he’s singing about giving up, you get the feeling he never will — that part of a life in motion is the understanding that you keep moving forward. Eventually, you’ll get home.
“Sometimes all you can do is reckon with it,” he says. “Say okay, now I understand this about myself, and next time I approach this, it’s going to be in a positive way. Next time, I’ll get it right.”
“Looking at the song titles on Innerlove’s debut LP suggests things are pretty bleak for the New York four-piece: the record is littered with songs called “Ain’t Who I Wanna Be,” “Things Stop Working,” “Hectic,” “The Way That I Live,” “Burnt Out.” But listening to it paints a very different picture–this isn’t a band burnt out and over it. Innerlove’s just getting started.
Though the band’s been putting out music since 2019, their first full-length feels like a real introduction. Stray singles like last year’s “The Wringer” have nodded towards country, but the LP fully embraces it. “Things Stop Working” is a full-on roots rock song, and “Trophies” and “26” are Innerlove’s take on bright-eyed folk. Other songs do stay a little closer to the crunchy, rough-hewn indie rock sound the band established on their Fine by Me EP–“10 in the Morning” sways and builds, and “Hectic,” a contender for the band’s best song ever, subtly weaves twangy riffs underneath pop rock melodies. The whole of it is a confident step forward for a band that’s always shown potential. It’s clear, after listening through the record, that this is exactly who Innerlove wants to be.”