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Greg Freeman's All Set The Bone Is a Double Album He Barely Gave Himself Time to Miss
A songwriter who just landed on a year-end best-of list turned around and wrote its sequel before the applause faded.
Most artists coming off a Pitchfork "Best New Album" and a spot on The New York Times' Best Albums of 2025 list would take a lap. Greg Freeman started writing his follow-up almost the moment Burnover was finished. That's not a marketing detail — it's the whole premise of All Set The Bone, a 13-track double album arriving October 2, 2026, built on a timeline that sounds more like a dare than a plan.
The making of it matches the pace of the decision. Freeman recorded the album quickly, in a Hollywood studio, with scant rehearsal time and deadlines he set for himself rather than ones imposed by a label calendar. He's described the arrival of the record's direction as an "epiphany moment," and what's telling is that it caught him off guard — he expected the search for a new sound to take longer than it did. Instead of circling an idea for a year, he apparently just found it and ran.
## From Cemetery Landscaping to a Full-Time Bet on Songwriting
That urgency tracks with the bigger move underneath it. Freeman left Burlington and headed to the Southwest to record All Set The Bone while committing to music full-time — a decision with real stakes for someone who was previously a cemetery landscaper and a restaurant line cook. Those aren't glamorous rock-bio footnotes; they're the kind of jobs you leave only when you're serious about the alternative. Knowing that history reframes the album's compressed production schedule less as a stylistic flex and more as a person moving fast because he finally can.
He didn't make this one alone, either. John Congleton produced All Set The Bone, and his résumé — St Vincent, Alvvays, Blondie, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten — is less a genre signal than a track record of helping distinct voices sound more like themselves rather than smoothing them into a house style. Pairing that producer with a record made under self-imposed time pressure is an interesting bet: fast sessions can either sharpen an artist's instincts or expose the cracks. Congleton's job here was presumably to make sure it did the former.
## What the Songs Are Reaching For
The lead single, "Indu," has been billed as a lo-fi earworm, which at least tells you the record isn't shedding its rough edges for the sake of a bigger stage. Freeman himself has called the album "a reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension," and the influences he's pointing to back that up: golden-era Modest Mouse and Pavement sitting alongside Mission of Burden, Fugazi, Unwound, post-rock, and art rock — a lineage that favors nervous energy over polish. The imagery attached to the songs leans the same direction, populated by a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts "clanking like trapped lobsters," a town of bent necks, and a lover with limbs bent like crab apple trees. That's not vague mood-board language — it's specific enough to suggest a writer more interested in odd, precise pictures than broad statements.
The touring plan matches the scale of the ambition. Freeman's booked a run of European festivals — Way Out West in Sweden, Green Man in Wales, Pukkelpop in Belgium, Supersonic in France, and Bogen F in Switzerland — alongside a North American tour that stretches from September 20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to November 21 back home in South Burlington, Vermont. Starting and ending in Vermont, with a transatlantic festival run in between, is its own kind of full circle for someone who only recently decided to do this for a living.
For anyone who wants the physical object, All Set The Bone is being pressed as a gatefold double LP on black vinyl with a special belly band — the kind of packaging that assumes people will want to sit with a 13-track record as a whole, not stream a single off it and move on. Given how fast this album reportedly came together, there's something fitting about that: a record made in a hurry, built to be listened to slowly.
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