Greg Freeman won’t be getting comfortable anytime soon. Across New Mexico, Vermont, Los Angeles, and a long stretch of tour stops hooking those places together, All Set The Bone came alive. While writing and recording it, Freeman moved out of his longtime home in Burlington, holed up in a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest, and stepped into music full-time, leaving behind odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook. The following album is populated by a grain of similarly unsettled people: a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts clanking like trapped lobsters, a town of bent necks, a lover with limbs bent like crabapple trees. Freeman calls All Set The Bone a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension.” It’s a box of political and personal yarns spread across four sides, “inhuman events” and grief pulled into a “perfect tsunami.” Freeman’s audience ignited like brimstone in 2023. Songs like “Come and Change My Body” have eclipsed the critical circles that first engaged with his music, making Freeman a bonafide threat to indie-rock’s throne. The attention, he says, still catches him off-guard. “I never get used to that, or take that for granted,” he says. “But, on the flip side, I don’t think about it too much when I’m writing music, and I think that’s important when you’re making something genuine. It’s about what you want to make, not what other people want.” That stance has become more complicated now that music is what pays his bills. Touring occupies most of his calendar, while recording happens in the gaps it leaves open. Instead of enjoying a multi-year hiatus between Burnover and All Set The Bone, he pushed straight into the latter, emerging with an hour of total music devotion. He assembled a band built to embody and obliterate contradiction—to walk the tightrope between chaos and precision. The “I wanna feel like a drummer, felt but not shown” line in “Indu” says it best, as the Greg Freeman Band is at its most spectacular when parts are heard as a sum. Freeman’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, Florry’s Joey Sullivan, and The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler lived with him in the California desert, practicing for a few weeks before hitting record. He’s also joined by songwriters Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace, whose vocal ranges complement the distinctiveness of his shrill, creaking voice rather than overwhelm it. Freeman doesn’t ask for much from his duet partners. “Someone who can sing with me and make it sound good” is enough. McClellan’s “high glottal” rises above his upper range, while Ace’s deeper harmonies sit naturally beneath his. Freeman made I Looked Out without expectation or remorse. On All Set The Bone, he embraces friction instead of refusing it, using scant rehearsal times and urgent, self-appointed deadlines to fill his third album with ambitious whims: smile-stretching guitar scorchers, cosmic percussive surges, near-baroque piano riffs, psych-rock noodles, brass cutouts, and enough key changes to build an unsolvable musical maze. All Set The Bone was finished quickly, in a real Hollywood studio with one of rock’s best modern architects, and with minimal separation between idea and outcome. For Freeman, uncertainty has become his wealthiest currency. “It should never feel comfortable,” he says. “Every album should scare you.”