Sunday October 25th Renny Conti w/ James Eichman \*\*\* Through his early twenties, Renny self-released a string of homemade albums, sorting out his aesthetic and narrative viewpoint as a musician before his project began in earnest. His self-titled debut was recorded in 2023, collecting older material that served as a proper introduction to him as an artist. Finally released in 2025, the album soon earned him buzz across the indie landscape, and landed him a deal with Mom+Pop. Once more, Split Second feels like a long-awaited debut: Emerging from not only 2023 but all the years before, Split Second catalogues the snapshots and places and people that made Renny the musician he is today. Renny’s life in music began as it does for many of us: a means of escape from the confusing pivot from childhood to teenage years. His parents are working artists, actors who also maintained day jobs, exposing Renny to the grind of a creative life from an early age as they orbited San Francisco in various suburban homes. His teenage years grew more chaotic as he struggled with school. At the same time, he and his brother began playing music together, which led him to phases in various metal and punk bands with friends. Initially, music was his form of community, his way of finding where he belonged. Eventually, while studying film in college, Renny began making music alone, altering the scope, aesthetic, and timbre of his work. As he experienced his first significant heartbreak, he began gravitating towards the music that would come to define his own writing: emotive, folk-tinged indie that seemed the perfect vehicle for the tone of gentle reflection he favors. In comparison to the unfettered expression of his earliest work, Split Second is the first time Renny was making music with some awareness that people would hear it, and in turn the album became a more considered statement. Surrounded by artists of other disciplines in New York, he found himself inspired by the workmanlike approach of painter friends. He hewed new songs into shape, and linked up with co-producer Adrian Olsen in Los Angeles, crafting a humid, layered atmosphere for Split Second — acoustic guitars and plainspoken vocals augmented by orchestration or by waves of distortion nodding to the heavier influences of his early musical DNA. It was only after the fact that the meanings of several songs truly revealed themselves to Renny. From an early age, his musical life was intertwined with his relationship with his older brother. Then, as his brother fell deeper into addiction, Renny continued on solo or with friends. Split Second collects the first songs he wrote after his brother’s passing, and many of them touch on the difference of experiencing his death against his absence while still alive. Once upon a time, Renny’s brother was his biggest musical influence. “It was almost a passing of the torch,” he says. “I’d be a completely different person were it not for us making music together when we were young.” On Split Second, there’s a poignance to him carrying on without him: The thing the siblings once shared becomes the thing that gives Renny strength to reckon with his brother’s death and all the other pitfalls of life. Presented by Songbyrd All ages