Widemouth

Chicago quartet Widemouth’s debut album, “No Gasoline,” fits comfortably within the current wave of folk-rock and alt-country music, drawing on many of the genre’s familiar stylistic hallmarks, like acoustic guitars, close harmonies and plainspoken lyrics. Yet while the album embraces these conventions, the band’s thematic concerns are different. Where many contemporary singer-songwriters use detail to characterize themselves or analyze romantic relationships, Widemouth uses detail to illuminate the joys and complications of friendship.

Across the album’s thirteen songs, the focus is on names, memories, half-finished conversations and the kinds of stories friends tell each other late at night. It opens with “I Wish You Passed On a Little Anger,” and straightaway it drops listeners into a world populated by specific people—Meme, Frances, Cristian, Rachel. The lyrics don’t overexplain these references; the band trusts the audience to follow along, and that trust becomes one of the record’s defining strengths.

Mak Carnahan and Jamie Eder are Widemouth’s primary songwriters and vocalists. Carnahan started the band a few years ago after putting up a flyer at Northwestern University, where she was a student, and Eder responded. Their vocal harmonies serve as the record’s emotional anchor. Around them, drummer Lily Mitchell and bassist Pat Pilch play with patience and precision. Steel guitar appears throughout the album, stretching songs toward wide-open spaces while the earnest lyrics keep them grounded in lived experience.

The third track, “Hotel Pool,” introduces a welcome instability into the record’s otherwise measured pace. The song feels as though it’s perpetually threatening to come apart, tense with lyrics about self-doubt and uncertainty. Widemouth excels when allowing tension to linger unresolved, and “Hotel Pool” demonstrates the band’s ability to create drama without forcing intensity.

Widemouth’s “No Gasoline”

Later, “You & Your Girlfriend” is a cathartic song, not because of any grand revelation, but because of its ordinary observations. Carnahan and Eder recount memories of a friend in distress, and the details remain painfully mundane: someone sitting against a wall, crying, unsure what to say. The song narrates the way that life is often not defined by dramatic turning points as much as by small moments, like when people we love reveal how vulnerable they are.

The title track serves as the album’s emotional release. By the time the song “No Gasoline” arrives near the end of the record, years of accumulated memories and unresolved feelings seem to converge. The song builds patiently before opening into one of the album’s most powerful moments. It takes the common image of a car stalling in an intersection on a freezing day because it ran out of gas and makes it an easy but effective metaphor for ignoring a problem until it becomes inescapable.

Widemouth avoids the temptation to end the album with a grand statement. The record closes with “Pinecone (Reprise),” an instrumental return accompanied by ambient airport sounds. The choice is fitting. Airports are places of departures, reunions, transitions and uncertainty. They are spaces between destinations. So, too, is much of adulthood.

For a debut album, “No Gasoline” feels assured and self-possessed. The band trusts its songs, trusts its listeners and trusts the emotional weight of small moments. The record ends where it began: with people trying to understand one another. Even if they don’t succeed, the effort itself becomes the point.

Widemouth’s “No Gasoline” was released on May 29, 2026 on Urban Scandal Records.