The ninth studio album from Deer Tick, Coin-O-Matic casts a bright light on a little-known facet of the American mythos: the hidden histories of the band’s home state of Rhode Island, where the everyday dramas of working-class families long collided with the menace of the mafia underworld. As they tapped into their infinite fascination with that strange duality, singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan, and bassist Christopher Ryan assembled a batch of songs exploring desperation, grief, redemption, and resilience with both cinematic detail and lived-in emotionality. A sharp new turn from one of indie-rock’s most enduringly vital forces, Coin-O-Matic arrives as a complicated love letter to a way of life slowly slipping from the collective memory.
The follow-up to Emotional Contracts (hailed by Uncut as one of 2023’s best albums), Coin-O-Matic takes its title from a cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca—a legendary mobster who ran one of the most ruthless crime families in U.S. history. “If you grew up in Rhode Island years ago, you’d see all these mobsters on the news and then run into them at a restaurant on Federal Hill,” says McCauley, referring to Providence’s version of Little Italy. “They were criminals but also very colorful characters, and I wanted the album to partly reflect a certain nostalgia for that kind of seediness.”
Recorded at Deer Tick’s home studio, Coin-O-Matic marks their first self-produced album in their two-decade-plus lifespan, during which they’ve enlisted A-list producers like Dave Fridmann (a Grammy-winner known for his work with The Flaming Lips and Spoon). “At first it was daunting not to have that extra ear in the studio, but it felt like the right time to peel off the Band-Aid and fully trust ourselves,” says O’Neil. “Since we were working in our own space and there weren’t any limitations on time, we had the freedom to take these four-guys-in-a-room rock songs and experiment with different ways of decorating them.” Featuring guest musicians like Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin (on baritone saxophone) and former Deer Tick member Rob Crowell (on organ), Coin-O-Matic frequently brings a live-wire immediacy to their finespun storytelling. “We’ve never been so comfortable making a record, and I think you can feel that in the performances,” says Dennis, who engineered the LP. “We weren’t beholden to anyone else’s idea of what Deer Tick sounds like, and because of that this album feels like an unfettered capturing of who we are as a band.”
Centered on a series of vignettes that merge personal memory and extravagantly nuanced fiction, Coin-O-Matic opens on “Dog Years”—a quietly devastating track that begins in folky intimacy before building to a sorrowful catharsis. In dreaming up the song’s storyline, McCauley looked back on an assisted-living facility near his childhood home, where his own grandfather spent the final years of his life. “The main character of ‘Dog Years’ is based on the guys I used to watch playing chess outside that building or hanging out at the bus stop, smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit,” says McCauley. “I imagined an older gentleman losing his partner and that loss accelerating his aging—almost like he was doing seven years of damage with every passing year.”
Deeply informed by the singular experience of growing up Irish-Catholic, Coin-O-Matic next jolts into the ramshackle jangle-pop of “Mary Singletary” and its tender but irreverent tale of interfaith teenage lust. “Most of the stories on the album are from my parents’ generation and the generation before that, when the idea of a Catholic and a Protestant getting together was very scandalous,” says McCauley. “With that song in particular, I liked the idea of writing about Catholic guilt and pre-marital sex and adding in a little bit of Looney Tunes-style violence—sometimes as a young Catholic boy, I did imagine a vengeful God cutting me down in a cartoonish kind of way.”
Graced with all the grit and warmth of a classic heartland-rock anthem, “ACI” channels a raw desolation and its first-person portrait of a man imprisoned at the Adult Correctional Institutions outside Providence. “When we were working on the album, I used to drive past the ACI a couple times a week and think of all the stories I’ve heard about the mobsters who ended up there,” says McCauley. “That song started with us throwing ideas around in soundcheck, and over time I realized it was meant to be a prison song about the getaway driver of a robbery gone wrong.” Later, on “Exit Door,” Coin-O-Matic inhabits a gut-punching melancholy as Deer Tick depict an ex-con’s return to a world he barely recognizes. “I pictured someone who’s maybe in his 70s, and he’s getting out of prison and all his favorite restaurants are gone, everything’s completely different now,” says McCauley. “On one level it’s a celebratory moment of getting your freedom back, but I imagine it’s also really unsettling and confusing for a lot of people.”
Lending a more intimate layer to Coin-O-Matic’s underlying theme of impermanence, “Everything Born” finds O’Neil taking the lead and delivering a bittersweet meditation on the inextricable nature of love and grief. “I started that song pretty soon after my son was born, and I was thinking about how anything that comes into existence will eventually be lost and therefore mourned,” says O’Neil, who now has a seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. “It’s tough to view the world through that lens, but I wanted to write a song for my children that also speaks to that feeling of precariousness.” Another look at the delicate arc of life and love, “Candy Cigarettes” closes out Coin-O-Matic with a gorgeously devastating love song partly inspired by a local monument to those who died in the 1981 hunger strike (a protest of British policy against Irish political prisoners). “It’s a song about childhood sweethearts, one of whom comes from Northern Ireland and maybe has a family connection to one of the hunger strikers,” McCauley explains. “There’s some allusions to recent Irish history but in a very subtle way—mostly I wanted to write a pro-immigrant song, and a song about a love that lasts an entire lifetime.”
In its soulful contemplation of recklessness and consequence, longing and devotion, Coin-O-Matic ultimately joins the canon of rock albums whose geographically rooted storytelling reveals deeper truths about the human experience. “I think there’s something universal in stories of regret and loss and poor decisions, even if they’re told through the lens of all the odd characters in this little state of ours,” O’Neil points out. “One of the reasons I wanted us to make this album is that I think Rhode Island deserves to be a contender for a place that people sing about,” McCauley adds. “Sonically there’s nothing country about it, but to me it almost feels like a country record set in an urban environment—there’s definitely some outlaws in there. I hope that people see themselves in it, and that they understand a little more about the place that we come from.”
Jobi Riccio knows that while a quiet heart-to-heart can solve many problems, sometimes the heart needs a giant, all-caps billboard, especially when the world around that massive sign gets louder by the day. As each new track on her new album Face the Feeling (due May 15th via Yep Roc Records) unveils, Riccio faces another inescapable emotion as if it were a billboard screaming into view as she hurtles down the highway. And rather than turn away from their challenge, Riccio faces those uncomfortable moments with the thrill of self-discovery, reveling in growth and change as facts of life.
Throughout Face the Feeling, Riccio finds masterful balance between extremes, indulging in the light and the dark, the subtle and the direct, the ecstatic highs and the mournful lows. “You have to chase what moves you, what’s exciting you,” the Nashville-via-Colorado musician says. For Riccio’s sublime debut album, Whiplash, that meant exploring growing up and coming of age, hoping to find a route away from chaos and pain. On the follow-up, she courageously wades into the uncomfortability and luxuriates in the catharsis—finding a remarkable strength in leaning into the power of change rather than resisting it.
In addition to the shifting inspiration, Riccio reaches beyond folk and country to find a new, more electric path through emotionally unguarded terrain. By merging the introspective storytelling of Americana with the restless pulse of indie rock, she reaches a deeper strength than those filling her already impressive résumé. Those heights include Riccio having received the John Prine Songwriters Fellowship Award at the Newport Folk Festival, earned an Americana Honors & Awards Nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year, dazzled at the legendary Grand Ole Opry, and having made her national TV debut on CBS Saturday. She’s toured with legends and icons including Lucius, Jason Isbell, and Iron & Wine. And yet despite those accolades and achievements, Face the Feeling pushes out to even more adventurous boundaries. The journey of self-discovery is exemplified in lead single “The Ridge.” “When I play the song, I picture a very specific ridge I used to go walking on in fall growing up,” she explains. “The crows and magpies, scrub oak and deer, communing with them always helped me figure out how I was feeling.” Buoyed by Dom Billet’s snappy drums and Paul Defilglia’s limber bass, Riccio’s lyrics test the line between loneliness and self-reliance as sweetly as her Telecaster tones.
When she wasn’t out hiking through the scenic wilderness of her native Colorado, Riccio’s life was powered by music. Country, bluegrass, and folk songwriters like John Prine and Joni Mitchell held particular sway, bolstered by the likes of The Chicks and Nickel Creek on local radio—not to mention her sister’s CD collection and hours spent on the family computer poring over music blogs featuring the likes of The Killers and The Strokes. “I didn’t know how to express it in my music quite yet, but I’ve always had a massive breadth of interests and inspirations,” Riccio says. “Country and folk were big influences but I always loved indie rock too.”
And where “The Ridge” finds solace in reflection, “Buzzkill” utilizes some of that depth to kick open the door to self-acceptance. A cathartic jolt of distortion, the track features a gruffer delivery somewhere between Courtney Barnett’s deadpan and Waxahatchee’s full-throated twang for a musical quarter-life reckoning and a defiant reclamation of agency. “I don’t want to be the guy at the party/ Who makes you sorry/ You decided to go,” she sings, fighting against the all-too-prevalent instinct to wallow in struggle.
Face the Feeling builds from the collaborative blueprint of Whiplash, Riccio teamed again with co-producers Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard. “I feel so lucky to have found Jesse and Isaiah, two of my closest friends who know me very well and share my excitement,” she says. And while those relationships remained constants, Riccio credits the album’s newfound strength to the interpersonal change that occurred since Whiplash. “I did a lot of growing,” she says. “It was an excavation of self and undoing of a lot of people-pleasing. Especially as a femme person, that is baked into my socialization from the day I was born, and this album represents remembering the core of who I am.”
The silvery “Love of the Song” works as a particularly powerful memento on that journey. Written as she relocated to Nashville, the track stares down the fear of fitting into a “cool kid crowd” and finding her own place. The moonlit twang of “Pilar, NM” gives Riccio space to explore extreme honesty and finding strength to do the things you love even when they’re difficult. “I’ve always been a pretty open book,” she explains. “But allowing myself to be challenged and learning the power of letting go was a big part of developing this album.”
The slow-burning “Doesn’t Matter” closes Face the Feeling with a blissful confidence and clarity. “Go give ‘em hell/ Go make ‘em mad/ Go give it everything that you have/ And don’t look back,” she avows, thunderous drums pounding each empowering word into place. The track originated from a songwriting lesson Riccio took with Margaret Glaspy, an experience which helped Riccio face her own imposter syndrome. “The song is a reminder that life doesn’t just happen in our heads and there’s room for all of us,” she says.
Album opener “A Little at a Time” feels like embracing the listener as they enter Riccio’s trademark blend of vulnerability and strength. The pain of distance rings out on the track over swaying guitar lines and a rich tapestry of harmonies, strings, and splashing cymbals. On the exquisite “Wildfire Season,” tracked the day after the second Trump election, Riccio’s rugged growl bounds against concussive snare and distorted guitar for a track fueled by rage and grief at the still-worsening climate crisis. “Leaders of our country and the ruling class are actively working to cover up the fact that a crisis is happening at all, despite the lived reality of haze-choked skies we have begun to experience nationally as records break and waters rise,” Riccio explains. The song proved a perfect call to action when Riccio performed at the Rally for Public Lands at the Colorado State Capitol, empowering attendees and those around the world to fight for environmental justice.
Through it all, the release at the end of Face the Feeling represents Riccio’s personal journey of growth—but also very clearly invites listeners along for the quest. “I wanted to task myself with facing the good, bad, and ugly feelings – and to create a place for others to do the same,” she explains. The resulting record acts as a call to arms, a celebration of self, even when the noise of the world threatens to drown you out.
