Caveman - Otero War (2016)

Since Caveman first formed in 2010 they've claimed a spot for themselves at the center of the New York music scene, become in-demand DJs, toured the world (sharing stages with The War on Drugs, Jeff Tweedy, and Weezer), and received critical praise from the most prestigious media. Now the band (Matthew Iwanusa, lead guitarist James Carbonetti, bassist Jeff Berrall, keyboardist Sam Hopkins and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Prescott Clark) is aiming higher. Caveman have their sights set on bigger goals, so on their third time around they made their biggest-sounding, most ambitious album yet. Otero War was created over the course of three years, completely inverting the ramshackle methods used to make 2011's CoCo Beware and their 2013 self-titled LP. This time frontman Matthew Iwanusa has taken the wheel of the creative process, bringing to it a level of patience, precision, and quality that exceeds anything he's ever done before. Iwanusa wrote most of these songs in the back of tour vans with a laptop and a portable keyboard, then spent years rewriting, examining every part to make sure it was exactly right, and eventually abandoning an album's worth of insufficiently killer songs before hitting the studio with the band. To help achieve the grander sound they were after, they brought in ideal mixer, Michael Brauer (Coldplay, My Morning Jacket) to elevate the album even further.