When Raleigh’s Long Relief debuted with the EP No Growth in 2023, there was no mistaking where the band was from—and not just because they nailed that ragged, sunstruck Triangle rock sound.
“They put bars on the benches in Moore Square / The experts say it’s happening everywhere,” the first words blare out on “Moore Square.” The rest of the EP is more abstractly emo, but that first track, a clarion anti-“revitalization” anthem that names names, might say the most about its author.
Long Relief’s debut LP, Win Some, Lose Some, has about the same political-to-personal ratio—but when your life is the news, what’s the difference? Paul Blest, the band’s 36-year-old singer, songwriter, and guitarist, is a video producer for More Perfect Union, an advocacy journalism nonprofit that focuses on working-class issues. Before that, he was a political news reporter at places like VICE and the INDY.
“Working in journalism, you can’t say everything you’re feeling,” Blest conceded from his home in East Raleigh. Sneaking progressive news into indie rock wasn’t really his goal, “but when you spend so much time with something and aren’t able to articulate your feelings in a full way, it’s going to leak into other parts of your life.”
Blest grew up booking hardcore and emo shows in Delaware, where he sang in a folk-punk band. But music took a back seat to starting his journalism career, and he left off writing songs until 2019, four years after he moved to North Carolina.
Settled in the Raleigh punk scene, he played a show covering songs by the screamo band Thursday with Chris Carr, who would become Long Relief’s second guitarist. This was also around the time that Blest’s old friend Greg Hughes moved to Raleigh, just in time to fill the drummer’s seat and bring in bassist Jeremiah Sloop.
Recorded by Greg Elkins at Raleigh’s Pershing Hill Sound, Win Some, Lose Some is fuller and more deliberate than the EP. Blest worked with vocal coach Anne-Claire Cleaver to open his voice beyond punk’s straining yelps, crafting something more reflective of influences like the smarty-punk Canadian band The Weakerthans, with their agile vocal melodies, or the brainy bar rock of Drive-By Truckers.
Listening to Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen inspired him to rethink the musical scope, leading to several tracks with trumpet by Franny Starlight, saxophone by Joshua Duncan, and cello by Kaitlyn Grady. “They did an incredible job of making a bigger vision come to light,” Blest said.
The album opens with the gleaming, cresting riffs of “False Spring,” which Blest conceived in the style of popular hardcore band Fucked Up. “But listening to the chorus and thinking about where the saxophone could go, I thought of a Springsteen song,” Blest said, “and Josh just came in and knocked it out of the park.”
“Perfect Thing” is a self-contained love song about a relationship 12 years in, but elsewhere, politics stay in the picture. “Earnest, Scared, Stupid” was built around that catchy chant, a pun on the Jim Varney movie title. (“Eventually I went back and realized it was about Joe Biden,” Blest said.) The single “Ghost Protocol” is about going home and recognizing less and less, which means it’s about aging—but also, gentrification.
“Can We Count on You” is an outlaw-country outlier, like a Phil Ochs protest song by way of Billy Bragg. It flings back the shibboleth from DNC fundraising spam: “Wrote my congressman a letter / It took him a month to reply / From the automated system / That tells you to fuck off and die.” And “Bad Faith” inveighs against anonymous internet extremists, while “Traffic Circle” is a cry for all the journos trading W-2s for 1099s.
“I didn’t set out to make the most depressing record of all time,” Blest said, laughing. “But I can hear what I was feeling after Trump got elected the second time—the disillusionment with the old, the horror with the new. It’s something I’m still working through.”
Us too, which makes Win Some, Lose Some so cathartic.
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