In the aftermath of World War I and the Easter Rising in his native Ireland, W.B. Yeats envisioned the end of Western civilization in his poem “The Second Coming.”
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” he wrote. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity. / Surely some revelation is at hand.”
Whether or not a rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem in the end, as Yeats suggested, the center has given way. In our modern era, dust grows on marble columns, tech is made to fail, truth is a trap, and all of your heroes have stumbled. Welcome to the sparkling ruins of All Set the Bone, the new album from singer-songwriter and Vermont expat Greg Freeman.
“Time to join the world you fucked up,” Freeman sings, kicking off the record’s opener, “Cahokia.” With a jerking, jagged indie-rock edge, the song serves as both a challenge to the culturally indolent and a primer for the flawed yet striving characters that populate the album. Things have indeed fallen apart all around Freeman, but wreckage isn’t ruination, and life goes on while a new world is born. The 13 tracks of All Set the Bone simultaneously document what’s disappeared and ruminate on what might take its place.
Freeman, 28, who’s now based in Chicago, wrote the record while roaming the country after leaving Burlington earlier this year. The Maryland native honed his craft in the Queen City beginning in 2017, starting a career that’s taken off since the release of his critically acclaimed 2025 album, Burnover. His sound is made up of equal parts ’90s indie rock — think Pavement and Silver Jews — and literate songwriting suffused with brainy themes.
Freeman’s ascent has been meteoric. After dropping his debut, I Looked Out, in 2022, he became part of a rising class of Burlington indie-rock breakouts that includes Robber Robber and Lily Seabird, all of whom have started racking up glowing reviews from the likes of Pitchfork and Stereogum.
Burnover, an album that feels like half indie-rock think piece and half campfire ghost story, catapulted Freeman to another level last year. The combination of his immediately identifiable voice — which sounds like someone speaking after hours of shouting, interspersed with quavering moments of falsetto — and the lyrical tendencies of Elvis Costello if he were coming down from a DMT trip made the album an instant classic in the modern indie world.
All Set the Bone isn’t just a slicker version of Burnover; it’s also the work of a more confident songwriter who has tasted critical success. There’s no tremulousness to these tunes: Freeman has arrived and isn’t interested in introducing himself any longer.
The new album has a sonic focus that Burnover lacked. The latter’s charming and disheveled twang prompted plenty of MJ Lenderman comparisons, but everything is a bit bigger on All Set the Bone, from the backing harmonies to the arena-rock textures that reveal themselves throughout the record. “Hail Mary” explodes into a tempestuous jam with pummeling drums, while the lockstep, guitar-heavy groove of “Indu” evokes shades of Neil Young’s work with Crazy Horse and Steve Albini-era Pixies.
The added sophistication of the production is a credit to the Paper Chase’s John Congleton. For all the feelings of isolation and distance the record evokes, it’s also an intimate listen: Congleton puts Freeman and his band in the room with you.
Freeman makes collapse sound strangely enticing.
Freeman makes collapse sound strangely enticing. On “Culture,” a doom-laden banger that goes from a kind of funeral march to a massive blowout jam, he searches for a way forward in a world where all the guideposts have fallen by the wayside. “Who do you look to when you’re all on your own? / When all your heroes lost their microphones?” he wonders.
Building in intensity, the song ends in a maelstrom of noise, complete with droning guitar feedback and cacophonous stacked horns, courtesy of Burlington musician Sam Atallah. Freeman howls above the gale: “No culture / And no more rock ’n’ roll.”
For all the sonic experimentation, Freeman’s lyricism is still the marquee draw. His balance of poetic imagery and stark, biting observations of reality creates glorious tension. The outwardly sunny vibes of “Costs,” with its raucous piano and dirty blues guitar solo, hide a story of regrets in a cutting capitalist critique.
“We’re so busy cutting costs / ’less it’s sending Christ crawling back to the cross,” he sings, “That by the time we noticed just how much we had lost / We was already on our own.”
All Set the Bone moves on from Burnover’s rustic tones and sense of haunted history to a more immediate yet endlessly philosophical conversation. This is an album obsessed with the present moment, as if Freeman were watching the collapse of Western civilization from the drivers’ seat of his soon-to-be-wrecked Toyota — a real-life episode he recounts on the aptly named “Totaled.”
Yet for all of its apocalyptic vibes, the record is somehow the furthest thing from a downer. Streaks of rebellion and a denial of the dark run through the songs like thin veins of silver in acanthite. On “Next to Nothing,” Freeman allows that maybe, just maybe, change isn’t analogous with death.
“It’s not the end of the world,” he sings on the tune, which opens on a funky, R&B-flavored drum beat before erupting into a big power-chord chorus. “But it sure as hell might be the end of yours.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Apocalypse Party: Greg Freeman’s new LP, All Set the Bone, is the perfect soundtrack for things falling apart”
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
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