The most important thing you learn on tour is to never leave a pillow behind. (No one’s going to mail you a pillow.) With several years of tours, cross-country moves, and countless lost pillows in the rearview mirror, Tyler Bussey is “starting over again.” Though he has long been a mainstay of the independent music community, he's generally preferred to play a supportive role—bouncing from one project to another, hosting shows in his basement, hiding away in his room to quietly work on his own songs—until now, under the moniker Thank You Thank You.

Deliberate in its subtlety, Thank You Thank You inhabits a world that is at once gentle and compelling, and yet acutely aware of its own impermanence. On their debut EP, NEXT TO NOTHING, each moment pulls away strands from a larger feeling and holds them up to the light. The songs feel less like they’re trying to make anything of themselves and more like they’re rendering a feeling, like there was nothing to it.

With every note and word parceled out, Thank You Thank You invites you into an emotional headspace where epiphanies are untangled in real time, and connections are threaded between the present and past. Like an idea caught and captured in a 4-AM voice memo, the songs delve deep into the core of a feeling—placing the listener within the heart of it. 

While living in Connecticut in 2009, Bussey was one of the founding members of The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, returning to the band for Harmlessness (which VICE called ‘the best indie rock record of 2015, period’) and Always Foreign in 2017 before leaving for good a year later. In the years following, Bussey also toured with Emperor X, played with Portland, Oregon’s Snow Roller, and contributed multiple instruments to Bad Heaven LTD's Strength (“a strikingly vivid and detailed sound that evokes a real sense of wonder” - Various Small Flames). He’s been a member of Strange Ranger since late 2018, touring with them behind 2019's Remembering the Rockets. All the while, Bussey has been hosting shows in his South Philly basement and writing the songs that make up NEXT TO NOTHING.

There is a certain loneliness present in the songs that is mirrored in the need for collaborators. The way notes sustain—tugging and holding before ultimately letting go—long for and invite the answering calls of complementary instrumentation. Gentle humming and amplifier buzz never quite leave room for complete solitude around Bussey’s voice as it carefully traipses around clever melodies, winding its way between moments of pure bliss in the brilliant arrangements. 

The EP was primarily tracked throughout 2019, when the principal musicians involved had time away from their main projects. "Everyone who played on this is in other amazing bands, doing other amazing things," Bussey says. "It's wild it came together at all, considering how busy we all were making other records and playing shows and practicing and writing." Contributors include Spirit of the Beehive’s Corey Wichlin, Another Michael’s Jacob Crofoot, Nick Sebastiano and Alenni Davis, Rozwell Kid’s Sean Hallock, Stephen Steinbrink, Sam Amidon, and members of Hour, among others. The record was finished in quarantine, with final tracking, mixing and mastering occurring remotely.

"This batch of songs was a real pleasure to have been a part of,” says Sean Hallock. “As a drummer, it's rare I get as much input on the songs as Tyler made available to us all. The project was truly collaborative, and I can hear each of the band members when I listen. The DIY nature of these recordings, I think, is really rad. I’m proud we made the sounds we did — with what we had, each other, and our collective experience; and that we did so in a dusty old basement." 

Though the diverse cast of contributors certainly plays a role in the shape of the record, primarily it's Bussey's songwriting and production instincts that make each track musically distinct. The songwriter pulls from a wide range of inspirations across these five songs, from Randy Newman and Arthur Russell to Yo La Tengo and Nick Drake. "I really can't do just one kind of thing," he says. "I'll get obsessed with certain musicians for, like, a week, or a month or half a year, but then I'll do the same thing with someone completely unrelated. Good music is good music, regardless of style or instrumentation or when it came out or whether it's cool right now. Usually, the less anyone I know likes it, the more I'm into it, because it feels wrong," he laughs.

"Most of the time, my favorite music hasn’t been what my friends are into," Bussey says. "Ending up in an emo band or an indie rock band or whatever always had less to do with what I was listening to or writing than circumstances or who my friends were, who needed a guitarist, that sort of thing. I always liked the music we were making, but it was always easier and more fun to jump into things than to try to start something of my own." 

Despite the playfully varied musical approach and shifting instrumentation, Bussey’s lyrical perspective establishes a throughline. “These are songs that could only exist when you’re surveying your 20’s in hindsight,” Bussey says, adding, "I think a sense of dislocation and pervasive financial precarity runs through everything I write now.”

Stark opener "O" describes the feeling well: the anxious resignation that comes with filling yet another rented room with second-hand furniture, in another new town, not really sure where you stand in your relationships or in your life. Even at its brief minute-and-a-half runtime, the song packs an emotional wallop, a fully-realized vignette.

Closing track "Autonomy" is a cinematic, all-hands-on-deck meditation on the questions posed by its title: are we the masters of our own destiny, or are we at the mercy of forces far beyond our control? Do we have a fighting chance, or are the cards stacked against us? "It's always both," Bussey says. "I wrote this song after being stuck in a van during a natural disaster with a bunch of people I absolutely did not want to die with; moments like that tend to make you reassess and change up your whole program. Hoping for the best isn't a substitute for discernment."

Even with its short runtime, on NEXT TO NOTHING, Thank You Thank You pulls off a difficult feat: the musicians put forth a cohesive, thoughtful, and expansive collection of songs that leaves the listener wanting more. Significantly, the record is a true document of a time and place, with the congenial air of an open-door policy and the result being far greater than the sum of its parts. “I really do believe in community and lifting other people up, not as, like, a concept, but as a practice,” Bussey says. “It comes just from loving music and wanting to make music with musicians you love. It’s as simple as that.” With this debut EP, Thank You Thank You proves itself as an imaginative, and unpredictable, project to watch.

NEXT TO NOTHING is out on limited edition cassette via Oof Records on Jan 8, 2021. 10% of sales will go to Amistad Law Project.