Greg Freeman's third album All Set the Bone is what happens when a songwriter who earned his reputation on compression decides to open every valve at once. His 2024 breakout Burnover was a set of taut story-songs — witty, delirious, devastating, and disciplined. This follow-up doubles the runtime and loosens the grip, and the trade-off is exactly as double-edged as that sounds. The Maryland-born singer-songwriter wrote All Set the Bone while travelling through the US and reckoning with, in his own words, 'a lot of change in my personal sense of … everything.' That searching quality isn't just a press-release detail — you can hear it structurally. Where Burnover moved with purpose, All Set the Bone wanders, and sometimes the wandering is the point and sometimes it's just wandering. At its best, the record is genuinely uncomfortable in the right way. Marooned builds queasy unease from frantic guitar stabs and drums that feel slightly wrong in their timing. Opener Cahokia starts as a great American road song and then deliberately collapses into proggy bedlam — not as a failure of control but as a statement about what road songs are supposed to promise and don't deliver. Freeman's voice, which sounds like it's perpetually straining at its upper limit, is well-suited to songs about anxiety. 'Who do you look to when you're all on your own? When all your heroes lost their microphones?' is Culture's central couplet, and it lands. The problem with a double album is that you need about twice the quality control, and Freeman isn't quite there yet. The songwriting is more imagistic and diffuse than on Burnover — deliberately so — but diffuse imagery on a double album risks blurring into shapelessness before the second disc. The literary streak that made Burnover crackle is still present, but it's working harder to surface through the additional runtime. What saves the record is that Freeman still has real formal instincts. He knows how to weld a literary sensibility to riff-heavy music that could live on mainstream rock radio — that's a specific skill and it's not gone. The question is whether the scale of All Set the Bone shows a songwriter genuinely growing into new territory or one who's spread his tools across a canvas slightly too large. Probably both, and the tension between those readings is what makes this worth your time even when it tests your patience.
