Pittsburgh's Frame and Mantle release 2nd album, 'Well of Light'

Pittsburgh’s Frame and Mantle could be described as indie rock or post-emo, but a cursory listen on Spotify might give the impression that horns play a larger role.

“I think that’s what people gravitate toward mainly, if they’re a listener, which I love,” guitarist Brian Thompson said. “That’s awesome that that’s kind of catching people’s ear. But we don’t want to be the trumpet band necessarily.”

On Frame and Mantle’s new album “Well of Light,” there are horns — provided by singer/guitarist Connor Freer — on four songs, about the same as the band’s 2019 debut, “Lost Under Nighttime Sky.”

“People always light up whenever I pull it out at the concerts, like ‘oh!’” Freer said.

Freer’s self-described “balancing act,” with switches between guitar, horns and singing, will be on display as Frame and Mantle plays a record release show on July 3 at Bottlerocket Social Hall in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood, with Old Game, Fake Grave and Cokeworks opening the show.

The album, which just came out Friday, was recorded at Mr. Smalls Recording Studio (the old location on the North Side and the new location in Millvale).

“We did all the instrumentals at the old studio, and then we did vocals and trumpet at the new studio so you get to hear both studios on the recording,” Thompson said. “That’s kind of neat.”

Thompson and his brother Mark (drums) founded Frame and Mantle in 2014 in Bradford, with the band shifting to Erie before relocating to the Pittsburgh region. Freer joined in 2018, with bassist Brian Duncan stepping in about a year ago after the departure of Scott Gergelis, who plays on the new album.

In a Zoom call, Thompson and Freer discussed the album, its title, the latest single and more:

Were there any challenges in putting this album together or did it just come together naturally?

Freer: I would say for me, it’s always a challenge to feel like you’re done with the lyrics. It’s just the hardest part for me personally, but I think everything else was really smooth. We came up with the song shells/ideas and then worked them out and added to them.

Thompson: I felt like it went well overall. The writing sessions were more productive than I anticipated. Usually I feel like it takes us a lot of time to fully write a song, but a lot of these songs came together in that year chunk between June ‘23 and June of 2024, which is kind of nice because I tend to get a little bit nitpicky and like to try different ideas when I’m writing. This one I kind of just let things kind of come together naturally instead of overworking stuff.

How did you come up with “Well of Light” as the album title?

Thompson: I don’t know if I’ve really told anyone this. This is just a dumb sort of thing. I was going to a festival last year in Indianapolis, and I was meeting up with my friend from college. I booked a hotel room, and they let you choose the room in the hotel app and I saw next to some of the room choices, there was – because it was in this downtown Indianapolis hotel – and they called it a lightwell, which I guess is an architectural term for an opening in the middle of the building where light is allowed to come in. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of a neat term. And then I thought of well of light, kind of taking that word apart. And then I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. So that’s how I came up with that. (laughs)

Related

• Pittsburgh's The Cheats release new album 'Old Rats on a New Ship'
• Pittsburgh's The Gotobeds return after 6 years with new album 'Masterclass'
• 2025 Pittsburgh area concert calendar

Were there certain themes lyrically that you were looking to explore on this album?

Freer: Not that I came to it with the intention of doing. I feel like a lot of the time Brian writes the main melody or the guitar part or our drummer Mark has done that too, and I ask them what they were thinking or feeling when they wrote it so that I can maybe try to channel it. Sometimes it works out that it aligns. Sometimes it’s going in a different direction, but it’s very vibes based.

Thompson: I know that you have taken a few cues from video games and some of the songs…

Freer: The “Well of Light” term just made me think of “Dark Souls” immediately, the bonfires that you keep coming back to in the game, and the first flame that you’re trying to get to at the end of the game. That’s kind of like the dark, you have to push through difficult stuff.

Thompson: It’s a really hard game, it looks like. I’ve never played it, but it looks challenging.

Freer: Even when you get to the well of light at the end, it’s kind of depressing in a way. People who’ve played the game know what I mean.

Thompson: You have to really grind too, don’t you? You have to beat one enemy, you die, then you go back. You learn how to beat that enemy, and then you’re like, oh, I keep dying and then you just figure out how to keep progressing. That would kind of frustrate me, I feel like.

So you didn’t come in intentionally with a theme, but did anything appear to you after like, oh, I’m talking about this on a bunch of these songs?

Freer: I feel like several of the songs are about struggling through various different kind of things, but struggle is a common theme among them and trying to look for a hopeful side, if there is one, as part of the struggle.

Thompson: I think that’s just kind of a common sort of connecting tissue in all the songs, working through stuff, but at the same time, trying to remain hopeful even in those moments where you’re not. Uncertainty is a big theme, anxiety, just coming from a place of not having stuff fully figured out and just not being super sure how things are gonna turn out, but trying to remain hopeful, just about personal relationships or the world in general, just general feelings about those sorts of things.

The latest single is “Green Grove Zone,” so is there a story behind that song?

Freer: I’d been talking to a friend who was dealing with some personal issues and was using tree-based metaphors to describe their problems, and I kind of just followed that thread. It’s kind of about if you were a tree and you were planted somewhere, but it’s not the right place for you, you can’t grow the way that you feel like you want to or should be able to.

How would you look at the band’s evolution from the first album in 2019 to where you are now?

Thompson: From my perspective, since I’m doing a lot of the initial principal songwriting of the song structure and stuff, I definitely feel like this one, instead of on the first album, it was maybe thinking of how I would write back then, like clean part or clean part/dirty part, sort of thinking part by part, this one out I was more focused on holistically serving the song’s best interest and trying to find ways to leave space for the vocals and make sure that if a part wasn’t working, instead of trying to force it to work, maybe take the part out of the song and see how that sounds. I think before too, I had trouble editing myself. And now I feel like I’m much better at that and also taking my bandmates’ ideas and working them into the song too, instead of trying to make my initial idea work.

Freer: I’ll say a more simplistic analysis of it. I feel like we’ve gotten heavier, while definitely there’s still some quieter, prettier, shimmery-er parts in this new album. It was definitely more of a focus in the previous album than this one, and it’s definitely heavier, a little bit grittier.

Thompson: Yeah, I would agree with that. There’s a lot more riffs on this one, whereas on the “Lost Under Nighttime Sky,” that was definitely more like indie – I wouldn’t call it twinkly necessarily. We don’t do the tappy emo thing.

Freer: There’s a lot of different effects.

Thompson: Yeah, and this one’s more riffs, and I think that is just more embracing the stuff that I liked growing up, like ‘90s grunge and 2000s emo and stuff like that, and not being afraid to embrace that.