It's All You Cowboy (album release), Able Baker, Cause + Control
Billy Hintz
It's All You, Cowboy and a smorgasbord.
It's All You, Cowboy
I am Trash, the 2024 album by It’s All You, Cowboy, sounds like a lost ‘80s R&B-influenced pop album, all bouncy keyboard melodies and vocal harmonies. At least, until you start listening to the lyrics, detailing mundane life situations and societal ills in a self-deprecating blend of sincerity and snark. The singles released ahead of I Can’t Eat — out Feb. 13 via Appleton’s Crutch of Memory empire — promise more of the same goodness on this double album. It’s All You, Cowboy is helmed by Frankie Furillo of long-running Madison heavy experimentalists The Central, and while it may offer a different sonic approach there’s a conceptual through line to be found on listening. With Able Baker and Cause & Control (who just released the EP Coyote in January).
media release: $15adv / $20dos plus $3 fee
It's all You, Cowboy
There’s a world adjacent to extreme music ‘s sphere in which unconventionality, propulsionary force, and confrontational energy still linger long after the noise has dissipated. It’s a world where the chaos of the art form is traded in for accessible structure; for infectious melody. Where intensity isn’t defined by sheer volume or speed, but rather by lyrical snark and its application to hook-driven pop songs. It’s a small, precious, and often obscure world that lets few in.
It’s All You, Cowboy lives here, and its new album, ‘I Can’t Eat’ is a modern centerpiece for pop music composed by and for punks, outsiders and degenerates beaten down by social norm. It releases on the Crutch of Memory label February 13, 2026 on digital and double-cassette formats.
Madison, Wisconsin’s Frankie Furillo leads It’s All You, Cowboy: a concept that combines the bouncing key-driven pop/soul feeling of 80’s and 90’s R&B and (for lack of a better word) YACHT with emotive cynicism typically associated with power pop, punk, and the alternative music of the era of end-stage capitalism. On ‘I Can’t Eat’, Furillo references Michael McDonald’s solo albums and the neo-soul movement that followed in their wake. You can certainly hear this influence in the layered vocal harmonies and the rhythmic bopping.
On the album’s aesthetic he says, “At the time I just wasn’t eating a whole lot and drinking a lot of coffee. Besides that, I’ve always been the guy who needed a box at restaurants.” ‘I Can’t Eat’ is an artifact of mundanity; of prosaic qualms. It’s the gospel of self-depreciating absurdity, but even at its most sarcastic depths, there’s a vague feeling of sunshine through the blinds. One might call it euphoric darkness. This contrast is what keeps it real.
Furillo himself rose to the execution of ‘I Can’t Eat’ from his mastery of extreme music- having played in experimental grindcore band The Central for 15 years. Through this work, he’s moved the goalposts of the genre by including bursts of melody and sound design while squeezing it all together with mechanical precision. He applies the same formula to It’s All You, Cowboy, cultivating a danceable feeling of pop progression for the music of the basements and warehouses of DIY America.
A Product of Crutch of Memory Enterprises, 2026
Able Baker
scrappy and exuberant DIY rock band originating in Madison,
Cause + Control
Cool rock band from Madison
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