Loose Ends, Long Goodbyes is a pop-punk project by me, Mathias. It’s heavily influenced by the late ’90s and early-2000s pop-punk I grew up on, though you might hear the occasional indie or post-hardcore influence along the way.

The town I grew up in didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a stoplight. We had to drive an hour to the next town over just to practice in driver’s ed. The nearest music store was three hours away, and the closest venue where you could hear a band that wasn’t country was even farther. Finding punk music felt like discovering a secret. The moment you met someone else who was into it, there was an instant bond. You traded recommendations, burned CDs, and shared bands like they were hidden maps to another world.

Life since then has taken me a lot of places, and my tastes have widened with it, but my heart never left pop-punk. This project is my way of channeling what made that music feel so special in the first place: the energy, the honesty, and the sense that you’re not the only one feeling what you’re feeling.