Quarterbacks

While residing in New Paltz, New York, songwriter Dean Engle launched Quarterbacks as a sparse punk-pop outfit, delivering his rapid, devotional pop songs on guitar as a single friend supplied percussion limited to a snare drum. That early lineup proved fleeting, managing just a handful of basement gigs before disappearing. In 2012 Engle reassembled the project by adding Max Restaino and Tom Christie on the rhythm section, transforming the lean original format into a high-energy twee pop power trio driven at frantic punk speeds. His romantic, occasionally charmingly naive songs emerged in great volume, helped by their compact constructions that typically ran under two minutes. The group performed around the area for the following two years, generating additional material and issuing selections on assorted cassettes, among them the 2014 tape Quarterboy, which functioned mainly as rough sketches for a full studio debut. During a single 12-hour session in 2014 the band captured 19 tracks that formed their self-titled first album, clocking in at 22 minutes; Team Love Records issued the LP early the next year.