Renny Conti finds clarity in the chaos on ‘Split Second’
Words by Matt Keenan
Photo Credit: Gabe Long
Some albums are written after a mess, or maybe to process some hard emotional year. Renny Conti’s Split Second is written in the middle of the mess, and it’s better for it.
Released on Friday via Mom+Pop, the record follows a stretch when everything seemed to happen all at once for Conti: a major breakup, the loss of a family member, and a hasty exit from his New York apartment that left him couch-surfing and subletting his way through 2024. When life finally started to settle in 2025, the songs came pouring out. The result is an evocative, heartfelt, conversational record about the highest possible highs and the lowest possible lows a person can go through, and how quickly the ground can shift beneath you.
It also feels like a debut, even though this isn’t quite one. Conti’s self-titled album, recorded in 2023 and released this year, gathered older material and earned him buzz across the indie world. Split Second is the first time he’s made music knowing people would be listening, and it shows in the best possible way. The songs are so much more considered, and the sound was shaped with co-producer Adrian Olsen in Los Angeles. Acoustic guitars and plainspoken vocals sit themselves comfortably in a humid, layered atmosphere, sometimes lifted by strings and other times swallowed by waves of distortion that nod to his metal and punk roots.
The title track really paints a great picture for you, opening the album by throwing out conventional strong structure, starting restrained and acoustic before a plaintive string arrangement and a quietly blooming guitar solo take over. It’s about feeling stuck for a long time, finding a way through, and realizing the change has already happened. That idea floats through the whole record like Peter Griffin floating towards the smell of a pie, and the record continues playing like a bleary, weathered kaleidoscope of memories.
Conti doesn’t do cathartic trauma-dumping either like you might expect on a record of this type, he’s intimate and dreamy, and he’s as interested in the small beautiful moments that relight a life as in the losses themselves. “Mona Lisa” is a dusty, lived-in, acoustic amble flecked with electric guitars that somehow, even if you can’t put your tongue on it, feel like autumn, and it’s a love song about getting back together with his girlfriend. It’s flipside is “Impossible Truth,” a thrumming road song where urgent drums and angsty ‘00s mall-rock melodies drive a narrator into relationship-rupturing arguments. “Leaving the Zoo” starts as a song about leaving New York and turns into something more haunting, imagining the edge of life and death as murky verses and volcanic guitar breaks build until strings and distortion swallow his vocals.
At the heart of it all though is Renny Conti’s brother. Conti’s older brother was his first musical partner and biggest influence, and after he passed away following a struggle with addiction, these became the first songs Renny wrote. Many of them look at the difference between losing someone to death and losing them while they’re still alive. “Water’s Edge” channels the surreal darkness of grief through psychedelic heaviness, while “San Francisco, 2005” moves through different years and places over a hazy tangle of acoustic and electric guitars and a vocal hook that sticks, as if his mind is pushing through the noise to make sense of the aftermath. As Renny puts it, it was “almost a passing of the torch,” and carrying on with the thing they once shared is what gives him strength.
Much of Split Second also goes back home, tracing lives lived across California and New York and painting a picture of how a person comes to be. Renny treats it all matter-of-factly: things happen, and we carry them with us wherever we may end up geographically. By the closing track, “Longing,” he isn’t offering a neat resolution. It’s the mess of life, and you can take from it what you will.
Split Second asks a question we’ve all wondered at some point: how did we end up here? Conti doesn’t claim to have the answer, but by the end of the record he’s a little closer to understanding who he was, who he is, and why those aren’t the same person. It’s a quiet, beautiful record that has a way of staying with you like the memory of someone you used to love.
You can listen to Split Second below:
