There’s a reason the new Fiction Years II EP by Drunk Uncle doesn’t read like a basement diary or a long sigh under a streetlight. The Austin trio—Peyton, Will, and Jake—aren’t here to write heartbreak anthems. They’re carving out emo that sounds like movement, like sweating through your shirt in the Texas heat.
“We wanted this release to be fun and summer-y in texture,” Peyton says. “Emo music that sounds upbeat and happy.” That’s the entire point. Not irony. Not parody. Just the rare moment when emo can be bright without losing its sting.
It’s a pivot from their previous full-length, O, brittle weather!, a colder, weightier record.
Fiction Years II loops back to their first release—2019’s Fiction Years—only this time, they’ve sharpened the tools. “We’re back where we started—me, Jake and Will—but we’ve all become more confident musicians,” Peyton says. What started as a rough, DIY exercise in getting songs out into the world has evolved into something much tighter in execution, but still wild in spirit.
They’ve never taken the straight path. Peyton says he once hated emo. Something in Snowing’s “Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit” unlocked it for him after a few tries.
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He met Will at a Fourth of July party—Domino’s co-worker, bass player, future bandmate. Jake came from Craigslist, a veteran of the local scene (Boyd, Larry & The Bears), and started making the long drives up to Round Rock multiple times a week.
Their first EP was tracked on borrowed gear, recorded in Peyton’s house in a haze of caffeine, sweat, and instinct. Five years later, that manic beginning is the foundation for a release that’s just as chaotic—only now with purpose.
Fiction Years II is about twisting the conventions of emo—turning it loose, keeping it weird, leaning into rhythm and color. Lyrically, it avoids grandiosity, opting instead for half-jokes, warped metaphors, and flash-thoughts that could be thrown away or obsessed over. Lines like “If variety is the spice in life, then you can sweeten my tea” say just enough.
The first Fiction Years EP featured a photo of Jake’s dad catching air off a bike ramp. For Fiction Years II, it’s Will’s dad. Peyton’s dad is locked in for the third. “I think all three of our dads wanted to be rockstars at one point,” Peyton says. “We’re living their ‘fiction years.’” It’s a shared, sideways legacy. Earnest, but never sappy.
It’s an album built on joy and forward motion, and one that knowingly swerves away from heaviness for its own sake. The references to Cap’n Jazz, Algernon Cadwallader, and Marietta are clear, but there’s also DNA from more off-kilter acts like The Brave Little Abacus and Animal Collective.
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Drunk Uncle started in 2020, a historically bad time to start anything. Plenty of local bands didn’t make it through the pandemic. But in the post-quarantine haze, the Austin scene didn’t just survive—it rebuilt itself. Peyton credits Mat and Tiny Sounds Collective with helping make it happen. “The Austin scene has become something I didn’t think I’d ever see after quarantine,” he says.
Tiny Sounds isn’t just a label. It’s the connective tissue behind a sprawling network of DIY bands like Fine! I Guess., Sleep Schedule, McBryde, Rose Ceremony, Tamsen, and Rebecka, plus Nervous, Wake Up Spaceboy, French Film, Chronic Avoider, and Leche. The scene spans from twinkle to screamo to noise and back again. It’s active, weird, and full of energy.
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Even Oakwood is playing again. Mineral is poking around at a reunion. The future’s looking decent—if Elon Musk and Joe Rogan would get out of town. And if you happen to be visiting? Just message Tiny Sounds on Instagram. They’ll tell you where to go.
The EP, Track by Track
Each song pulls from different corners of the emo map but lands in the same terrain: heat-slicked, jangly, no room for gloom.
Dear Sergio
Dear Sergio came from me just messing around in between songs at practice. I was trying to play guitar like Victor Villarreal of Capn Jazz. I was trying to get that energetic, jangly feel out of just one chord when Jake started playing along. It sounded cool but not much like a song. Once Will put a melody over the chord with his bass we realized we might have something and the chorus came to us pretty quickly after that. I just started yelling “where do birds go?” in my best Tim Kinsella voice because I thought it was a goofy thing to say.
Anyway, Will always records our new songs so that he can remember what he was playing and for this video he saved it as “CJRO” for Capn Jazz Rip Off. When we referred to it next practice we called it c-j-r-o and then after saying it a couple of times quickly it just sounded like we were saying sergio so we just started calling it that. I didn’t have any lyrics up to this point other than the chorus, “where do birds go// when the wind don’t blow” but once I started contextualizing the song around a sergio character it became easy to create.
Dust (Eventually)
Dust was the first song we wrote for the EP and kind of became the guiding tone for the album. It draws a lot from Parrot Flies era Algernon Cadwallader (think, “If it kills me”). I think a lot of the energy of the song comes from our admiration for them.
Lyrically it also serves as a foundation for the ep’s tone. Lines like “if variety is the spice in life then you can sweeten my tea” are supposed to be goofy and fun– we didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously with this one. We also add a little anthem on the end which is something we do on the next song too.
Anglerfish
This is just a riff I really wanted to make into a song. I feel like it follows the classic twinkle emo structure of twinkly riff intro that that never comes back in the song. That was okay with me. Again, we didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously. I was really happy with the ending of this song and getting the call and response between will and I to work. Lyrically, I worked from the back to the front with this song. I only started writing the lyrics along with the last riff (“if you could see all of the things that I’m thinking before I think them and then create”).
I knew I wanted to say “Hey ______” for the start with the blank being some sort of animal. After creating this weird little riddle for the end of the song about predicting thoughts I thought an anglerfish could serve as a symbol for that riddle. And then of course I had to include some un-serious lyrics (“you know that I wouldn’t have kissed you, if I would have known that, you looked so unpleasant”).
Bad News vs. The Early Riser
Bad news is influenced heavily by our friends in the band Sleep Schedule and also Kerosene Heights who we had done a little run of shows with at the time after having done a split with them. It ends in a similar fashion to the final song on our first ep with a lot of noise and distortion and I think does a good job of leading into the final track which kind of breaks the main sonic and lyrical themes of the album.
Barcodes
Barcodes was pretty much all written in a day. I was listening a lot to the song Saw Daddy by Common Sage and I wanted to try and write a song that has the same kind of jerky vocal delivery. It was the day of one of the band’s rehearsals so I spent the whole day at work trying to iron the song out. Once Will and I got to practice, Jake told us he was going to be an hour or so late so I told Will I had been working on something.
We worked in a frenzy trying to get the song together before Jake showed up and once we had it we were like “dude we’ve got something to show you”. We spent the next two hours getting it pretty close to exactly how we wanted it and not practicing for whatever show we had that weekend. Jake had come up with that tom heavy, Jeramiah Green influenced beat on top of the fluctuating 5/4 6/4 time signature and we knew this had to be the “road trip” part of the song.
The last thing we did was add that false ending into the “breakdown” section and I knew there was someone in our scene who would be perfect for screaming on top of it. Carlos Cartagena, drummer of Rose Ceremony but also vocalist of facturn was the exact voice I had in my head when we wrote the part. He wrote the section and totally killed the performance. Really makes the song what it is and what it is is my favorite on the ep.
