The cover of “Maybe Luck” is a photograph set in a curved cherry frame, edged with a band of subdued red. For most of her life, Jamie Weed thought of it as a thing that hung in her grandfather’s backhouse in Denton, Texas, beside the checkerboard tiles, the bright red furniture, and the Elvis memorabilia he loved. She took it home in 2020, after he died, on her first trip back up from Austin. Months after the band locked the image in as their album cover, drummer Alex Peterson worked out what the photo actually was: a lookout post at a national park in Thailand.
Her grandfather, who she calls papa, was born into a large rural Texas family. The youngest child of an absent father and an illiterate, deeply religious mother, he eventually moved to Denton and opened a laundromat with his brother. He loved country music. When Jamie picked up the guitar as a kid, she taught herself to fingerpick well enough to fake her way through Chet Atkins arrangements just to make him smile. Later, when she was in indie bands, she’d run rehearsals in his small backhouse, the one he’d built himself, sitting in their vast backyard. As much as she loved him, he was the one person in her family who held back her decision to transition.
“I needed to start hormones so badly but he was having health problem after health problem and I felt like I would be a burden and this change in our relationship would hurt our family and impact the way I am able to remember him,” she writes.
The picture has been on her wall since 2020. She’d sit working on mixes for “Maybe Luck” and find herself looking up at it. “It just started to feel like this album is in the same world as this picture,” she says. “In a way this piece is a way of memorializing my papa and honoring the beginning of my real life.”
“Maybe Luck,” proun‘s debut LP, is out June 26 on Good English Records.
Written and self-recorded across two years between practice rooms and homes in Austin, it’s a record about transitioning a few years deep, about what it feels like when life only really starts in your late twenties and the years before become context to make sense of. It’s also the first record Weed has made from a mostly positive place.
“I think making this record was the first time I ever wrote music from a mostly positive perspective, albeit there are tough subjects and many emotions packed into ‘Maybe Luck,'” she writes. “I just felt making this record pushed me out from this loop of almost exclusively writing through my depression and traumatic experiences. I also generally have never had a better life than I do now and that feels so bizarre to say but it is just reality.”
proun started as Jamie’s solo outfit during years of quiet bedroom recording. The 2023 EP “form” got it off the ground. Bassist Dante Zatto, also a DFW native, had spent his teenage years orbiting the same Denton scene as Weed without ever crossing paths with her. The two only properly met after both moved to Austin, bonding over a shared love of underground emo. The second EP, “podium,” followed in 2024, with Alex Peterson engineering it. Peterson joined on drums shortly after. The band have since played alongside Jay Som, Lomelda, Foxing, and Remember Sports.
Almost all of “Maybe Luck” was tracked at Spilled Milk/Cherrywood Center, an Austin practice and recording space that doubles as a church and a daycare. proun first worked there during the “podium” sessions, when Peterson was still just the engineer; those sessions stretched through the night in the practice room and the sanctuary next door. When a few tenants moved out later, the band moved in.
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“There are so many bands currently or have previously rehearsed here,” Weed writes. “It’s just a nice quiet space that feels so necessary as rent prices rise and no one can afford to have a house or a stable shared practice space. We recorded everything except vocals for ‘Maybe Luck’ at the space and through the recording process we grew closer as friends and collaborators. Almost every song was arranged here and hours and hours of practice followed. The place you create something really sets the tone for the entire project.”
The recording itself was unhurried and self-managed, drawn out across a full year of constant editing. Peterson had only returned to drums when he joined the band. “The last band I had played drums in was like 2016ish,” he writes, “so I wanted to be able to take my time with the drum recordings so I felt okay about them.” Because the sessions were on his own rig, he could go in alone or with Weed or Zatto and work things out at his own pace. Most songs blended programmed drums with live takes. Sometimes he’d write the part by programming first and playing to it; other times he’d learn the beat from Weed’s or Zatto’s demos and make it his own through jamming.
“Satellite” was the only song that needed extensive re-recording. The band had tracked it first, before they’d settled on their drum and bass mic choices. Peterson and Zatto went back and gave it another pass, which set a foundation for Weed’s guitars and vocals to play with.
Many of these songs began on Weed’s old nylon-string classical guitar, the one she went halfies on with her parents as a Christmas gift when she was eleven. She’s never traded it out for an electric or pedals when she writes. The instrument shows up on the recordings themselves on “Maybe Luck,” “Echo,” and “Satellite.” From that bare-bones starting point of voice and nylon strings, the band builds outward: telecaster twang catching against Zatto’s baroque basslines, Peterson’s angular drums sometimes layered with their programmed counterparts, arpeggiated guitar lines and stacked vocal harmonies threaded through the corners. There’s 90s math rock in the geometry of the arrangements, a 2000s indie sensibility in the melodic instincts, and a softer alternative-pop pull underneath. The Bandcamp tags read alternative, emo, folk, rock, gay, shoegaze. The record sits in the air between them.
For Zatto, the instruments themselves carried meaning. “My instruments and the gear that surrounds it (whether mine or not) hold reflections of my being in their appearance,” he writes. “For this record I really wanted to capture that in my bass sound as well, so no matter the space and how disconnected the process could be for me at times I held what I wanted to portray in my hands and beneath my feet. I think a part of this record for us is a sense of escapism in reflection of our lives, sort of the what ifs or messages to past selves but I don’t think you can imagine a life without being grounded in the reality of your own experience of it, and I wanted my bass parts, tones, and effects to express all of that.”
For most of the writing, Weed worked from a journal she bought right before proun’s first real tour, opening for alexalone. She’d kept journals before, but those were the diary kind, places to vent and loathe. This one stayed about music. It’s now almost out of pages.
“I will always remember this journal as a part of my life when my heart started to hurt less,” she writes, “and I think a lot of the essence of what ties the record together began in these pages.”
The title track came together on that tour, written between a Logan Square balcony in Chicago and the backseat of a minivan. The band had played her hometown of Denton a few nights earlier. “Maybe it’s luck of the draw to tell friends who you are,” Weed sings, the line that landed for her on tour, thinking about meeting and re-meeting people from the DIY scene she’d come up in. Other songs were further back at the time. “Miracles” was being performed unaccompanied. “Stumped” hadn’t found its words yet. “Satellite” had a less refined guitar part filled with feedback and bends.
“Coloring Pages,” released in May ahead of the album, came out of Weed’s experience of coming out to her mother. The song moves through childhood objects (coloring pages, toys) from the years before anyone has the language for gender, before anyone realizes who they are.
Peterson, asked what he wants out of the next record, has a short answer: “to record more songs live together.”
“Maybe Luck” is out June 26 on Good English Records. Digital and vinyl pre-orders are open through proun’s Bandcamp.
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