Eddy Undertow, as he is called, could be The Most Interesting Man In Music. We would assume that he’d bristle at the idea being, if not humble, then properly reserved, but the truth is in the story and, to a large extent, in the songs contained in Days Without Names, Sweet Undertow’s sophomore album set for release in Spring 2026.
Already dropped at the tail end of 2025 is the upbeat and insistent ramble of “Country Blues,” essentially a straightforward country-tinged song as the title suggests whose cheeky lyrics are actually a lament about having left the city. To wit, movement and restlessness are concepts that weave through the artist’s narrative aplenty. As a kid growing up in Chicago and its suburbs, the die was cast early with exposure to the city’s punk rock scene balanced with his dad’s vintage blues collection, creating a musical lexicon that entwines Muddy Waters with The Jesus Lizard, Howlin’ Wolf with Naked Raygun, and similar unlikely collisions- classic riffs played on a stolen guitar: You get the picture. That said, he couldn’t have left sooner.
After a spell as a wildland firefighter, Eddy wandered Asia and Europe guided only by urge and opportunity, a guitar his sole constant. He played to bemused patrons of off-piste Crimean bars and in an orphanage in now war-torn Ukraine; fronted a pro band in Ho Chi Minh City and partied through the slums of Mumbai; and was once paid in counterfeit shoes to perform a single song at a Carpathian Mountains disco. In 2016, he ended up in San Francisco, having been once before, as a child, for the funeral of his grandfather. It was there, during those lonely days, that Eddy birthed what would become Sweet Undertow, including the band’s evocative name.
Sweet Undertow’s Skeletone Machine, released in 2022 on Mother West, Eddy’s debut album under said moniker, eloquently chronicles those nomadic years and presents as a genre-blending, blues-based dive into the human condition through metaphor and memory.
The album is a cinematic document of a wide-eyed quest for something universal yet tantalizingly undefined, channeled through authentic, bluesy Americana. Recorded at the all-analog studio of producer John Vanderslice (Death Cab for Cutie, Deerhoof, Spoon etc.), it was wrapped up literally the day before the 2020 lockdown shuttered the world.
But while the pandemic dropped an obstacle in the road for many, Eddy just kept on writing. He recalls, “We started working on the songs that became Days Without Names during COVID, but they really began to form after I'd left San Francisco and moved up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. I moved up in December 2020, to the land of Donner Pass during the snowiest winter in 50 years. In San Francisco, for the first time in my life I'd set down roots- I had a community of artists and musicians who gave me a home. I knew my neighbors. In the Mission District, I finally found a place where I wasn't alone. And I left it.”
He continues, “As I entered into a dark and lonesome place, I felt obligated to explore it. I think that's what saved me- exploring the depression instead of giving into it and just wading out into Lake Tahoe one winter night, swimming until there was nothing left.”
As the songs for the new album started to take shape, Eddy realized that they were more acoustic. more rooted in tradition than the last (first) album.
He says, “Skeletone Machine was me fighting the world; Days Without Names is the world fighting back. Days Without Names is an older record; Skeletone Machine is younger. Skeletone Machine came from traveling the world. risking everything to try and touch something sacred- fighting every day because another way wouldn't even occur to me. Days Without Names is about learning that ultimately, everyone loses the fight.”
Listening through Days Without Names, top to bottom, “Step Lightly,” offers a sweet, rustic bounce under Eddy’s seductive rasp and picked acoustic guitar, (that’s Maxie Mandel on backing vocals) rounded out by Jim Semitekol’s electric guitar, Doug Pettibone on pedal steel, John Eckstrom on bass, and Dave Tavel on drums and percussion, his core band pulled from the Skeletone Machine sessions that remains fairly stationary throughout the new album sequence, with the exception of a few noteworthy incidentals. “Jessie Lee,” for example, is a classic barroom shuffle with commensurate (awesome) piano work courtesy of Jake Pinto, and this time, featuring Haley Spence Brown on additional vocals. “Little Great Depression” and the touching, “Lose A Fight,” spotlight gorgeous embellishments from the Mastersons’ Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle and violin, respectively.
“To me, Days Without Names documents an exploration of the question of suicide- both in my own life, but also for humanity writ large,” says Eddy. “There are songs that explore lives subject to forces that blow past a person's ability to cope,” for which he cites “Hit Me Like A Memory,” featuring Ed Maxwell on bass and the Eels’ Butch Norton on drums, and “Dropping Helicopters.” He continues, “There are songs that laugh at the maudlin, self-centeredness of depression; “‘Free Whiskey,’ ‘Little Great Depression,’ and ‘Country Blues.’ (aforementioned). There are songs that confront mortality (‘Lose a Fight’) and songs that examine how love can transcend mortality. Even if only for a while (‘Wicked Heart’).”
Eric Corne from Forty Below Records (Freedy Johnston, John Mayall, The Bacon Brothers) mixed half of the album with Mother West’s Charles Newman, mixing the other half.
Eddy addresses the raison d’etre for, well, doing any of this at all…
“The job of an artist is to make art- and the artist gets there by exploring questions. A big one, I think, is what's called the question of suicide- basically it's this: Why should a person keep on living? Gifted with consciousness, we've discovered that we live at a random point in a void that expands to infinity in all the directions you can list. There is no broader meaning to life when seen from the perspective of our local galactic cluster, or from the atomic level, or even in between- it's not someone's plan and there's no magic person in the sky who cares and is directing it all. So, in this void, what's the point? Who cares if humanity nukes the planet into oblivion or if an individual person lives or dies?
The answer that Days Without Names poses, in its roundabout way, is that in this meaningless void in which we float- it matters. It matters how you treat people. It matters to be kind. It matters that you try and love. Each layer from the unfathomably vast to the unfathomably tiny is real and matters to itself. People exist; joy and despair are real; you have the power to increase or decrease these in others and yourself. It matters to try and live, to be kind, to temper suffering and to love.”
When asked what feeling he’d like the listener to be left with after the stylus comes up, Eddy simply says, “That there is hope, even for people.”
For any press inquiries, please contact Perry Serpa at Vicious Kid Public Relations; perry@viciouskidpr.com; 917 660-4137