Your teenage years are for figuring out who you are and maybe for joining a band. Grady Allen and Dante Melucci — along with three other friends — formed the band Anxious in 2016, before they could even drive. Six years later, its first full-length album, Little Green House, smashed the hardcore scene.
Now in their 20s, Allen and Melucci say you can call their second album, Bambi, hardcore, melodic, punk… whatever you want. But make no mistake, it's ALL Anxious.
There is no time wasted on Bambi. Lead singer Allen's voice can soothe and unsettle like an angsty lullaby one moment, before Melucci's thrashing guitar breaks the relative quiet the very next. They open their new album with the track "Never Said" — a dark ode to the uncertainty of relationships after hitting it big. Allen says that's all part of the plan.
"I like it kind of starting with this sort of chaotic sentiment," he says. "And then, by the time it pulls around to the last song on the record, you know, the last song is kind of real gentle and sweet."
Guitarist Melucci says the intro song is meant to evoke the band's earliest days, but he also snuck in a little foreshadowing of where the guys end up.
"It's maybe one of the more, like, 'Anxious-y songs.' But my biggest inspiration at the time of us working on that was the first Panic! at the Disco record, which is, like, a really divisive record … in our kind of scene," Melucci says.
"A bunch of, like, the chords in that song, I realized while we were writing [it], are totally just taken from the first song on that record."
Melucci calls that "controversial," because Panic! at the Disco's 2005 record, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, was immediately popular, and over the years, that kind of polished emo became too mainstream.
Anxious isn't daring the hardcore scene to turn on them, but Allen says, "For me, in writing that song, I think it was just coming from a pretty raw frustration that I think I experienced in our little corner of music subculture."
Still, Allen says he wouldn't call their new album a departure from the genre that made them popular, either.
"This is just who Anxious is. And these are the songs that we write," he says.
After years of touring following their surprise success, Allen hit a wall. Too young for even a quarter-life crisis at the time, he nevertheless agonized about whether to go back to college and get a degree or to the studio to try and capture lightning striking twice.
"I wanted to have the space to have some experiences and just live some life outside of a[n] eight-passenger transit van," Allen says.
"It's been so cool living in this very unconventional punk corner of the world. But in a lot of ways, my life felt very homogenous — you know, everybody was in a band, or managing a band … and so to step back in a space where people might be pursuing, you know, what are considered, like, far more conventional things or careers ... I feel like that's given my life a lot of diversity that I didn't have, prior."
Now 24, Allen has realized that the benefit of growing up is being able to reflect. And upon further reflection, maybe naming your band Anxious might not send the message you want it to.
"I wish we had named the band Bambi. That would have been such a good band name. You know, the downside of naming a band when you're 15 is, uh, I don't know. They're not always winners," Allen says.
So who is Anxious now? Well the first single off Bambi might give you a clue.
"Counting Sheep" combines the band's hardcore roots and its melodic curiosity into one song. Pepper in some guitar riffs that sound straight from the '90s and you get what Anxious has become.
"When we had the general sense of all the songs, I think that was the most 'Bambi' one we had. I think we just wanted to be pretty shameless on that song," says Melucci.
Melucci adds that there was a conscious effort to squeeze as much into those four minutes as possible. Everything that inspired them, what they learned on the road and what they looked forward to. But it feels rich, not overstuffed. It's the perfect single because it mirrors their own young lives — so much experience in so little time.
"I hope Bambi affords us the ability to keep doing what we love," says Allen.
Melucci adds that he hopes the album "helps see us for who we are. So I'm excited, because it feels like we're the most authentic we've been."
Copyright 2025 NPR
