Greg Freeman has shared Cahokia, the ferocious opening track from his forthcoming third album, All Set The Bone, due for release on 2nd October. Accompanied by a new video, Cahokia establishes the uneasy atmosphere that runs throughout the record, using the story of the ancient civilisation that once flourished around the Mississippi River as a lens through which Freeman examines the instability of contemporary life.
Greg Freeman
The song takes its title from Cahokia, the vast Indigenous settlement whose monumental mounds remain in what is now Illinois. Its rise and disappearance provide Freeman with a powerful metaphor for a modern society increasingly shaped by consumerism, environmental anxiety and the threat of authoritarianism.
Rather than treating those themes as distant political concerns, Freeman positions himself — and the listener — inside the cycle. Cahokia considers how societies can simultaneously make participants and victims of the forces that threaten to overwhelm them, setting the tone for an album preoccupied with history, mortality, personal upheaval and the feeling that time is running out.
All Set The Bone follows Freeman’s 2023 album Burnover and represents another significant shift in the songwriter’s life. During its creation, he left his long-time home in Burlington, relocated temporarily to an isolated part of the American Southwest and committed himself to music full-time, leaving behind work as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook.
That period of upheaval feeds directly into the album. Freeman describes All Set The Bone as a reflection of “a lot of change, and a lot of tension”, bringing together political and personal stories across its 70-minute runtime. Its characters include a voter struggling beneath credit card debt, religious figures trapped in their own emotional conflicts and people navigating relationships, grief and uncertainty.
Musically, the album embraces that same sense of instability. Freeman’s long-standing affection for the heavier, more abrasive sounds of Fugazi and Unwound informs its darker passages, while echoes of Big Star, The Drones and Mission of Burma emerge elsewhere. There are also traces of early Modest Mouse and Pavement, but All Set The Bone deliberately refuses to settle comfortably into any single lineage.
The result is a record built around friction and contrast, moving between guitar-driven rock, psych-rock excursions, intricate piano parts, brass flourishes and expansive rhythmic passages. Freeman has described uncertainty as a kind of creative currency, embracing the idea that each album should push him somewhere unfamiliar.
For Cahokia, that approach results in a track that feels both immediate and expansive. As the album’s opening statement, it establishes a world where personal and societal anxieties are inseparable, with Freeman using the distant past to illuminate an increasingly unsettled present.
The album was produced by John Congleton, with Freeman joined by long-time collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah alongside Joey Sullivan of Florry, Carney Hemler of The Rockin Worms, Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace.
All Set The Bone follows Freeman’s ongoing fascination with history and the passage of time, but places those concerns against a more personal backdrop. The album’s songs consider love, grief, bodies, ambition and the uneasy realisation that individuals and societies alike can become trapped by the trajectories they have created.
Following the release of All Set The Bone, Freeman will embark on an extensive run of North American dates, alongside European festival appearances ahead of the album campaign.
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