Back in 2021 we wrote about La Bonte, the recording project of Southern California‘s Garrett La Bonte, with the release Don’t Let This Define Me on Anxiety Blanket. A vehicle for a more reflective style of music for someone who has been rooted with the local punk scene, La Bonte offers “an unguarded and intimate tone while retaining a certain abstraction,” we wrote of the record. “Hurdling any danger of becoming sentimental and mawkish with sharp writing and implied meaning.” The result was intensely personal and shot through with melancholy, yet achieved “an empathetic tone only possible via vulnerability,” and with it found a mode of perseverance amid loss.
Out later this month, La Bonte’s new, EP Grist For The Mill,consists of b-sides from the same recording period. It represents both a continuation of the self-reflection started on Don’t Let This Define Me and part of the process of moving on. “As we move through life from one chapter to another, we find events and experiences that we’ve held onto but aren’t sure what to do with them,” La Bonte explains. “Some store them away to reflect at a later date, while others share these with others as an attempt to process the past and make sense of the present simultaneously. A chance to heal and create something new.”
Single ‘Angel’ has all the slow burning weight of its predecessors, flickering to reluctant life from acoustic strums before gradually unfurling its wings. “I thought at thirty years it’d all be clear / That I’d be free of this disease,” La Bonte sings, but the despair is leavened by the same empathy as before. An understanding of how, no matter what occurred in the past, there is meaning in the simple act of continuing onward. “Between here and now and what I thought defined me,” goes the final verse. “All that I see is that I made it through.”
