One could say I’ve been practicing listening to Free Range for quite some time.… So much so that the release of their sophomore album Lost & Found this year may have topped the list of my most anticipated albums of 2025. I’ll always be biased towards Chicago artists, but there is something I get from Free Range that I don’t get from any other band, and simply put, that’s front-person Sofia Jensen. Even though I’m always on the hunt for what’s new, unique, and genre-bending, I find the most refuge underneath the sonic weighted blanket of artists like Free Range who give me a sound that is so pure, untouched, and vulnerable yet so oddly familiar that it makes you comfortable enough to sit, stay, and listen with intent. Sure, you could say Free Range sounds like a combination of other indie folk bands like Hovvdy, Sadurn, Babehoven, Merce Lemon, and Lomelda, or that Sofia Jensen’s voice echoes that of Phoebe Bridgers, Elliott Smith, and Connor Oberst. Still, it’s not as black and white as all that. Free Range, to me, hangs in the grayish in-between, providing a sound that is familiarly soothing but daringly challenging in a way that keeps each song and album fresh in a scene with no shortage of great bands.
I first discovered Free Range after hearing that they were opening up for the Texas-based indie folk group Hovvdy doing an intimate acoustic show at Lincoln Hall. It was my first time seeing Hovvdy after listening to them for years, and I was so incredibly excited to see them in such a raw, vulnerable setting. When I went to check out Free Range, however, I became more excited to see them perform than Hovvdy. Practice, Free Range’s debut album, immediately became a bible to me. I still believe that it is a perfect album with absolutely no filler, lulls, skips, or fat to trim; it’s a perfect folk rock record that found its way to me right when I needed it the most. Sofia Jensen has one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard draped over an acoustic guitar. The way they sound, the lyrics they write, and the melodies they create are so unique to me and scratch such an internal itch that I thought other artists were scratching fairly well for the longest time. But I was wrong; I was just struggling on my road to find Free Range without knowing I was struggling on my road to find Free Range. With help from Friko’s Bailey Minzenberger, Red P.K.’s Andy Krull, drummer Jack Henry, and sibling producing duo Tommy and Hannah Read (Lomelda!), Sofia has done what I thought would always be impossible: They made a better album. I know, I know, I didn't even believe myself at first, but it’s very much true. It took me several listens to get there as Lost & Found is a much harder album to crack than Practice, but my, oh my, is it a far more rewarding listening experience the more time you spend with it.
I didn’t immediately love this album, I’ll be honest. The first two or three times I listened to the album all the way through, I couldn’t really pinpoint any songs that I loved, even with the few that stood out to me early (”Chase”, “Big Star”, “Hardly”, “Storm”), but that’s all they did. I went in expecting to hear songs that would quickly triumph over my favorites off Practice like “Growing Away” and “Running Out”, but I just wasn’t finding them.
However, I definitely wasn’t disappointed in those early stages of listening to Lost & Found. I could clearly tell this album was more focused, mature, sonically diverse, and had a much more professional sound than Practice (which is not a jab at Practice, that record has exactly the sound it is supposed to have). Lost & Found is one of the most stunningly produced albums I’ve heard in a minute, and I’d expect no less from Tommy and Hannah Read, but they really did outdo themselves on this one. Even though this album continues the main narrative and themes found on Practice like growing up, becoming the adult the world expects you to be, and striving to foster real, honest emotional connections with those around you, this album takes those themes and filters them through a lens of someone who is a few years older, more experienced, and much wiser. I don’t know what Sofia has seen in the last several years but suffice it to say they’ve probably seen and been through a lot and their simple yet earnest lyrics on Lost & Found reflect those of an artist who is learning more and more how to walk a mile in their own shoes.
There’s also a greater emphasis on a full-band sound on this record than anything we’ve heard from Free Range before. Yes, Practice has piano, pedal steel, and drums, but all of it always felt like such background window-dressing to me all trying to prop up Sofia’s voice as the only true focal point of the record. With Lost & Found, Sofia is putting less of an emphasis on their guitar, their voice, and their overall presence and working more closely with their fellow rangers to craft a record that plays to the strengths of every person in the band; there’s an analogy somewhere in there about growing up and striving to create meaningful connections but you’ll have to find that yourself as I do not have the time.
Anyway, it all finally clicked for me after several play-throughs, and boy, did it hit hard. The early favorites I’d been carrying around with me since the first listen developed into stone-cold Free Range classics, and all the other songs surrounding them started speaking up for themselves much more loudly, too. There’s no doubt in my mind that “Chase”, “Big Star”, and lead single “Hardly” are the best songs they’ve ever written while "Storm" takes this newly emphasized “full-band” sound to brave new heights with the most upbeat and bombastically twangy song they’ve written to date. Songs like the title track “Lost & Found” and “Conditions” show off new experimentation in background vocal layering as well as the former bringing Sofia’s beautifully melodic piano skills to the foreground where they belong. In addition to piano being more upfront on this album, we finally get some blazing helpings of harmonica on the effortlessly gleaming “Big Star” and the laid-back and earnest simplicity of “Clean” (the former having the best chorus in a Free Range song yet).
On Practice, even though most songs had a diverse set of instrumentation, I always felt like the only two parts of each song I was supposed to be hearing was the guitar and vocals. On Lost & Found, the drums are much more involved and critical to the foundation of almost every song, and electric guitars buzz in and out of songs like “Hardly” and “Concept”. Local legend Macie Stewart’s violin strings ring out over tracks like the opening “Tilt” and the title track, providing extra layers of warmth and happiness while “Storm” breaks the Guinness Book of World Records for most pedal steel in a Free Range song. All of this musical growth and experimentation leads the way to a more colorful musical palette where songs linger in your head longer, to the point where the only way to get rid of them and to not go crazy is to play them even more.
As far as influences go, it’s not hard to imagine Elliott Smith having a very deep impact on the sound of this record overall. Sure, Elliott never really had much of a twang or overabundance of Americana influence in his work (that’s where artists like Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, and John Prine shine their way into Sofia Jensen’s songwriting) that is so central to Free Range but what Elliott did have and what he passed on to Sofia Jensen is the ability to paint a musical picture with such powerful and emotive brush strokes that listeners are left humbled and speechless to Sofia’s words and melodies. You can hear Elliott Smith’s influence all over songs like “Chase” and the Either/Or sounding “Concept” with drums and guitar melodies that take you right back to 1997.
There are still a handful of songs I haven’t talked much about, if at all. “Service Light” brings back whispers of Phoebe Bridger’s most stoic and confident songs off of Stranger in the Alps. Sofia’s controlled yet powerful voice whispers of the challenge of opening yourself up and letting someone else into your life. What I appreciate about lyrics like “I wanna show you how / but I just can’t see / why I’m trying / to make me feel alone” is how Sofia is able to paint such a familiar and unpretentious picture with so few words; there are so few metaphors on this record, and Sofia is all the more powerful for it. Speaking of lyrics, “Faith” has probably my favorite lyric on the record: “There’s nothing worse than running from a mirror”. The first time I heard it, it was like an epiphany of sorts, thinking about how simple yet effective such a metaphor is and how poetic it sounds in lyrical form. The one-two punch of “Faith” and “Clean” is, in my eyes, the most endearing and oddly romantic part of the album. The lyrics themselves are not exactly romantic per se, but the instrumentation in each song is so soft, supple, and warm that it just invokes those feelings in me; it doesn’t help much that Sofia’s voice sounds so much like a depressed angel who’s spent a little too much time on Earth after misplacing their Heaven passport that it’s almost impossible not to find these songs oddly endearing.
The album ends on yet another high note with the modest “Ringing” and the spectacular instrumental “Tilt (Reprise)”. The way “Ringing” starts is almost comparable to a lost dog limping to find shelter in a storm. There’s a timid fear in Sofia’s voice not only at the start of the song but throughout as they come face-to-face with the realization that their fears and troubles on growing up and opening up to those close all come from within. In this way, “Ringing” brings the album full circle with its central theme, closing it all off with perhaps the most modest and stripped-down song on the record. If “Tilt” is the deep inhale the doctor asks you to take before finishing up their evaluation of you, “Ringing” / “Tilt (Reprise)” is the accompanying exhale that wraps up your check-up and books the next visit. “Ringing” is less of a “see ya later” and more of a “’til next time” type of song, and I’m already impatiently waiting for album number three. One final note to make here: “Tilt (Reprise)” is not a song to be written off just because it’s an instrumental reprisal of the album’s opening track. I’ve heard a lot of reprise closing tracks in my time, and this one is, without a doubt, the best. Not only do we get some beautiful slide guitar action, the return of Macie Stewart’s cathartic violin, and Jack Henry’s merciful percussive rhythms, but we get some righteous communal vocal melodies in unison with the piano that make you feel so empowered and loved that maybe everything is going to turn out all right.
I love albums that challenge me—albums that I expect to love immediately but force me to spend more time with them to get the full, ever-evolving picture. I could have just grabbed the few immediate favorites I had and just written off the rest of the album as a loss, but that would have been so foolish and selfish of me. Lost & Found is such a musical and emotional achievement for front-person Sofia Jensen and their compadres in Free Range that people are finally going to start taking notice of perhaps the best kept secret in all of Chicago indie music, mark my words. After all, you can’t keep songs like “Big Star” and “Chase” a secret for long; the world will soon know the name Free Range or else risk total destruction. Okay, it’s not that dire, but please, go out and find your lost self in between the lines of Free Range’s exquisite sophomore release. You’ll be glad you took the time to sit back and relish in the beautiful simplicity that is Lost & Found.