On Split Second, Renny Conti learns to live within loss

Writing from such a perspective is a complicated ordeal, as slipping into clichés and mawkish references to death are an all too typical approach to such an avidly entangled subject. For Renny Conti, however, grief appears in his songs as a way to slowly make sense of what is happening. He watches his life’s perception change the way a city evolves, its tall buildings built only to be torn down.

Following his self-titled debut in 2025 – and later signing to NYC-based indie label Mom+Pop – comes Split Second, a record inescapably shaped by two profoundly changing events: the death of his brother in 2024, and a painful romantic breakup. The first track opens on the strange clarity that follows a great loss, the eye-opening shock of realising how fragile everything is: “Now every day is crystal clear / I sit and watch the boats sway in the pier."

Split Second's ten songs move in a similar way to those boats throughout, swinging gently, led by acoustic guitars, piano and clarinet arrangements, with soft drums and quiet vocals. But Conti never plays down the pain of what he's lived through. On “Mona Lisa”, he describes the acrid end of his relationship, where the other person’s coldness isn’t acknowledged; it's the kind of thing you only remember as the first light slips through the window when you first wake up. “Oh, oh, it’s morning time again,” he sings at the song's end, over and over.

On “San Francisco, 2005,” he returns to memories of his brother and seems to conjure his ghost, who lingers in the energy of the phone lines that surround his childhood home. In "Leaving the Zoo", the song’s slow pace follows the clumsiness of Conti's day-to-day life in the aftermath of it all, with a vocal effect in the chorus that seems to emulate its confusion.

Throughout the record Conti’s voice is a whisper, in the same hushed tone as Phoebe Bridgers or Elliott Smith. The production, a collaboration between Conti and Adrian Olsen, follows strings and clarinet that drift through the songs, recalling the early work of Andy Shauf, while the ache of some of the lyrics echoes a Bright Eyes-era Conor Oberst. Other moments are familiar too; the repetition of the word “some” in “Some Smoke” evokes Big Thief’s “Not”, and “Desert Cold” has the rhythm of a Fountains of Wayne song.

The record closes on “Longing”, a song with an eerie string arrangement in which Conti appears to want to close this chapter of his life, accepting the decisions that led him to be where he is now before the song ends somewhat abruptly. As it seems that for the first time in his life Conti has been given the chance to become a full-time musician, hopefully his wanderings will continue to fuel his artistic endeavours.