Eric Harm "All The Wrong Moves"
$32.00
Eric Harm "All The Wrong Moves"
$32.00
"Get to the show early to catch the opening band" is a motto we often try to follow, though we don't always make it on time. Sometimes, though, you can see a new band, and that performance will forever be ingrained in your memory. That's what happened back in 2022, when we attended an already stacked show at The Broadway and caught the first set from Eric Harm & The $100. Immediately catchy songs that ignited an entire crowd into a dance party and left a lasting first impression on us.
So it is a serendipitous full circle moment that we can now announce our next record is Eric Harm's debut LP "All the Wrong Moves". Pressed on 2 limited edition vinyl colorways, you can pre-order the Carnation Magenta version exclusively from Freeman Street Records as well as get it on Bongwater Ice Blue from Eric Harm directly through his Bandcamp. "When You Move Back In" the first single, is out now, providing a sample of the captivating lyrics and melodies to come when his album is released in November. Take a listen below:
Eric Harm thought he was done with the game, but the game wasn’t done with him. A decade ago, he left his role as drummer in the long-running rock outfit Titus Andronicus for a corporate job. Yet even while posted up at a desk each day, the music didn’t stop. Harm was singing into his phone constantly, trying to corral the melodies that appeared in his head. Fast-forward from 2015 to 2025, and Harm was back behind the kit in Titus, and putting the finishing touches on his solo debut, All The Wrong Moves.
“I didn’t expect to put a record out,” Harm admits. “But it was something I had to do, and all that matters to me is that I did it.”
Though the New York City songwriter picked up tours with other groups here and there, he really cut his teeth during Titus Andronicus’ ascension, providing the backbeat for the acclaimed run of 2007-2015, including their seminal 2010 release The Monitor and their sprawling 2015 rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy. As one might expect, Harm’s own work bears a similarly rollicking, raw rock ‘n’ roll energy, but filtered through different interests. During his hiatus from Titus and the slow drift of the pandemic, Harm finally began collecting his own writing in earnest, approximating a cross-section of Motown and Brill Building songwriting sensibility and the erudite, sardonic power-pop of the artists that defined Stiff Records in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The music on All The Wrong Moves is played with a sweaty urgency stopping just short of reckless abandon, bursting with hooks derived from Harm’s pop acumen. “I’m not trying to reinvent anything, but I want to do something interesting with a classic type of structure, songs that people want to sing along to,” Harm says. “That’s the kind of music I like.”
Upon a move to Ridgewood, Queens, Harm discovered he was neighbors with his old bandleader, Titus mastermind Patrick Stickles. The two began hanging out again, trading demos of their current work. Stickles soon suggested Harm come down to Titus’ inner sanctum, a rehearsal-space-meets-closet-meets-studio in Bushwick, to record his songs. Stickles served as producer, with fellow Titus member R.J. Gordon later providing engineering and mixing. “Patrick and I were glad to be back in each other’s lives,” Harm recalls now. “After I had brought my voice to some Titus records where I could, he in turn had the right instincts to help with All The Wrong Moves.” With the freedom to take his time, Harm carefully and patiently honed the album, making sure every melody, every bit of arrangement, sat just right while keeping the unruly electricity of the performances intact.
Inspired by his own array of foibles in navigating adulthood, Harm began to construct his songs around a character both larger-than-life and utterly recognizable: a lovable loser, the worst version of all of us, the kind of protagonist you root for despite the fact that he can’t seem to help but fuck everything up. Harm pulled on various film and television tropes, nodding to iconically obnoxious figures like the version Larry David plays of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, or Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Powers, or the male protagonists of early Wes Anderson movies. “The character on All The Wrong Moves is the petty tyrant of the most pathetic kingdom,” Harm wryly cracks. For Harm, this was a vehicle not only to dissect and reframe the most neanderthal elements in anybody’s personality, but also a meta-reflection on why we still hold out for the redemption of these figures in fiction and real life alike.
Harm found the phrase that summed it all up in an unexpected source: a chess book. The thesis of the book, and thus All The Wrong Moves, is not simply that a man can go through life dropping the ball at every turn, but also that a keen awareness of mistakes offers a specific advantage. That if you recognize the wrong move, you’re in a position to act, and to convert it into something else. Throughout All The Wrong Moves, our narrator reacts to romantic fallout with self-pitying lamentation, with getting high, with ever so slightly grazing up against enlightenment. The album asks a simple but eternal question along the way: Will he ever learn his lesson?
In the album’s early scenes, there isn’t much reason for hope: The garage rock rush of opener “Bongwater” features Harm fully inhabiting his anti-hero, barking a chorus of “I am what I am, in the same kinda trouble I was always in/ And damn it feels good/ I’m a fighter not a lover.” In the easygoing swagger of “Blood Stirred Up In Me,” our protagonist considers an affair, and then the ragged power-pop of “When You Move Back In” finds him making a non-apology to an ex, missing the larger point as he rattles off minor transgressions. Similarly, the narrator dances back and forth in other singles like “Bad Dreams” and “Little Light,” the former a reckoning with the results of quitting vices and the latter a swooning paean to the full-time stoner life when the more enduring sources of light in life flicker. In the end, “(Caught Myself) Picking My Nose Again” would certainly suggest All The Wrong Moves leaves its central character no better than where we found him.
Yet there is too much nuance and humanity in Harm’s writing for it to be that simple. Written in his thirties, All The Wrong Moves documents Harm poking fun at the recurring idiocy of one’s twenties. But far from dismissal, each raucous refrain, each singalong chorus, offers a glimpse of salvation. To Harm, all the punchlines and degeneracy still sketch a route to growth. All The Wrong Moves might end in an ellipsis rather than a neat and tidy evolution, but that ellipsis leads somewhere. “You can recognize when you need to grow, when you need to put in the work,” Harm concludes. “People definitely can change — I believe that’s true.”
This album would not exist without the following:
Patrick Stickles - Producer / Engineer
RJ Gordon - Engineer / Mixing Engineer
Matthew Barnhart - Mastering Engineer
Alex Friedman - Blueprint Engineer
Ryan Weisheit - Saxophone
Rob Menzer - Cover Photography
Tyler Clark - Design and Layout
Karla Moheno - Press Photography
Pressing Information
100 Units on Carnation Magenta Vinyl (Freeman Street Records Exclusive Color)
150 Units on Bongwater Ice Blue Vinyl (Eric Harm Exclusive Color)
First Single "When You Move Back In" Available Digitally and Vinyl Pre-Order Available 10/23/26
Second Single "Blood Stirred Up In Me" Available Digitally 10/30/26
