Winnetka Bowling League

Winnetka Bowling League’s debut single “On The 5,” a love letter to the baked asphalt of a California freeway, perfectly encapsulated the melancholy of a past romance conducted under blistering sunshine. The track, released at the tail end of the summer, was an immediate hit at college radio where it spent three weeks in the top 5, was playlisted on Sirius XM’s’ AltNation; Not bad for the first release from a newly formed band of musical compadres named for their singer’s bowling league in the San Fernando Valley.

The fourth EP from Winnetka Bowling League, pulp presents a radiantly detailed collection of stories from the life of frontman Matthew Koma. With equal parts raw sensitivity and self-effacing humor, the award-winning artist/songwriter/producer explores everything from the sweetly cinematic (a teenage crush on an impossibly cool girl he met on the Martz Trailways bus) to the quietly heartbreaking (an attempt to save a friend from a destructive relationship) to the delightfully tragicomic (the time an ex left him to move to Wisconsin and work at Mars Cheese Castle). When met with Winnetka Bowling League’s prismatic form of indie-pop, the result is a batch of songs that invite both pure nostalgia and profound self-reflection.

Their 2022 EP pulp arrives as the most immersive and introspective body of work yet from Winnetka Bowling League, whose lineup also includes drummer Kris Mazzarisi (Koma’s brother) and keyboardist Sam Beresford. In laying the groundwork for the EP—which features a guest spot from multi-platinum-selling pop superstar Demi Lovato on fiimy—the L.A.-based Koma headed to New York and spent several months holed up in a studio in the dead of the pandemic winter, a deeply isolated experience that soon inspired him to re-examine certain moments from his past. Along with tapping into the limitless ingenuity he’s shown in his work with an eclectic range of artists—Bruce Springsteen, Britney Spears, Tiësto, to name a few—Koma deliberately returned to a more intimate approach to songwriting. “For years before starting this band almost everything I was doing was electronically driven, and it’s felt good to pick up a guitar again and write in a more direct way,” he points out.