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Three years in the making, HOLSMAN's debut album Sally, is a love letter to Chicago punk and an unflinching concept album about two survivors of abusive childhoods navigating adult relationships with light at the end of the tunnel. Today the band shares the first single and video, "I'll Be a Dog in My Next Life," which Ryan wrote during a stretch where the future felt unmapped and the past still had its hand on his shoulder.

On "I'll Be a Dog in My Next Life," the video finds Holsman in a full nose-to-tail dog costume, musing on the idea that pets get a much easier go in life than people do. "The song came from the depths of the lowest point in my adult life," he explains. "My future felt completely uncertain, and I still felt weighed down by my past. I realized that even if I'd been born a dog, life wouldn't necessarily be about naps and belly rubs. It was therapeutic." The video, he adds, was inspired by the TV show Wilfred. "It's one of my favorites, and getting to be the pot-smoking alcoholic dog for an afternoon was more fun than recording the song itself."

Led by Ryan Holsman and with Dan Tinkler behind the board and on bass, Sally plays as a concept album following two twenty-somethings — both survivors of abusive childhoods — as they try to build an adult relationship out of materials neither of them was given. "The highs were really high, and the lows were really low," Holsman says. "To say things can get messy is an understatement." He's also pointed at how the genders get treated differently in stories like this one: men in these situations tend to get written out, and women get flattened into "manic pixie dream girl" types instead of people. Sally is Holsman's attempt to write both halves of that story honestly, and to hand something useful to anyone still in the middle of it.

Sonically, the album sits at the intersection of HOLSMAN's two biggest reference points: the bruised, big-chorus punk of The Menzingers and Against Me!, and the loose, hook-first songcraft of 1960s pop. "I wanted to write a love letter to my favorite bands who pretty much dominated my formative years. As a kid I listened to a lot of '60s rock too, and I think it's actually pretty apt to say combining those two influences gets you a record like this one," he says, adding that at the end of the day, this album is about unyielding hope. "Even though it's hard to get honest about these kinds of things, I wrote this record to assure other people who are in the thick of it that there's light at the end of the tunnel." It's also, unmistakably, a Chicago record, built inside, and in tribute to, the city's long-running punk lineage.