Role Model releases follow-up album "Chuck Timely & The Hourglass"

Role Model, the project of 29-year-old Tucker Pillsbury, released his third studio album, Chuck Timely & The Hourglass, on August 7 via Interscope. Pillsbury built the record around one rule: no synths and no programmed drums, chasing the feeling of 1980s synth pop and yacht rock without reaching for the obvious sounds. "I liked having a rule," he told NPR. "It's like, how do we get the danciness of these '80s synth pop records within our palette?"

The album follows a year dominated by "Sally, When the Wine Runs Out," a bonus track from the deluxe edition of 2024's Kansas Anymore that turned into his biggest hit after a live bit in which he shouted "Where's my Sally tonight?" and brought up guests, including Charli xcx, Natalie Portman and Bowen Yang, to chant the bridge with him. "I learned about what a bridge can be," Pillsbury said of the song, adding that he wanted to "go do much better versions" of what had worked on a pop-radio hit.

Pillsbury named the new album's central character, Chuck Timely, about halfway through writing it, describing him as a stand-in for nostalgia and the passing of time as friends around him got married or moved away; he built a vision board for the character featuring Paul Newman aviators, Repetto shoes and what Pillsbury called "kind of pathetic, drunk, but also charming male loneliness." Lead single "High Hopes 3000" carries a Georgia Satellites-style rowdiness that sets the album's tone.

Pillsbury has been candid that he does not take "Sally" too seriously as songwriting, laughing that its bridge "could have been written by a five-year-old" and singling out the line "cold like Minnesota, hotter than a fever" as "ridiculous," even as he said he still loves the song for what it is. Its parent album, 2024's Kansas Anymore, pivoted his sound into rock and folk textures while chronicling the end of his relationship with influencer Emma Chamberlain.

Pillsbury got his start in Pittsburgh film school before uploading lo-fi songs to Soundcloud, releasing his 2017 debut EP, Arizona in the Summer, from his bedroom. A message from the manager of rapper Mac Miller led to studio sessions with Miller himself, which Pillsbury called "a moment of God at the perfect time," and eventually a deal with Interscope in 2018.

Producers Mason Stoops and Taylor Mackall helped him dodge easy genre choices on the album, swapping in a flute solo and sitar where a song like "Chasing Midnights" might otherwise have reached for banjo and fiddle. "It really screamed for banjo and screamed for a fiddle solo in the bridge," Pillsbury said. "We were just like, what's the opposite of those things to bring it in?"

The record also includes a bridge appearance from actress Dakota Johnson, Pillsbury's rumored girlfriend, on the track "Love I You."

Pillsbury will celebrate the album with a homecoming concert in Portland, Maine, before heading out on his biggest headlining tour yet this fall, tracked with the rest of the season's runs on the tour guide. The album itself joins the week's new pop and indie releases on the release calendar.