Renny Conti’s indie rock reckons with the mundane and mortal

New York City singer-songwriter Renny Conti’s most cherished moments are the ones where “nothing is really happening.” On his new record’s opening track “Split Second,” he recounts one particular memory of feeling at peace while sitting at the pier: “I sit and watch the boats sway in the pier / The city breathes the seasons in and out.”

“I remember feeling calm and free,” he says while nestled on a couch at The FADER office. “Those [moments] feel increasingly rare.”

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Conti wrote his forthcoming album, Split Second, out September 25 via Mom + Pop, while reeling from a series of life transformations and life-defining losses: the end of a major relationship and the death of his brother to addiction. He crystalizes such passing moments on the new record, taking a microscope to the mundane to find something resonant about love and loss. The result is 10 songs that are huge in their intimacy, softly sung and strongly felt.

Conti grew up in the Bay Area, the child of two working artists. He began playing music with his brother in his adolescence with stints in different punk bands, but he found himself gravitating towards the solace of singer-songwriter music as he grew into young adulthood. He connected with the genre especially after transferring colleges from San Francisco State to NYU to study film. The city’s re-cresting indie scene consistently pulled him away from film. “I just made all these buddies and ended up playing a bunch of shows. [Music] became the center of what I was doing here,” he says. “Shows kept popping up and people kept being like, ‘Want to play?’”

The pandemic allowed him further time to zero in on recording music at home. When the world began to open up in 2023, he was working part-time on film sets, but decided to pivot to food service to further commit to music. In 2025, he released his self-titled debut record which featured standouts like “Looking at the Geese” which shows off Conti’s gravelly yet lilting voice and lyrics which hopscotch between poignant theses and stream-of-consciousness rambling. On it he sings about “getting caught up in the president’s laugh,” before tumbling into a meaningful moment with a lover: “It’s 6 p.m. freezing and you’re drawing a bath / This is our little prize.”

The record garnered buzz in New York City’s indie circles, leading to Conti booking a headlining show at Baby’s All Right in January 2025 and then a rising dribble of label interest culminating in his signing to Mom + Pop (underscores, After, Magdalena Bay) in 2025.
On his new record, Conti continues to sharpen his lyrical pen and write movingly about the experience of contending with death. He does so with striking clarity on album single “Leaving The Zoo,” which is about the loss of his brother.

“That song tries to capture both the experience of learning someone passed and then all the little fucking experiences you have reconciling and accepting that,” he shares. The song speaks about death directly and in poetic terms. “And while you are gone life is a chore,” he sings. Its central refrain is simply, “Leaving the zoo / I’d do it too,” a metaphor that paints the living world as just a series of enclosures, a passing attraction.

“I wish [writing it was like] a cathartic thing,” he says of the song. “It hasn’t changed how I think about [death], really, but it's definitely helped me realize how I feel about it more.”

Listening to Conti’s striking and sung poetics makes me feel more, too. Like on album single and standout track “Mona Lisa” where Conti mixes meanings to dreamy effect: “You cut the lemon with the knife / I spent the night inside the forest of your life,” he sings. Its inversions and resonance feels like an encapsulation of these wandering days of your mid-20s, when a sense of meaning and purpose comes in and out of clarity.

“I feel like I'm fucking up, generally, a bit less than I used to,” says Conti about becoming a full-time musician. “It feels a bit more possible to just feel chill, instead of everything feeling big and bad.”