The Set Up (Pre-Order)

• Limited Edition 1st Pressing on "Desert Hardscape" Color Vinyl

The Set Up is the wayward sister record to The Delines 2025 release, Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. Each song here is a little movie full of grifters either struggling to get out of the life or just falling into it, the aftermath, the wreckage after the breakup, the lost and not the romantics adrift on the road.

Willy says "The Delines were finishing the Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom sessions when I brought in a tune called "Walking With His Sleeves Down." Amy learned it on piano and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning but the song didn’t quite fit the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside. And then I brought in the idea of "The Set Up," a piece I’d been thinking about for a while, a spoken word song in three parts: the lure, the catch, and the grift. I wrote the words, Cory wrote the music, and Amy played the part and man oh man did she deliver. "Keep The Shades Down" was written as a link between the romance of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom and the isolation of the The Set Up. The couple in the song realizes just how close the haves are to being have nots. I had written “Jumping Off In Madras” for the woman in “Her Ponyboy,” (Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom), as she gets off the freight train alone after the death of her boyfriend. Cory wrote Getting Out Of The Ward for the guy in “The Meter Keeps Ticking” who is leaving the mental hospital two days after Christmas and the stunningly beautiful “The Last Time I Saw Her” for the kid in “The Reckless Life” as she sets off from the hospital into the darkness of the world. The tracks came together fast and it was so naturally cinematic in feel that Cory and I began bringing in instrumentals to make it even more so."

Produced by John Morgan Askew The Set Up is The Delines at their rawest and CinemaScope best.