Quarterbacks is streaming their self titled album, out now via Team Love Records here, here and here. It’s 19 songs played in 22 minutes. It’s fast, broken-hearted and full of people, places and things. Quarterbacks was recorded at the Tin Roof Sessions Studio in New Paltz by Kyle Gilbride (Swearin,’ Waxahatchee, Radiator Hospital) in less than 12 hours.

Quarterbacks started as a short-lived duo playing too-fast love songs backed by guitar and a single snare drum. Basement style, old smelly carpets, house shows for punk and patch kids. This was in New Paltz, a college town at the bottom of a mountain in upstate New York. Dean (Dean Engle, the band’s songwriter/vocalist) worked at one of the town’s two record shops, as K Records-obsessed small town boys usually do.

The Quarterbacks line-up combusted after a handful of shows. The songs sat dormant until January 2012 when Dean enlisted Max Restaino and Tom Christie to revive the project. The new three-piece expanded the original vision, playing love-obsessed songs with limited affectation. The songs averaged under-2 minutes, and the DIY ethic remained firm. A few tape-only releases came into being (See the brilliant Double Double Whammy Records of Brooklyn NY).

Two years of upstate basement shows further refined their efficient tw*e punk set, new songs slowly forming from familiar themes and chord patterns, progress through recursion. Down the street from the record shop where Dean worked was Team Love Records, a record label that had relocated from Sugar Street in NYC’s East Village to Church Street in New Paltz. The folks at Team Love and Dean found themselves spending way too much time discussing favorite Cat’s Miaow singles and post-Young Marble Giants projects.