Release day, guh… Release day… Release day, how I yearn for you… Except, today, it’s Supermarket Parking Lot’s release day, and it is a huge win for the Boston and New York folks. Over the week, I had the pleasure to listen to Honesty Doesn’t Pay and give a review on this album before it released. Supermarket Parking Lot… Like, the hit lyric? “Pacing outside of the grocery store, saying I can’t do this…” Like, in the hit song? Engine, by Slaughter Beach, Dog?

Also, I was yesterday years old when I learned this was a one piece project- just several musicians helping out at shows. What the hell? Marco one talented guy!

“Wake up and start the day, the supermarket scene plays”. Today, Boston/NYC-based rock band Supermarket Parking Lot releases their debut album, Honesty Doesn’t Pay. Their first ever studio record, Honesty Doesn’t Pay, marks a bold new chapter for Supermarket Parking Lot.

Featuring soaring keys, anthemic hooks, heavy riffs, and a biting progressive rock edge, on Honesty Doesn’t Pay, Supermarket Parking Lot’s bandleader and principal songwriter Marco Tewlow explores existential dread, heartbreak, the nature of anger, and the struggle to find one’s purpose in a chaotic, ever-changing world. “I am standing on the outside,” Tewlow croons on lead single A Favor (The Cell), constantly flipping between a distant longing for acceptance and an electrifying fight for his sense of self. Not content to just explore these themes lyrically, Tewlow’s compositions also push and pull across genre boundaries, ranging from hooky, early-2000s-tinged alternative rock,, to pensive, almost classical minimalism, to melancholic art-rock, to long-form multi-movement prog epics (and everything in between). Honesty Doesn’t Pay is a radical re-introduction to Supermarket Parking Lot’s sound and style that recontextualizes what came before and sets the tone for what is to come.

Supermarket Parking Lot will go on a DIY Northeast US tour to support the debut album launch: May 1st in Boston, MA, May 2nd in Manchester, NH, May 5th in New York City, NY, May 6th in Meriden, CT, and May 7th in Philadelphia, PA. The album will also be released on CD on May 1st, both at shows and through the band’s online store on Bandcamp.

You know, I downloaded this album not even knowing what to expect. I managed to catch Supermarket Parking Lot’s set at Nice, A Fest back in 2024. It’s for sure been a minute since I last heard of the project. I saw the notification pop up on Instagram- a DM from Supermarket Parking Lot asking for a favor. And, what do we have here… I’ve gotta say, going out of my way to take a listen was a unique experience.

I opened up the file of these super secret songs on my super secret phone that has a bunch of super secret things on it and not even the first 30 seconds into the album I was like… Damn… This is fire. I listened to the full uncut album file that was given to me to see what I’d be in for instead of going in and selecting each song individually. That had to have been the best choice, actually. Each song managed to transition into others flawlessly and had my jaw dropped to the floor.

Now, Supermarket Parking Lot are totally outside of my usual taste in music. I played Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream while listening to this album. Or, at least I tried to. There was something about how this album sounded that made me just… Think. I don’t know how else to explain it, but the musical elements from the first two songs of this 11 track album were insane. One thing that surprised me was how long each song was. I’m so used to listening to a 2 minute song and the album being over within, say, I don’t know… 10 minutes? Shoutout Told Not To Worry… But, this did not bore me. I sat there seriously ascending from my bed to these riffs.

I was soooo curious about this album and its production and how Tewlow curated everything. I managed to stir up some questions to ask Tewlow to better understand Honesty Doesn’t Pay.

What inspired the new album? Did you have any bands around you influence you on Honesty Doesn’t Pay?

The new album came out of the wreck of a different project of mine from high school. We had released one record, more in a synth-pop vein, and were working hard on a second. Me and the other main songwriter had a pretty bitter falling out and haven’t spoken in years. But I’m not a person to leave projects unfinished. I took the songs of mine that I’d pitched but were never really worked on (the second movement of "Vampires,” “Overload,” “Honesty Doesn’t Pay,” the bridge of “Normal Person,” and “Blue Light”) and decided to aim them at a new project. I used the original album name too- Honesty Doesn’t Pay.

I see this album as being in continuity with the record I made with that other project, structurally, thematically, and even at points musically. Both are rooted in my high school experience and deal with themes of anxiety and isolation and relationship breakdowns. They also both are conceived as albums first, songs second. The track order and the transitions are as important as the songs themselves. They both use instrumental interludes as glue between tunes, etc.

A lot of the tunes deal with heartbreak— my high school sweetheart and various college year 1 situationships. The later tunes I finished, like “Forest Fires,” “A Favor” and “Vampires” gets more complex structurally. I was influenced a lot by bands like King Crimson, Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Radiohead. There were also some local bands that really pushed me to want to get weirder and do more. Bands like that don’t really exist anymore, like Trophy Husband, Little Plastic Dinosaurs and Prisoners of Love, who were so radical to me in terms of what you can do with very little in a DIY setting. And bands that do still exist, like Makeout Palace and Smilley, who inspired me to execute to the best of my ability and across the finish line in guns ablaze.

When writing songs musically, did you intend for these tracks to blend into each other originally, or was that written in later on?

Not every single track was intended to blend into any specific other. But I knew from day one that nearly every track would transition, unless there was a structural reason not to. There are specific pairs— “Cadenza” and “In Creative Desperation…” plus “Ender” and “Vampires”. Cadenza came out of a live tradition where I would write into the setlist an improvised bass solo to go from a song into “Desperation.” “Ender” sprouted out of a solo piano improv I did over the form of movement 1 of “Vampires”.

Other transitions were borne out of trial and error, if not necessity. “Honesty,” “Normal Person,” and “Blue Light” emerged as an obvious triad, before I had even played live with a full band .Call them the High-School-Ex trilogy. Lyrically they all touch on different aspects of the same material: regret, self-sublimation, and grief, respectively. In most of my early shows, they’d be played one after another to end the set. Meanwhile, “Forest Fires” into “A Favor” was a late-game realization. They were already slotted as tracks 1 and 2, but I realized about a month ago that since they were in the same key, I might as well let one fade into the other. “Phantom” slots in as track 3 because there was nowhere else to put it, ergo it would have to transition seamlessly into “Cadenza” (the album’s designated literally-just-a-pretty-transition track).

What goes through your mind when you create music? What was your thought process behind Honesty Doesn’t Pay?

There’s two ways anyone writes a song. You either first have a musical idea or a lyrical idea. I go for either. “Forest Fires” stems out of a dream that I had during the COVID-19 pandemic. I woke up with the chorus, fully-formed and the rest of the song was written to try and make sense of it. “A Favor,” “Phantom Vibration,” “Vampires,” and “Blue Light” all originated as riffs, if not structures with temp melodies and no lyrics. “Overload,” “Honesty Doesn’t Pay,” and “Normal Person” were all lyrics first. Then “Desperation” is a funny one.

The title came first- it’s a song about writer’s block written appropriately during my worst-ever writer’s block. I was without ideas for months. I scribbled the name down in a desperate attempt to codify my ineptitude, only to look at it and be given inspiration from the title alone. That’s become a more common process for me lately, as I’ve started workshopping ideas for what comes next.

Were there any songs you had a lot of trouble coming up with to go with the 11 track album?

There was no song that was specifically written for the album that I ever struggled with. There was, however, a single track that preceded the album and nearly didn’t make it on…

Overload is easily my favorite track on this beautiful creation- do you think others will think the same, or will your personal favorite maybe take the lead? What’s your favorite song off this album?

“Overload,” at one point in time, was my least favorite song on the record. I hated it. It was a holdover from the 11th grade and I just couldn’t put myself in 17-year-old-me’s shoes. It was also the simplest track on the album, musically. My bandmates circa 2024 hated it more than me, mostly for that reason. It was just bland, uninteresting- especially to try-hard Berklee students like us. The depressive attitude around the song was palpable. No one wanted to arrange it and no one wanted to perform it. The original recording; I swear, my vocals were audibly suicidal. But the song persisted, because it served a key structural function. It was the cooldown from “Vampires,” and no other song I tried to write worked quite as well in that slot. I nearly cut it half a dozen times, but it survived.

In 2025, I changed the way I would handle the live band (opting for minimal rehearsals, sight reading, and constantly circulating new and old members in and out of the ensemble), and “Overload” came alive. I credit my friend Angus Monroe for the most of this. I don’t think it still holds true for him, but at one point after the second or third gig we did together, he came up to me and said “I think ‘Overload’ is my favorite,” then walked off. The joy and raw energy he put into this dead weight song about overstimulation and burnout was palpable. He single-handedly changed the way I play the song. It’s weird to say, but for the first time ever, I think I finally understand my own song. I play it live way more often, re-produced the song almost entirely from scratch, and can finally say that I’m proud off t. It’s for sure the song that has been worked on for the longest period of time, being the first song written and the last one finished.

To the other part of the question: my personal favorite is “Phantom Vibration”. It’s probably the closest to the platonic ideal that I have for my music. Atmospheric, heavy, melancholic, inextricably linked to the piano, slightly theatrical, and in 6/4. It’s also some of the best poetry I think I’ve ever written, even apart from the musical context.

I do think that standing back a bit, the most impressive tunes on the record are “A Favor (The Cell)” and “Brothers #2 (Vampires)”. Those are the prog epics; songs I needed to a certain confidence to write and a certain delusion to release. I’m happy if anyone gets attached to anything I make, but I hope that if anything gets some recognition, it’s those two.

If you could tour and play this album at any venue in the world, where would it be and why? Would it be a hometown show, or would you go out and show the world what you got?

I’d love to play it in front to back at Webster Hall in NYC. Hometown show, a famous mid-sized venue (the best kind of venue), and to top it off- I work there! Would be cool to bring the album to a space that I know intimately but is definitively above my current station.

Holy fart. This was easily an S+ tier album from the DIY scene. There’s something so charming about the way Tewlow writes music and really puts his mind out there with whatever he creates. Getting to know some of the behind the scenes and understanding of how Tewlow digs into his thoughts for his songs was super interesting! I really loved being able to listen to this album for the first time and for sure wish I could do that again. It’s so captivating. For sure stream Supermarket Parking Lot’s debut album- it’s something you SHOULDN’T miss.

Supermarket Parking Lot

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