On their new single, the Los Angeles alt-rock trio turns a missed birthday, tour fatigue, nostalgia, and the fear of losing touch with the people who matter into an anthem about learning to be present before the life you wanted becomes another thing you forget to experience.
There are obvious sacrifices involved in pursuing music.
Money.
Sleep.
Stability.
Privacy.
Relationships conducted through phone screens and time zones.
Hours spent driving toward a show that might last forty minutes.
But sometimes the cost announces itself through something much smaller.
For Madie Renner, lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of Los Angeles alternative-rock trio OUT IN FRONT, it was realizing she had forgotten her father’s birthday while on tour.
The realization did not feel small.
It sent her into a panic attack.
“Family is the most important thing to me, so I was completely gutted and in disbelief that I had let it happen,” she remembers.
Her parents had always jokingly warned her, “Don’t forget us little people when ya make it big.”
Suddenly, the joke felt terrifyingly literal.
Renner had spent so much energy trying to build the future she wanted that she had momentarily lost track of one of the people she wanted that future to matter to.
That emotional collision became “Medicine,” OUT IN FRONT’s soaring new single, released via AWAL. The song arrived quickly—roughly three hours—and emerged from Renner’s fear that pursuing music might slowly disconnect her from the family, memories, and ordinary life she was supposedly pursuing success for in the first place.
For a band becoming increasingly accustomed to forward momentum, “Medicine” is essentially an argument for looking backward long enough to understand what all that momentum might be leaving behind.
The Birthday You Cannot Get Back
Ambition tends to become more flattering in retrospect.
Once something works, the missed dinners become dedication.
The sleepless nights become discipline.
The years of uncertainty become an inspiring origin story.
But sacrifice rarely feels that cinematic while it is happening.
Sometimes it simply feels like realizing you forgot to call your dad.
For Renner, that moment created a deeper fear than embarrassment.
“From a personal cost perspective, it made me realize that pursuing this dream could mean becoming disconnected from the people and the life that matter most to me.”
She had not forgotten because she stopped caring.
She forgot because she cared so intensely about something else.
That distinction makes the guilt harder.
Music was not competing against people she did not value.
It was competing for attention with the people she valued most.
“That terrified me,” she says. “It made me question whether chasing this dream was pulling me away from my family, and even from reality itself.”
“Medicine” grew from that contradiction.
The dream is real.
So is the life happening while you chase it.
Who Else Pays for Your Ambition?
Renner does not believe ambition automatically requires guilt.
But ambition requiring sacrifice can easily produce it.
Especially because the artist is rarely the only person making the sacrifice.
Every mile away from home belongs partly to the people left there.
Every missed birthday is experienced by both sides.
Every tour date that looks like progress on an itinerary might also represent an absence somewhere else.
For Renner, that tension is amplified by how supportive her family has always been.
“When I miss something important, it can feel like I’m taking their support for granted.”
The guilt, then, is not really regret about choosing music.
It comes from wondering how much the people around you are being asked to contribute to a dream that technically belongs to you.
There is maturity in the distinction Renner is beginning to make.
The solution is not abandoning ambition.
Nor is it pretending distance does not matter.
It is intentionality.
“I want to make it, but I also want the people I love to still feel like they have me along the way.”
That might be the most important line inside the emotional world surrounding “Medicine.”
Success is not worth much if everyone who helped make it possible experiences you primarily as an absence.
Three Hours and the First Take
Some songs need to be excavated.
“Medicine” arrived almost intact.
OUT IN FRONT says the track came together in around three hours, unusually fast even by their standards.
The band trusted it immediately.
Renner’s initial vocals were never intended to become the definitive performance.
They were scratch takes.
They stayed.
Everyone involved recognized that attempting to improve their technical polish might remove the emotional evidence that made them valuable.
“The rawness felt more honest than anything we could have recreated,” Renner says.
There is something fitting about that decision.
A song about recognizing you have become too distracted to remain present was preserved partly because the band resisted overworking the moment when it first appeared.
The harder decision was allowing everyone else to hear it.
Renner describes the lyrics as intensely personal, involving her family and the feeling of being “a piece-of-shit daughter and sister.”
When her team wanted “Medicine” to become the first song released from the new material, vulnerability became frightening in a different way.
Still, the same logic that protected the scratch vocal eventually protected the song.
The discomfort was evidence.
Sometimes the first version of an emotion contains something revision cannot reconstruct.
When the Bassline Changes the Song
“Medicine” also represented a deliberate musical shift.
The band felt the project needed something more bass-driven, and bassist Ryen Wagner supplied the foundation.
The resulting riff did more than establish the low end.
It changed how the band thought about space.
“We wanted ‘Medicine’ to have more dynamics and musicality and feel a little less straightforward than what we had been doing,” drummer Isaiah Volk explains.
When Wagner brought the bass part in, the arrangement began opening up.
Instead of every instrument competing to produce the largest possible sound at every moment, the trio started considering how each element could occupy its own emotional and sonic territory.
They let the bass speak.
Then the guitars.
Then the drums.
Then the voice.
The result remains recognizably OUT IN FRONT—anthemic, immediate, built for a room full of people—but the scale comes from dynamics rather than constant force.
The song breathes before it explodes.
That makes the explosion mean more.
Nostalgia Without Escaping Into It
At its core, “Medicine” also longs for childhood.
Not necessarily childhood as it literally existed.
Childhood as emotional shorthand.
Life before the calendar accelerated.
Before professional identity began swallowing personal identity.
Before happiness needed to be scheduled between travel days.
Renner has described the song as longing for “the simplicity of childhood, when life felt lighter, happiness came naturally, and the world didn’t feel so heavy.”
Musically, the band deliberately leans into that feeling.
The bassline carries a familiarity.
The guitars recall older alternative-rock textures.
The drums settle into grooves that can initially feel almost comforting.
But the lyrics destabilize the nostalgia.
“The classic bass riff, guitars, and iconic drum grooves almost trick the listener into thinking it’s going to be a sentimental, nostalgic song,” Renner says.
Then the actual subject reveals itself.
This is not a song arguing that everything used to be better.
It is a song written because the present has become difficult to inhabit.
That keeps the nostalgia from becoming decorative.
Childhood matters because it represents a time before Renner understood how easily a person could become so focused on building a life that they stopped noticing themselves living it.
The Unphotogenic Parts of Tour
Touring is one of the easiest parts of music to romanticize visually.
Highways.
Backstage passes.
Green rooms.
New cities.
Crowds.
Stage lights.
Hotel rooms that somehow look cinematic in photographs.
OUT IN FRONT wanted the “Medicine” video to show what happens between those images.
Missing home.
Watching friends’ lives continue without you.
Wondering whether you have made the right choice.
Existing in motion long enough that the place you normally call reality begins functioning without your participation.
The music video, co-directed by Noa Volk and the band, was conceived as a look behind that curtain.
“Life quietly moves forward without you in a place you’ve come to know so well, and that can be really hard,” Wagner explains.
But the band did not want to make touring look miserable either.
That would be another distortion.
There is joy.
Stupidity.
Chaos.
Friendships forged because the same people are trapped in vans, venues, and unfamiliar cities together.
Then there is the sudden transformation when the band steps onstage.
The quiet anxiety disappears into volume.
“The cuts between the quieter moments on the road and the energy of performing visually capture what this life actually feels like.”
Not glamorous.
Not tragic.
Both.
From Tennis Courts to Tour Vans
The speed of OUT IN FRONT’s ascent makes the anxiety inside “Medicine” especially understandable.
Renner, Volk, and Wagner met in 2024 while working as tennis coaches.
Renner had studied songwriting at Belmont University before moving to Los Angeles, where the country-club job that paid the bills also happened to introduce her to Volk. A former Division 1 tennis player and pilot, Volk had been looking for a way to put music more seriously at the center of his life. Wagner, Volk’s former college teammate, completed the trio.
Jam sessions followed.
Then songs.
Then shows.
Then suddenly the tennis coaches were becoming a band.
They have since accumulated millions of streams, with 2025 single “fLoAT” surpassing four million, and have shared stages with artists including Yellowcard, The All-American Rejects, Sublime, AJR, Wet Leg, Joyce Manor, and others. The band recently signed with Sony/AWAL and is supporting Charlotte Sands across North America.
That transformation can easily become emotionally disorienting.
The thing you were pretending might happen begins happening.
And because it is happening, there is no obvious moment to stop.
Learning to Be a Band Under Pressure
Touring has accelerated OUT IN FRONT’s growth not simply as musicians but as a small functioning ecosystem.
They still handle significant amounts of work themselves.
That means creative partnership has been tested against logistics.
Stress.
Fatigue.
Schedules.
Equipment.
Travel.
Problems that have to be solved quickly because the next city is already waiting.
“We’re constantly taking leaps and hoping that, somewhere down the road, all of the work will pay off,” Wagner says.
Uncertainty has become part of the relationship between them.
But so has competence.
Doing things themselves has forced the trio to understand how each person reacts when something goes wrong.
Playing alongside more established artists has accelerated that education further.
Professional environments create professional expectations.
“You adapt quickly, read the room, and rise to whatever environment you’re in.”
OUT IN FRONT are learning what kind of band they want to become partly by observing bands that have already survived long enough to become it.
Vulnerability That Can Fill a Room
OUT IN FRONT have built their reputation around an energetic live show and large, anthemic hooks.
“Medicine” creates an interesting challenge because its origin is almost painfully private.
Renner does not see those qualities as opposites.
“The most personal things can often become the biggest moments in a room because people recognize themselves in them.”
Specificity gives the anthem something to stand on.
The forgotten birthday belongs to Renner.
The experience underneath it does not.
Anyone who has missed something important because work became overwhelming understands it.
Anyone who has wondered whether ambition is slowly changing them understands it.
Anyone who has wished adulthood could briefly become smaller understands it.
The guitars and drums give the emotion scale.
They do not replace it.
“We want our songs to feel huge live, but we never want that to come at the expense of what the song is actually about.”
That philosophy explains why “Medicine” can begin with shame and end sounding almost communal.
A confession becomes a chorus.
Watching the Details
Touring with artists OUT IN FRONT once admired from much further away has also changed their understanding of live performance.
What impressed them was not simply talent.
It was care.
FOH sound.
Lighting.
Merch.
Stage presence.
Technical consistency.
All the pieces an audience might not consciously identify but immediately feels when they are missing.
“We want to be as professional as we possibly can,” Volk says.
The trio invested early in their own sound rig and have carried it from venue to venue, learning it well enough that changing rooms do not completely change the band.
Consistency becomes another type of identity.
Not merely sounding good when conditions are ideal.
Learning how to sound like yourself almost anywhere.
That attention feels aligned with OUT IN FRONT’s broader trajectory.
The band may have begun almost accidentally through three tennis coaches discovering a shared musical language, but increasingly little about the way they approach the project feels accidental.
Protecting the Present
And yet, “Medicine” exists because relentless forward motion has consequences.
The band is now experiencing things they previously imagined from a distance.
Tours.
Industry support.
Large stages.
Growing audiences.
Millions of streams.
The danger is immediately transforming each achievement into another starting line.
“We used to dream about being where we are now,” Volk says, “and now we sometimes find ourselves dreaming about what it was like at the very beginning, when all of this was just a dream for us.”
It is almost absurd.
When you are beginning, you dream about arrival.
When you begin arriving, you become nostalgic for the beginning.
Meanwhile the present—the thing both versions of yourself supposedly wanted—quietly disappears between them.
That is the real subject of “Medicine.”
Presence.
Not as wellness jargon.
As survival.
Look up.
Call home.
Remember the birthday.
Notice the van ride.
Notice the terrible backstage room.
Notice the night where everything goes wrong.
Notice the stage where everything suddenly works.
The future is going to arrive regardless.
OUT IN FRONT are trying to learn how not to miss themselves getting there.
In Conversation With OUT IN FRONT
MUNDANE: “Medicine” came from something incredibly ordinary but emotionally loaded—forgetting your dad’s birthday while on tour. What did that moment reveal to you about the personal cost of pursuing music full-time?
MADIE RENNER: The moment I realized I had missed my dad’s birthday, it sent me into a full-blown panic attack, almost an out-of-body experience. I had never experienced anything like that before.
Family is the most important thing to me, so I was completely gutted and in disbelief that I had let it happen. My parents have always joked, “Don’t forget us little people when ya make it big,” and in that moment, I felt like I had completely let them down.
From a personal cost perspective, it made me realize that pursuing this dream could mean becoming disconnected from the people and the life that matter most to me. I was so focused on making it in music that I had lost track of something as important as my own dad’s birthday.
That terrified me. It made me question whether chasing this dream was pulling me away from my family, and even from reality itself.
That feeling of guilt, fear, and realizing that success might come at the expense of the people you love became a huge part of what “Medicine” is about.
MUNDANE: The song deals with the tension between chasing a dream and feeling selfish for the sacrifices that dream demands. Do you think ambition always comes with some degree of guilt, especially when the people you love are the ones absorbing the distance?
MADIE RENNER: I don’t think ambition always has to come with guilt, but I do think guilt can naturally come with pursuing something that requires sacrifice, especially when the people absorbing the distance are the people you love most.
There’s a weird conflict in wanting to be proud of what you’re building while also knowing that every mile, every missed birthday, and every moment away from home is something your family experiences too.
For me, the hardest part is that my family has always supported this dream. So when I miss something important, it can feel like I’m taking their support for granted.
I think that’s where the guilt comes from—not necessarily regretting the dream, but wondering if I’m asking the people I love to sacrifice too much for it.
I’m learning that pursuing music doesn’t mean I have to choose between my ambition and my family, but it does mean I have to be intentional about staying connected.
I want to make it, but I also want the people I love to still feel like they have me along the way.
MUNDANE: You’ve said “Medicine” came together in only a few hours. When a song arrives that quickly, do you trust the first instinct and leave it relatively untouched, or does the real work begin afterward in shaping the arrangement and production?
MADIE RENNER: For us, we usually trust the first instinct, and “Medicine” was one of those songs where everything just clicked.
Everyone on our team instantly connected with it and felt it was one of the best songs we’d ever made, which was shocking because it only took about three hours in the studio.
Those were actually my scratch vocals, and we ended up keeping them on the final version because the rawness felt more honest than anything we could have recreated.
For me, though, putting it out was scary.
The lyrics are incredibly personal and deal a lot with my family and feeling like a piece-of-shit daughter and sister. So when the team wanted it to be our first song out, I was nervous about being that vulnerable.
But I think that’s exactly why we trusted it. The emotion was real, and sometimes the first take captures something you can’t recreate once you start overthinking it.
MUNDANE: The bassline became the foundation of the track after you realized the project was missing something more bass-driven. What did Ryen’s riff unlock in the song, and how did it change the way the rest of the band approached the arrangement?
ISAIAH VOLK: We wanted “Medicine” to have more dynamics and musicality and feel a little less straightforward than what we had been doing.
We were intentionally trying to explore some different sounds with this one, and when we heard Ryen’s bass riff, we knew we had something special.
It really unlocked the song and made us want to give every instrument and vocal room to shine instead of having everything fight for the same space.
MUNDANE: There’s a nostalgic undercurrent to “Medicine,” especially in the longing for a time when life felt simpler. How did you keep that nostalgia from becoming sentimental and instead make it feel immediate and relevant to where you are now?
MADIE RENNER: I think sonically, the song creates a feeling of nostalgia for a lot of people.
The classic bass riff, guitars, and iconic drum grooves almost trick the listener into thinking it’s going to be a sentimental, nostalgic song.
But when you really listen to the lyrics and dive into what we’re saying, there’s a much deeper sense of urgency and relevance to what’s happening in our lives today.
I think that contrast is what keeps the nostalgia from feeling overly sentimental.
MUNDANE: The video deliberately shows the less glamorous side of touring—missing home, questioning your choices, watching other people’s lives move forward without you. How important was it to present that reality instead of another polished version of life on the road?
RYEN WAGNER: Being on the road makes it really difficult to process the people and life you’ve built at home.
Life quietly moves forward without you in a place you’ve come to know so well, and that can be really hard.
But you also find the fun, the little moments of chaos, and the relationships you’re building on the road that make it all worth it.
We wanted to show both sides of that reality rather than another polished version of touring.
I think there’s something really beautiful about seeing the contrast between traveling, missing home, and then suddenly being onstage playing a show.
Those cuts between the quieter moments on the road and the energy of performing visually capture what this life actually feels like.
MUNDANE: OUT IN FRONT started with three tennis coaches bonding over music, and now you’re touring with artists like Charlotte Sands and opening for bands you once admired from afar. Has the speed of that transition changed the way you relate to one another inside the band?
RYEN WAGNER: I think we’ve grown so much as a trio, and it’s honestly crazy to look back at how far we’ve come.
We’re constantly taking leaps and hoping that, somewhere down the road, all of the work will pay off, but that uncertainty is also what makes it exciting.
Doing so much of the work ourselves on the road has really brought us closer and taught us how to be efficient, especially in stressful moments.
Sharing the stage with such professional acts this early has forced us to adapt quickly, read the room, and rise to whatever environment we’re in.
I think those experiences have really shaped us both as a band and as people.
MUNDANE: You’re known for anthemic choruses and an energetic live show, but “Medicine” is rooted in something deeply introspective. How do you balance making songs that can explode in a room with writing that still feels emotionally specific and personal?
MADIE RENNER: I think the key for us is not separating the two.
The most personal things can often become the biggest moments in a room because people recognize themselves in them.
With “Medicine,” the lyrics came from something really specific and painful in my own life, but the dynamics, bassline, guitars, and drums give that emotion somewhere to explode.
We want our songs to feel huge live, but we never want that to come at the expense of what the song is actually about.
If anything, being honest and specific is what makes the big moments feel real.
MUNDANE: You’ve already supported artists across very different corners of alternative music, from Yellowcard and The All-American Rejects to Wet Leg and Sublime. What have those experiences taught you about what kind of live band OUT IN FRONT wants to become?
ISAIAH VOLK: We want to be as professional as we possibly can.
Every one of those bands treated every aspect of their live show with the utmost care and professionalism, from Front of House and lighting to stage presence and merch.
Watching that firsthand really showed us how much the details matter.
We invested a lot in our sound rig early on and have carried it with us everywhere. We’ve gotten so comfortable playing with it that we’re able to bring a consistent, professional sound to every show, regardless of the venue.
That’s the kind of live band we want OUT IN FRONT to be.
MUNDANE: “Medicine” is ultimately about presence—looking up before life moves past you. As things continue accelerating for the band, what are you trying to protect or stay connected to so that success doesn’t become another reason to miss the life happening around you?
ISAIAH VOLK: We want to protect our presence as much as we can.
It’s obviously hard to reminisce when you’re constantly moving forward, but “Medicine,” among other songs, is a reminder to accept where you are and embrace every experience that got you here.
We used to dream about being where we are now, and now we sometimes find ourselves dreaming about what it was like at the very beginning, when all of this was just a dream for us.
I think that’s what we want to protect most: remembering to appreciate the moment we’re actually living in instead of always waiting for the next thing.
The Life Between the Milestones
There is a cruel little paradox buried inside ambition.
You spend years imagining a future.
Then the future begins arriving, and almost immediately you start imagining the next one.
The first show becomes the bigger show.
The first million streams becomes the next million.
Opening for someone becomes headlining.
The van becomes the bus.
The support tour becomes your tour.
The dream keeps moving precisely because you keep reaching it.
OUT IN FRONT understand that mechanism particularly well because almost everything around them currently appears to be accelerating.
Only a few years ago, Renner, Volk, and Wagner were tennis coaches discovering that they liked playing music together.
Now they are signed to AWAL, accumulating millions of streams, playing alongside artists they admired before their own band existed, and learning how to navigate the strange machinery of touring as both musicians and friends.
There is plenty to celebrate.
“Medicine” asks what happens if celebration becomes another thing you postpone.
Maybe success is not only about reaching the life you wanted.
Maybe it is being sufficiently present to recognize it once you arrive.
Renner forgot her father’s birthday because she was busy doing something she once dreamed about doing.
The mistake hurt precisely because both things mattered.
That contradiction does not have an easy resolution.
You cannot be everywhere.
Tour will take you away from home.
Ambition will occasionally make you selfish.
The people you love will sometimes absorb consequences from choices they did not make.
“Medicine” does not pretend otherwise.
Instead, OUT IN FRONT seem to be arriving at a more modest philosophy.
Pay attention.
Remember why you wanted this.
Remember who helped you get here.
Call home.
Allow yourself to notice that the exhausting van ride, the small backstage room, the technical problem, the night where nobody slept, and the forty minutes onstage might someday become the things you miss.
Because the strange truth about pursuing a dream is that eventually the pursuit itself becomes your life.
And if you spend all of it waiting for the dream to finally begin, you might look up one day and realize it already happened.
