Closing the chapter on a fruitful solo career, singer/songwriter David Bazan reformed his legendary project Pedro the Lion with the release of Phoenix in 2019, their first new album in over a decade. Phoenix not only marked the project’s official comeback, it quietly initiated the beginning of a five-album musical memoir charting the places of Bazan’s youth. With 2022's Havasu, Bazan goes back to the seventh grade, where he and his family spent one year living in Lake Havasu City, AZ. 

Santa Cruz is Bazan’s third album in the series and follows up where its predecessors left off — rippling with the anxious excitement of teenage awakening as we track a 13 year-old Bazan through the cusp of adulthood. His most fraught and frank album yet, Santa Cruz advances David Bazan's charged chronicles of the past and the ways it shapes and misshapes the present.