Jade Lilitri was sitting on a batch of almost-finished songs when he got a call from Hop Along drummer Mark Quinlan. Mark told Jade he was starting up a new record label called Feral Twin and was wondering if he could repress some earlier records by Jade’s long-running Long Island indie/emo project Oso Oso. Unsure if that would work due to other labels retaining the rights to the material and more interested in the new songs he was writing anyway, Jade told Mark if he had a certain amount of funding he could get in the studio right away. A few weeks passed and one day Mark called Jade back. “Hey, you said this much and you’re ready to make a record?” “If you can get me that,” Jade replied, “I will be in the studio in like two weeks and have a record for you in like a month.” The result was an exchange of information, Oso Oso’s sixth full-length album in an 11-year span. Because of the time crunch, Oso Oso’s longtime collaborator Billy Mannino wasn’t able to engineer and produce this one, so Jade ended up reaching out to Dan Maddalone, who opened up his own BirthdayLand Studios outside of Albany about a year prior. Jade had already talked to Dan about recording some “non-Oso songs for fun” when they had the time, but “Dan is the type of dude where if you get to know him you know this is a dude you go to to make a big ass sounding rock record,” Jade says. So it was a perfect fit. Jade headed up to Dan’s studio and worked on the record for two weeks straight. “We’d just work all day into the night and at night time drink beer till we were tapped out,” he recalls. “[Dan would] crash in the live room, I’d crash in the control room. [Then we’d] wake up, get coffee, and do it again.” Jade started Oso Oso as an acoustic solo project (originally called Osoosooso) back in 2014 as an outlet for some songs that didn’t fit as well with his emo-punk band State Lines. And when some other members of State Lines couldn’t get the time off for the Hotelier tour they were invited to open that same year, Jade did the tour as Osoosooso himself and this side quest quickly became his main focus. By the time of his 2017 breakthrough album The Yunahon Mixtape, his songwriting had drifted in more of an indie rock direction from its emo/punk roots, gaining comparisons to the likes of Death Cab For Cutie and Built to Spill, and it’s continued to evolve naturally from there. At this point, the best reference points for new Oso Oso albums are just other Oso Oso albums. “You get to a point where you are on your sixth LP for a particular project and it’s almost like the previous releases themselves become an influence,” Jade says. “You know what the ‘band’ is about. You know where you’ve been, how you think it could be improved upon, but you also have to figure out where you wanna go that you haven’t been before. There was a lot of focus on that while writing these songs.” an exchange of information came together much differently than its 2024 predecessor life till bones, which was built piece by piece in the studio. For the new album, Jade had most of the guitar parts and vocal melodies already fleshed out before that fateful call with Mark Quinlan, and when he got to the studio, he banged out the main skeletons of the songs in just a few days. That gave time for guitarist Eddy Rodriguez—the only other full-time member of Oso Oso—to write some of his own parts in the studio for the first time since joining Oso Oso almost five years earlier. It also gave the band time to work closely with drummer Joe Taurrone, who Dan recommended they bring in. Joe “was an absolute legend and I think contributed to this album being what it is,” Jade says. Given the way it all came together, it might not come as a surprise that an exchange of information is a harder, more rocking record than life till bones. It moves at a brisk pace, only slowing down during brief moments like album centerpiece “wind me up,” which began its life as an acoustic song before turning into a soaring alt-rock power ballad that would fit neatly somewhere between Oasis and Radiohead. As Jade and Dan worked tirelessly on these songs, various friends stopped by like Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s Kory Gregory, who screamed alongside Eddy on “someone like that” (“I’m not a screamer,” explains Jade), and Chelsea Paige Ragan of Pictures of Vernon, Diva Sweetly, and other bands, who played the guitar solo at the end of album closer “the days” (“I’m not a shredder either”). They tracked almost everything except some Mellotron/synth/keys and vocal harmonies during their two weeks at BirthdayLand, and then put the finishing touches on the album back at Billy Mannino’s studio Two Worlds, where Billy also ended up handling the final mix. an exchange of information isn’t exactly a true concept album the way The Yunahon Mixtape is, but it does have kind of an overarching story that runs throughout. On the second song, “it’s all bait,” “the narrator is begging the listener or themselves or a lover or something to not give up on this dream because everything else is designed to make you give up and it’s all bullshit-it’s all bait,” Jade explains. But as the album goes on, the protagonist gradually sheds the wide-eyed ideals of youth and their dreams start feeling more like delusions. By the penultimate track “the premiums,” “this person is disillusioned by seeing everything for what it is,” Jade says. “The magic is gone they can’t create it. They can’t see it and they’re starting to wake up.” Jade prefers the specific meanings of his songs to be up for interpretation, though he says if you run into him off stage at a show and ask him about one in particular he’ll probably give an honest answer. But he does share this: “I think my songwriting is probably rooted in wanting to be loved but not domesticated, enlightened but not disillusioned, wanting to be your own person but also belong. These things all seem impossible; I don’t know if thats pessimistic but it feels real. That’s the truth I’m trying to dig at. That’s what has always seemed like the point of all of this for me as an artist: exploring and sitting in the balance whatever this rollercoaster is.” Tracklist: 1. 4 am redemption 2. it's all bait 3. the nights 4. the facts 5. know you know me better 6. wind me up 7. everybody has their fun 8. she rides in the stars 9. someone like that 10. trace me 11. the premiums 12. the days
Pressing Information: 200 Cotton Candy Splash (Oso Oso Artist Exclusive) 300 Red Nebula Splash (Feral Twin Label Exclusive) 500 Pink Acid Wash (Indie Retail)
Release Date: November 6, 2026