A decade ago, the Sad Giants burst onto the Reno scene thanks to their pop-punk mix with heart-wrenching vocal performances and somber guitar lines. Songs like “Car Ballet,” “Sullen Hearts” and “Sunday Best” attached hook-filled melodies and memorable choruses to moments of struggle and pain.
The band was on a tear, with great song after great song, and big show after big show … and then came COVID-19.
“The first five years, we were doing great, and then COVID hit—and nothing was certain anymore,” said frontman Bobby Benedict during a recent Zoom interview with the band. “Quentin (Young) was our original bassist, and he left the band for a little bit to take care of his kids going to high school. We had my friend Nik Taro fill in on bass during some shows during COVID—and he died in a car accident in 2021. At that point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do the band anymore.”
With help from check-ins from his bandmates, Benedict weathered the emotional storm and came back to the group—finally ready to take musical action. At last, Sad Giants are set to release their debut album, Space Case, on Friday, Jan. 23, with an album-release show at the Holland Project.
During the interview with Benedict (vocals/guitar), Young (bass), Jeremy Martin (lead guitar) and Jesse Moran (drums), Benedict explained how dealing with his grief led to the creation of Space Case.
“I was not communicating anything to anybody,” he said. “I was just sitting in my room making a bunch of demos, and at one point when I was making these demos, I reached out to a producer friend of ours who produced the album, Colin Christian from Wires & Noise Audio Services. He was like, ‘These are good; what does the rest of the band say?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I have an entire band I have not been talking to.’ I went on a little acoustic tour with a friend of mine, recorded some acoustic tracks that are out there, and came back, and I was like, ‘I have a band that I need to talk to.’”
Sad Giants decided to act on the moment and recorded the album over the last year.
“We just decided to spend 2025 as the ‘record the album’ year, and get it done and get it out, because we had so many demos,” Benedict said. “It was really hard to hold myself to any sort of schedule, but we finally got it done, and now I just want to get out there to commemorate the fact that we, as a band, are still making it. We’re going to keep doing it. It was almost the end for a lot of things, for a lot of people, so now I think this new era of Sad Giants is like new life.”
While Space Case fits the established tone of impassioned, sentimental songwriting across Sad Giants’ discography, the new album delves deeper into lachrymose lyrics and moving musical moments.
“This album is dealing with mental-health issues, which is sort of a thing we always have going on in our songs, because I’m just that kind of guy,” Benedict said. “But then in the middle of this ‘oh no, I’m so crazy, and relationships are hard’ album is a quick gut punch of, ‘also, people are dying all around you; all your friends … if they’re not dead yet, they’re going to die eventually, and you’ve just got to deal with that.’ It’s a melancholy recollection for the rest of the album on friendship and the way we have relationships with each other. I think it’s going to be good for us to start on a real dark note—a real hard look at ourselves—so anything we do afterward is going to be a nice, light-hearted romp.”
One song even includes a voicemail that Benedict left Moran after hearing the news of Taro’s passing.
“That song ended up being a celebration of the friendship we had, and then it hits you with the voicemail, and then the next song, ‘Caveman,’ was just my stream-of-conscious examination of my own grief at the time,” Benedict said.
“Caveman” makes use of an inside joke held between Benedict and Taro.
“I didn’t want to write music … but I remember me and Nik were joking one time, and he said, ‘What Fall Out Boy does is just steal a line from a movie and write a pop-punk song around it. So I was like, ‘Fuck it; I’ll do that,’” Benedict said. “The same fight scene (in Closer) that the ‘he tastes like you, only sweeter’ line that Fall Out Boy song (“Thnks fr th Mmrs”) came from, I stole the ‘I’m a fucking caveman’ line from as well. I was just like, ‘I can’t write shit, so I’ve just got to steal something real quick to feel something.’ I think it worked.”
The members of Sad Giants each shared what they hope listeners take away from Space Case. Young said he wants the lesson “to be happy, even though shit can be bad, and to ‘Hold On,’ just like one of our songs. I love that about this band. It’s been about people feeling better, going through stuff and just doing better.”
Moran, more explicitly, said: “At this point, I’m just doing music to just do music, and I don’t really care what anybody takes from it. Whatever they take from it is whatever they take from it, and I’m happy that someone can reminisce or connect with it. That’s gravy on top.”
Added Benedict: “I echo that same sentiment: Once the art is out there, it’s not ours anymore; it kind of just exists, and we have to do our justice to that art we made.”
Newest member Martin said: “I’ve been in the band for two months now, and they just shoved me into all these things, which is good. I think that one of the coolest things about this group and this album is that it just goes to show in this day and age, where everybody makes all their music with AI and just self-produces these little things in their houses, it’s kind of cool to see us, a mid-30s- and upper-40s-age band, that’s still doing it. There’s not a lot of that around.”
While the members of Sad Giants are excited about the release of their debut album and their release show, they were excited to share they will soon have copies of Space Case on vinyl—the first time their music will be available in a physical format.
“We’re planning to do a couple of video things leading up to a vinyl-release situation so we can kind of show off the cool art piece we finally have to cement us in a not-just-digital legacy,” Benedict said. “It feels a little better to have something physical in your hand.”
Sad Giants, with Zack Ryan’s Modern Medicine, Head Stone and Silent Giant, will perform at 7 p.m., Friday, Jan. 23, at the Holland Project, at 140 Vesta St., in Reno. Tickets are $12.42 online in advance, or $12 on the day of the show. For tickets and more information, visit hollandreno.org. Learn more about Sad Giants at www.instagram.com/sadgiants.