It’s been seven months since that night, and Brendan hasn’t had a drink or touched a razor since. He smokes a joint in front of me at his apartment in Brewerytown because, he says, it helps ease the stomach-flipping side effects caused by all his new medications. “They haven't figured out my cocktail yet,” he says, laughing. We talk about the time they spent recording Holy Ghost, a process that began mere days after his five-week stint in the treatment program. When they hit the studio, Jake’s half of the songs were well past the demo stage. Brendan, however, had nothing. “I remember sitting down in my bed and being like, ‘We have to record an album in two days, I don't know if this even is gonna go down.’" But when the time came, the words poured straight out of him. “They were all just kind of like, ‘Fuck,’” he remembers of his bandmates' collective reaction. The resulting lyrics, which drift between spiritually tormented and flat-out inspiring, are entirely about treatment, Brendan says.

Holy Ghost marked the first time Sean and Ian wrote all their own drum and bass parts, and it was the first time Modern Baseball ever recorded an entire full-length together, as a unit. Nowhere is that togetherness more audible than on “Just Another Face,” the record’s legitimately epic closer. The verses are despairing: I’m a waste of time and space, drifting through my selfish ways/ I don’t know how I got here, Brendan sings over bleeding chords and mid-tempo percussion. But the chorus is reassuring, especially set against a clamoring swell of guitar warmth: If it’s all the same it’s time to confront this face to face/ I’ll be with you the whole way. Brendan’s lead vocal is almost swallowed up by the band, probably because at this point they’re not shouting with him, but actually at him: Even if you can’t see it now/ we’re proud of what’s to come, and you.

It’s a weirdly fitting end to a great record, and it hits extra hard once you know about the real-life catharsis that inspired it. “I remember Jake saying, 'This is the realest thing you've ever written,'” Brendan tells me. It’s the kind of urgent, deeply personal rock song that reminds me why bands like Modern Baseball will never cease to have an audience: there’s always gonna be kids looking for something that feels real. There’s always going to be lost souls looking for a reminder that they’re not in this alone.

