Audio Production | Mixing | Songwriting

Summertime Dropouts

Album + Placements

The Challenge

A debut album written collaboratively across a large group of writers, most working remotely, over the course of a year. The challenge wasn't talent. It was alignment. Getting that many voices to agree on what a song needs, find the right parts, and let go of the wrong ones requires as much communication as it does creativity. It also requires someone willing to be fully inside the work, not just engineering it from the outside.

The approach

Two young men in a room; one with a guitar and wearing a cap, the other sitting at a table with a hoodie, engaged in a casual moment writing music for the midwest pop punk band, Summertime Dropouts.

A man with dark hair and a beard playing a blue electric guitar while seated indoors.

BS Creative wasn't just behind the board on this one. We were co-writing songs on the record alongside the broader collaborative group. Long nights of back and forth across remote sessions, careful listening through dozens of versions of the same sections, the slow unglamorous pre-production work that most people skip and that's entirely responsible for why the finished record sounds unified rather than assembled. Every collaboration was treated as a conversation. The result sounds like it came from one voice even though it came from many.

Top image of recording studio mixing console with numerous buttons and sliders. Bottom left image of a musician wearing a winter hat playing drums in a studio. Bottom right image of a wall of audio equipment with colorful LED lights and controls.

BS Creative co-founder, Brett Verlennich's laptop computer displaying an audio editing software with waveforms and sound control panels, placed on a table next to an iced coffee.

Three young men in a cozy living room, one playing an electric guitar, another standing near a keyboard, and the third sitting and looking down. The room where much of the pop punk music was written for the Minneapolis based band.

Listen Up

Explore the Album and EP! You can listen on Youtube, Spotify, or Apple Music.

Text in black and pink reading "Young and Dumb" with "Dumb" in large pink letters, and black text below reading "Summertime Dropouts." Additional doodles of hearts, X's, arrows, and scribbles decorate the background.

A person wearing sunglasses shouting into a red megaphone with lightning bolts, with text saying 'Summertime Dropouts' and 'No Diving!'

The proof

Over 400,000 streams and a sync placement list that spans television, streaming, and gaming. The kind of cultural range that doesn't happen by accident. It happens when music is made with enough specificity to spread into completely different contexts and still land. Placements continue to come in today.

A surfer rides a wave at the beach with a green-tinted sky. Text overlay reads 'Summertime Dropouts' and 'Rewind' at the bottom.

Group of six young adults standing in front of a sign that reads 'Summertime Dropouts' and 'The Soundtrack' with a tagline 'Chase your dreams and pray for a happy ending' in bold text.

Still working

The album keeps finding new audiences through sync licensing years after release. In 2021 an indie film built around the band used the music as its backbone, bringing BS Creative back in to record actor vocals and handle additional arrangements for the production. That's the value of music.