Grief Becomes "Leaving The Zoo" On Renny Conti's New Album "Split Second"

The moments Renny Conti treasures most are the ones where "nothing happens at all." In the album's opening track "Split Second," he writes about sitting by the docks watching boats sway, feeling the city breathe with the seasons. He told The FADER: "I remember that feeling of calm and freedom—moments like that are getting rarer these days."

The self-titled ten-track album "Split Second" arrives via Mom + Pop on September 25th. Conti wrote it while navigating the end of a significant relationship and the devastating loss of his brother to addiction. Rather than dramatizing these enormous losses, he trains his focus on the mundane details, letting ordinary moments carry the full weight of love and grief.

Conti grew up in the Bay Area, raised by parents who were both full-time artists, and spent his teenage years playing in punk bands with his brother. He later transferred from San Francisco State to NYU to study film, but found himself pulled deeper into New York's resurgent indie music scene: "I made a bunch of friends and just kept going to shows—music became the center of my life here." The pandemic gave him more time to focus on home recording, and when the world reopened in 2023, he left film set work behind for the restaurant industry, freeing up more time for music.

In 2025 he released his self-titled debut album, featuring tracks like "Looking at the Geese," and headlined a show at Baby's All Right that same January before signing to Mom + Pop—home to acts like underscores, After, and Magdalena Bay.

The album's most direct confrontation with death comes in the single "Leaving The Zoo," written for his late brother. "This song tries to capture that exact moment of finding out someone has passed, and all the small, fragmented experiences afterward of trying to make peace with it, trying to accept it," Conti says. In the lyrics he sings "when you're gone, being alive is hard work," with the recurring refrain "Leaving the zoo / I would do that too"—comparing the living world to a series of enclosures, an exhibit you're just passing through. "I wanted writing this song to be a healing process," he says. "It didn't change how I think about death, but it did help me get clearer on how I actually feel about it."

Another single, "Mona Lisa," layers images on top of each other: "You cut a lemon with a knife / I spent the whole night in the forest of your life." This kind of imagery inversion mirrors the flickering, uncertain sense of meaning that comes with your twenties. Speaking on becoming a full-time musician, Conti says: "I feel like I mess things up less often than I used to—it feels more possible now to just relax into things instead of blowing everything up into something huge and terrible."

"Split Second" officially releases via Mom + Pop on September 25th.