PawnShop Motel Moves with Under Neon Signs Ahead of a Ten-Single Year
The Denver Duo’s Three-Song 2025 Release Bridges a Busy Catalogue of Emo Pop Rock
Under Neon Signs sits eighth among the popular tracks of PawnShop Motel on Spotify. It is the only 2025 release in a top ten otherwise made of 2024 and 2026 singles. Released on 2 May 2025, the 3:35 title track carries the duo’s emo pop rock on melodic indie guitars. In catalogue terms, it is the bridge between two very different years.
PawnShop Motel have Under Neon Signs in the RockCharts.News playlist below, and their full run of coverage sits on the PawnShop Motel profile. The single came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Hit play, then keep reading for how it fits between their 2024 and 2026 runs.
The PawnShop Motel Catalogue So Far Runs From The 2024 Singles To A Ten-Single 2026
PawnShop Motel are Matt Gray and Stewart Moody, two friends who met in 2015 selling lawn fertiliser door to door in Kansas City. They moved to Colorado, played in other bands together and then started their own. Their 2024 releases opened with Under the Stars in March.
The 2024 run was steady. Endless Ham followed in April, and Haven’t Gotten There Yet arrived in August as a three-song release. Premonitions & No Good Reason then paired two songs in October. Tangled came in November and Spiders closed the year in December, each with an official video, a lyric video and an acoustic video. Swinging at Imaginary Enemies opened 2025 in January.
Then the pace changed. After Under Neon Signs in May 2025, the next release did not come until January 2026, when I WANNA blame YOU started a much faster year. HOSTAGE followed in February and I kinda like it in March. The four-song EP More than broken landed in May, and the double release Me and You and How it ends in June.
In a September 2026 interview with Happy Mag, the duo said they had set a target of ten singles for the calendar year. Number seven was out in late August and number eight was lined up for October. The band’s own site sums up 2026 as a year of beating cancer, recovering from a torn ACL and releasing ten singles.
What Changed With Under Neon Signs Was Format, Length And A Prize-Winning Song
Three things set Under Neon Signs apart in that run. The first is format. It is a three-song release, with Be Your Man and Pretty Psychosis alongside the title track. It was also the first multi-song release since the two-song pairing of October 2024.
The second is length. The title track runs 3:35, but both companion songs run past five and a half minutes. As a result, the release has far more room than the short singles around it.
The third is recognition. In a July 2025 interview with VoyageDenver, Gray said his song Pretty Psychosis had won the Denver chapter of NSAI’s yearly songwriting challenge. It then moved on to a national second round. That makes Under Neon Signs the release that carries a prize-winning song.
The Through-Line Joins Blues, Indie And Rock From A Basement Studio Outside Denver
Across the catalogue, the method has stayed the same. The band describe their sound as their own version of blues, indie and rock. They record independently in Stew’s basement, which the duo treated with acoustic panels and bass traps. They also split the writing, with one of them bringing a nearly finished idea to the other.
Gray learned guitar at Ottawa University in Kansas and took a jazz guitar class there. Today he plays guitar, sings and writes, and he has said he likes layering guitars and synths.
The references the band name point the same way. The Blue Stones show what a two-piece can do with blues-rock riffs and modern rock production, which is the model PawnShop Motel follow as a duo. Similarly, Jack White built his guitar sound on raw, fuzzed blues tones, and that edge sits under the emo pop rock melodies of Under Neon Signs.
That makes the release a good fit for listeners who want melodic, emotionally direct rock with some blues grit underneath. It suits fans of emo pop rock, emo rock and indie rock who like to follow a band release by release. For anyone new to the duo, it is also a useful starting point, because it sits exactly between the steady 2024 singles and the faster 2026 run.
From the RockCharts.News curator team: “Most bands save their strongest song for a big album. PawnShop Motel put an award-winning song on a three-track single and kept moving. That says a lot about how they think about releases: keep the catalogue growing and let the songs find people.”
Where To Stream Under Neon Signs And Follow PawnShop Motel On Every Platform
You can stream the single on Apple Music as well as in the Spotify player above. To keep up with the next releases, follow PawnShop Motel on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The videos live on the YouTube channel.
For news between releases, the duo posts on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Every link also sits on the PawnShop Motel link page, and the official site collects their music, photos and press kit.
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