Grampfather, a Kingston-based rock band, is releasing their seventh album, “Laugh Lines,” on April 26. The four-piece band has gone through many iterations since its creation in 2013, with guitarist, singer, synth player and founder James Kwapisz leading the band as his self-funded passion project since he started it during his time as a student at SUNY New Paltz.

“Grampfather started as a three-piece garage rock kind of raw sound [band],” Kwapisz told Kingston Wire. “I’ve been playing with the core four guys for five years, with the newest member joining in 2021. With this ensemble we’ve made three albums together, this is our seventh album now.”

The band hasn’t only cycled through members but genres as well. “With past albums we’ve jumped around genre-wise with rock. We’ve done indie rock, psych rock, but our fourth album was thrash metal,” Kwapisz said. “‘Laugh Lines’ has a succinct indie-rock sound, and is more focused than past albums. We are using songs written on the album as jumping off points for the next song, so they transition together smoothly.”

Kwapisz said the idea for “Laugh Lines” came from the idea that “as you’re aging you get lines in your face, and it’s a nice metaphor because you’ve laughed and cried and lived a life. It’s a very 'meta' album because it’s about writing and music and writing music. Each project we think of as something different, but this was more reflective of what the band’s sound is if someone asked. It feels big and significant.”

Kwapisz said the band took their time with this album. They wanted to let themselves “marinate” with the songs more so they could get more familiar with their sound, allowing them to flow seamlessly between tracks and produce a solid collection in the end. “In 2022, we put out two albums in a year, with our sixth album coming out six months after our fifth album. It’s always better to space things out,” said Kwapisz.

Song notable songs on the album include “Rot in Bliss,” which is the album’s opener, and “In Your Bones.” These two songs, Kwapisz said, get at “the core sound of the band.” These songs feature the kind of melodic vocals and transgressive guitar riffs that both the band and the entire indie-psych rock genre are known for, and each song settles comfortably into this label throughout the rest of the album as well.

Some variations come on “Gondola,” which features Kwapisz playing the banjo and synth, and “Blot,” where he’s on the mandolin and bongos. Their last song on the album, “Complete Contentment,” is nearly four minutes of Kwapisz playing and layering synth sounds.

The band has been playing and living in Kingston since 2019, and frequently perform at local venues such as Tubby’s in Kingston and Terrapin Kitchen (@terrapinkitchen on Instagram), which is a house show venue in Kingston organized at bassist and backup vocalist Jake Offerman’s residence. The band will be having their release show here on April 27. The space is also set up for musicians to have their set recorded; Grampfather went with this location to record “Laugh Lines.”

The other members of the band include Andrew Blot, who is their lead guitarist and, said Kwapisz. He and Blot have a “Lennon-McCartney thing,” as he has been in the band the longest, since 2019. Tony DiMauro is the band’s drummer and has been in the band since 2020.

Upcoming shows include a 4/20 show at the Avalon Lounge in Catskill, their April 27 show at Terrapin Kitchen, a May 4 show at Secatogue Brewing Co. in West Islip on Long Island, a tentative June 14 show at Windjammer in Queens, a July 12 show at Red Square in Burlington, Vt., and a Sept. 7 show at The Tasting Lab in Greenville.

To keep up to date with Grampfather and learn more about the band, check out their Instagram @grampfatherrr, their Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and their Bandcamp, where you can preorder “Laugh Lines” and listen to the rest of their catalog.