[Cover photo credit to Chad Greene]

Omaha, NE Rock band Space To Play has announced their debut self-titled album along with releasing their first single, “Daylight’s Comin“.

Space To Play, the album, is due out September 12, 2025, via Omaha Music Group. You can celebrate the new record with the band’s official hometown release show at Omaha’s Slowdown on release day, featuring Matt Beck of Matchbox Twenty.

The album “came together organically, with no firm expectations other than to make art that felt true to the band.”

When writing the music, bandleader Matt Banta (vocals, guitar, piano) noticed a shift in his approach:

Specifically, in my earlier years, I tended to write to process feelings and what I was going through in life–now, I’m writing purely from an artists’ perspective and am able to be much nimbler thematically.

The album touches on a wide range of themes including “failing relationships, hope in the face of adversity, living life to the fullest, and observations of society.”

“Daylight’s Comin” is “an encouraging tune that looks to a promising future.” Banta describes it as “a song about dreaming big dreams and working to be ready when your opportunity comes.”

The band includes members who have all toured with other bands, but was born in 2021 from impromptu jams. It represents an evolution of Omaha’s 90s Rock outfit Blue Moon Ghetto (BMG) who shared stages with Ben Folds Five, Semisonic, The Urge and more.

The band of longtime musicians is made up of Banta, brothers Clint Thomas (bass) and Kevin Thomas (guitar), Scott Evans (drums) and Dana Murray (producer, percussionist), who has previously performed with Norah Jones, Branford and Wynton Marsalis, Aloe Blacc and more.

Banta says about the new outfit’s goals:

Space To Play, both the album and the band, represents how BMG has grown from a rock band into more of a creative force focused less on what the results will be stylistically and more on the process of becoming the best artists we can be, individually and as a whole.