Last year, Paul Collins was rummaging through his garage when he discovered a cardboard box containing a number of demos he recorded in the late 1970s with Peter Case. Somewhere behind the holiday decorations and haphazardly stacked lawn furniture, Collins had unwittingly stored the entire the Breakaways catalog, the otherwise unrecorded band that filled the gap between Collins’ and Case’s work together with the Nerves and their respective solo(-ish) careers with the Paul Collins Beat and the Plimsouls. Those 13 literally hidden tracks include stripped-down versions of Nerves standards (“One Way Ticket”, “Working Too Hard”) and early takes of later favorites like “Everyday Things”, which Case took with him to the Plimsouls. Collins’ work is more heavily represented, including a Turtles-tinged blueprint for “I Don’t Fit In” and a surprisingly familiar-sounding first take of “Let Me Into Your Life”. While the quality occasionally reflects their budgetary limitations, the songs are raw but never sloppy. Walking Out on Love: The Lost Sessions is power pop in its purest form, with guitars that seemingly race the drums before crashing headlong into the choruses, and for fans of Case and Collins, this collection is one of the most essential things to come out of a garage since William Hewlett hired Dave Packard.