On the cover art of the new Grumpy album, Unfindable Ring, frontperson Heaven Schmitt kneels over a collection of tchotckes – a stray button, some jewelry, and several tiny animal figurines. The objects are spread out over a glowing yellow floor, as if lava is cooling underneath them. Schmitt’s fingers emerge from a pair of fingerless gloves, glowing orange as they press against the neon floor.
Unfindable Ring is Grumpy’s first full album since 2020’s Loser, when Grumpy was Schmitt’s solo project. On Unfindable Ring, you can now hear the contributions of the five new band members: Anya Good, Ellie Long (Kid Lake), Austin Arnold, Diego Clare (D.A. Crimson), and Lane Rogers. Together, they’ve crafted an LP that reminds me of Julien Baker’s most gutting lyrics and Alex G’s most distorted production. The six of them have captured a new emergent synth-folk sound, as loyal to the country scene in Nashville where Schmitt studied songwriting at Belmont University as it is to the grittiness of New York City, where the bandmates reside now.
Comprised of mostly trans musicians, and several of Schmitt’s ex-partners, Grumpy captures the magic of both the eternal and the temporary on their sophomore LP. I called Schmitt a few weeks before the release of Unfindable Ring, where he spoke to me one free afternoon from the road amidst his tour with Zach Bryan.
You started as a solo project, and you’ve grown in recent years to have a larger band. How has that changed the songwriting process? What have your bandmates taught you as you’ve grown as a project?
Heaven Schmitt: You know, I always wanted it to be a band, and in a way, it always was. But it wasn’t until I found the right people that our identity shifted to a band, a collaboration between six people. With my band, my general philosophy is just to pick people whose tastes I really admire, and whose talent I’m attracted to, who are good people who I really love. And then, just let them fly. I generally like to just write a song and bring it to them, and they kind of have the instructions to inject themselves in whatever way they see fit. Especially with this past album, that’s when our sound really became a band because we were all together for every second of making this album. All of us produced it, and recorded it together.
In other interviews, you’ve talked about being a band of mostly trans people. Your lyrics reference this, especially in ‘OBL’. Tell me more about how being trans influences your art.
HS: We talk a lot about this in the band, but there’s gotta be something about being trans that makes you a master of sound. Like, I hate to say that about myself, but… there are so many trans artists that I think there must be some brain connection with being trans and making music. Ellie said there is apparently a huge percentage of trans people who have synesthesia. But I also think our creativity has to do with the way that being trans makes you a more experimental person. I think you get used to doing things outside of what one might consider the norm. Because you have to go against so much to become who you are. You have to be so creative with your life that I think it makes you a more creative person artistically. For me, at least, it gives me a sense of, like, okay, I can actually do whatever I want, and I’m going to be good to my community and make myself happy.
Since I listened, I’ve been pondering the concept of things that are unfindable. I’m wondering if you have a take to share on what someone should do if they’re haunted by the unfindable?
HS: I was certainly plagued by this idea of, you know, the unfindable. And the song ‘Unfindable Ring’, I wrote for my girlfriend Ellie. In the beginning, I kind of pursued her for a long time, and she was very wary of having anything serious. I think she has some fear of commitment, you know? She has this question of like, “What if one day I feel trapped?” And she pointed out a pattern in me early on, which is that I’m such a grand gestures person, and I was really, like, sweeping her off her feet. But she kind of reflected something that no one had said before, which was like, “Hey, this is so grand and you are so attentive and perfect that it almost doesn’t feel deserved, and it’s hard to receive. I almost question if it’s even about me.” And I had never really questioned that, but after she said that, I was like, “Wait, I think I do have this desire to be so perfect for any partner or any person I’m seeing.” So the song ‘Unfindable Ring’ is about being a grand gestures guy. It’s about thinking that one day I will do the grand gesture that earns me unconditional love. But actually, [relationships] are not really about those things. So my advice for somebody searching for something that doesn’t exist, is forgive yourself and allow yourself to be imperfect. I think one of the hardest things about relationships is being witnessed. It can be so tough to be so known. So knowing that you and your entirety is worthy of love is helpful.
I’m wondering which song on this album was the most unfindable? What’s the one that took you the longest to write and presented the biggest challenge for you to finally feel like it was finished?
HS: Several songs come to mind that didn’t make the album, because we haven’t solved them yet. There’s one that I hope will make the next album, because I love the song, but I’m completely stumped by it. On this record, the one that was the hardest to get right? That’s tough. I feel like if I said this to my band, they’d be like, “Are you kidding me? This one song was so hard.”
Heaven stood and poked their head out the door, asking his girlfriend and bandmate, Ellie Long, to chime in. From a couch in the adjacent room, she waved and offered her opinion.
Ellie Long: I think we were particularly worried about getting ‘Queens’ right.
HS: Oh, I’m gonna talk about that. Yeah, good answer.
Heaven turned back into the room where he was taking my call, and explained a little further about the final track, ‘Queen’, which is the closer and over six minutes long.
HS: I think we had the most anxiety about [‘Queens’] because it’s such an important song to us. It’s a big, emotional song and it’s something that felt like it really existed in the present. So, you know, when recording any intimate song like that, it’s hard to know if I’ll get it just right. It was the one song we did in a proper studio. My whole band was sitting in the control room. I could see them through a window watching. It’s just me and a guitar and we got it in one take. I could see them at the end being like, “Don’t blow it.” We were very particular about what we added to that, and the reason we went to like a proper nice studio is because we wanted a real grand piano. We did it at a space called Living Rooms. It was truly down to the wire; it was the last thing we recorded for the album.
The lyric that I contemplated the most is from ‘Queens’, when you repeat, “Everybody thinks we’re in love, but we’re only practicing kissing.” The reason it has such a grip on me is because it seems to say two things at once. It feels hopeful, like the beginning of a journey with lots of potential. But it also sounds tragic and hollow, like something that is stuck and can’t grow. I took this to mean that the album has an ambiguous ending. As the writer, can you share more about this double meaning and ambiguity?
HS: That lyric is a huge part of the album, it’s like the entire message of the story to me. This song is one I wrote for Anya, who has just been my greatest artistic collaborator. And we dated… well, we tried dating for, like, one or two years. It was off and on, and it just didn’t work. Yet I think we’ve had such an insanely powerful connection, that’s just otherworldly. There’s something spooky and magical and unconscious about how we communicate. For so long, we thought that that meant we were supposed to be romantic partners. When we finally, finally broke up for real, it just was so clear that we’re supposed to be working on something greater together. She’s with me on the thing I want, maybe even more than love, which is to make this music and to make it huge. We have this special way of collaborating, and of course we were attracted to each other throughout that bond. But you know, the kissing was just practicing kissing. Our mission together is something big and important. Our creativity is our connection to the divine and our freedom from capitalism.
The 13 track album features several lyrics that explore this concept—love that shapeshifts yet endures. In the penultimate track, ‘Twenty Five’, Schmitt tenderly sings, “You can always come home to me, Patch you up when you need to be/ I love watching you as you’re changing.” On another track, ‘Last of Your Kind’, they declare that promised redemption always comes back. On Unfindable Ring, we’re all somewhere in between fleeting and forever.
Unfindable Ring is out now via Bayonet Records.
