Mabe Fratti has unveiled a new single, ‘Quieras o no’, taken from her forthcoming album Sentir Que No Sabes – out this Friday (June 28) via Unheard of Hope. Following previous offerings ‘Enfrente’, ‘Kravitz’, and ‘Pantalla azul’, the track is accompanied by an interactive website and music video designed and built by Theo Ellin Ballew. Check it out below.
Ballew said of the visual:
‘Quieras o no’ moves from one phase to another, like truncated opera, and so does the website: one mode of interaction gives way to another that’s totally different. Peopled with a mixture of original footage by Gerardo del Valle and gifs found on GifCities.org, this online world posits a cyborgian future where the computational and biological intermingle. Here, wherever your cursor moves, indelible marks are made: this is not a clean Jetsons-like future, but a dirty, cyberpunk one that registers your foot- and fingerprints.
The same moving images appear at the same moments in the song, no matter what–so, there are key similarities to all experiences of the website. However, each experience is slightly different: the initial gifs appear in random positions and in random sizes, and all elements are draggable, so viewers can arrange them as they wish, like a pile of triggering family photos. Any experience of the site is valid–as long as you keep your sound on, and try dragging everything. Enjoy, and be in touch with @theo_on_silver with comments, screenshots, etc.
The WAEVE – the duo of Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall – have announced a new album City Lights. The follow-up to their self-titled 2023 debut will be out on September 20 via Transgressive Records. Along with the previously released title track, the LP includes the new single ‘You Saw’. Check it out below and scroll drown for the album cover and tracklist.
“‘You Saw’ is a song about acknowledging how seemingly tiny decisions can have a seismic impact on the course of one’s life, how sometimes it feels like the way things turn out are predestined,” the duo explained in a statement. “It’s about reconciling a past version with the new version of one’s self and being grateful for how things work out. It’s built around a rhythmic string line to reflect the sense of propulsive forward motion.
City Lights Cover Artwork:
City Lights Tracklist:
1. City Lights
2. You Saw
3. Moth To The Flame
4. I Belong To…
5. Simple Days
6. Broken Boys
7. Song For Eliza May
8. Druantia
9. Girl of the Endless Night
10. Sunrise
When Dolores discovers Zoey, a sex doll, in her garage, her first instinct isn’t to throw her husband, David, out of the house. Instead, it’s to reflect — to think back on her history with him, and her family dynamics with her step-brother Gavin. What could she have done better? Is she the problem? The doll, which Dolores ends up talking to — sarcastically then intimately — brings up an unavoidable question about what David wished for during their relationship. Was he secretly wishing Dolores was more like Zoey, inert and unresponsive? Or is it just a sexual fantasy he separated from the love he has for his wife?
In any case, David leaves, ashamed, and Dolores is left to pick up the pieces of their fractured relationship. She’s a schoolteacher keeping an eye on a student who might have a secret affair with a much older teacher, but her sister pulls her back to New York City for support after a miscarriage. All the while, she tries to get rid of Zoey, while meeting with Gavin, thinking about their encounters in the past, and trying to get the full picture of who she herself is as a person. Hey, Zoey’s ability to provoke feelings throughout and past the novel is ambitious and edgy, making it another intense and intelligent work from Irish novelist Sarah Crossan, who plays with human emotions and language in a deeply memorable and idiosyncratic way. There aren’t many books — or authors — that prompt you to inquire within yourself after the last words have left the page.
Our Culture sat down with Sarah Crossan to talk about sex dolls, unlikeable narrators, and the ways in which abuse and love are intertwined.
Congratulations on your new novel! How does it feel for it to be close to being out in the US?
It’s always really nerve wracking! It’s totally out of your control. I’ve done the bit I can do, and it’s up to publishers and readers to decide what it’s about. But I know I’ve done the best that I can do, so the bit within my power is completed. I feel proud of myself, and we’ll see what happens now.
You’ve written countless young adult novels, a dystopian series, edited anthologies, and now, with Hey, Zoey, have two adult books under your name. What’s been the evolution of your writing like, and how do you decide what stories to tell?
I did a masters’ in creative writing, so I was writing for adults first, then I was writing a novel. You know these writers — I was one of them — who was writing the same novel for ten years. I was just learning my craft through writing this novel, then I was teaching in New Jersey, in Hoboken, and I was trying to get my grade six students to read. I found Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, which is a verse novel, it won the Newbery Medal in the nineties. Somebody gave it to me, said ‘You should read it and give it to your grade sixers.’ I thought there was no way they would want to read poetry, but they did! I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s not a huge thing in the UK.’ I thought I could try it, so I did, and I got an agent almost immediately. I had never sent out to agents before. I became known as the UK and Ireland as the trailblazer in terms of verse novels, but actually, I had stolen this form! I thought about whether I could make it work for an adult novel, so I tried with Here Is the Beehive, and it worked. With Zoey, I wanted to do something different, and it wasn’t going to work in verse; I tried short prose. I love experimenting with writing — I’m so lucky to have a publisher who lets me do what I want. That’s the best gift, creatively, is just to be given freedom. And so many authors don’t; they have a brand they have to fulfill. And maybe in a way it’s problematic since no one really knows me or what I do because I’m always doing different things. But that’s what being an artist is about — it’s not about your commercial branding, but doing the thing that you love. I’m lucky I’m able to do that.
Hey, Zoey is a product of our AI fascination and fear — Dolores’ life comes apart when she finds out her husband, David, is hiding a sex doll in the garage. What inspired that?
I just saw an article, after COVID, that said there was a rise in synthetic sex dolls. And you can get AI versions, which are more sophisticated than the robotics, which were way behind. And these dolls, they can’t stand up and walk around or anything, but I was wondering what would motivate someone to want one of these. Then I wondered about the partner of someone who would have one of these. It’s obviously about this disconnect in the relationship, and your communication with other human beings. I wanted to write about misogyny, about internalized misogyny, abuse, love, how those things connect. I had this idea for a story, and I wondered if I could find a way to write about these things through this story. When I said it to my agent, that I wanted to write about abuse and women, and I sent her the opening, and she said ‘This is horrendous. How are you going to make that work without it feeling really tacky?’ But she said I should try, so I did.
After initial reluctance, Dolores begins to talk to Zoey, who is calm, helpful, and knows just about everything. What was it like writing these conversations between a human and non-human?
What I did in order to write the book, is when I had ideas, I’d talk to Siri, Alexa, and Google. They’re all gonna talk to me now, since I said their names. ChatGPT wasn’t quite developed then, because I probably would have been chatting to it too. I also had an app that was called, I think, ‘iGirlfriend,’ and I’d talk to her as well. I was having conversations with lots of AIs at the same time, and I amalgamated them in order to create Zoey’s responses. Those were the most fun scenes to write because I was doing it in real life. It’s just interesting the way different AI systems respond in different ways. And even in the writing of it, they became more compassionate and more responsible in the way they responded. I noticed that I was writing, since it took about three years in total. It was interesting to see how AI was progressing in terms of its ability to sound human. Kind of frightening how quickly it changed.
There’s this emotional and devastating undercurrent that runs through your adult novels — in this and Here Is The Beehive, the narrators are so sharp and astute. People so many times sanitize their narrators, and I respect and love that you don’t. Where do you think this kind of style comes from?
Yeah, it was so interesting when I wrote the second book, because I knew Ana in Here Is the Beehive would be unlikeable to so many people, just because she’s a woman having an affair. She’s particularly unlikeable to married women, and I had a lot of married women not wanting to read the book. It was abhorrent to them on a moral level. It was interesting, but I could get it — I had been married. My editor said that she was a bit sharp-edged, could we soften her a bit? And I said, ‘Oh my goodness, she says half of what I think!’ Not even close to being unlikeable, in terms of the worst things that go through my head. We all have these awful thoughts. Someone walks into a room and we’re scanning them, the things we think about people when we meet them and the ideas we have about ourselves and what we like vs what we know is socially acceptable. We’re all a lot kinder and we’re all a lot darker than we’d ever admit to ourselves. It was surprising to me that it was her reaction. I mean, I think I could get much closer to the bone. I’m writing a book at the moment, and thinking, ‘Can I go this close?’ We’ll see.
There’s a scene in Hey, Zoey where she describes the sex doll pornography she’s watching, and that was a huge scene, so much in that was real! I had looked, like, what is it in this pornography, what do these men do to these dolls? And it was horrific. And my editor said we can’t have it, it’s just too horrific to read. It’s cold on the page. There were loads of moments that I had to cut because it was really unpalatable. When I read the audiobook aloud, the engineer said, ‘Oh, this sounds fun, I’m looking forward to doing this with you.’ By the end, he’s like,
‘[heavy breathing]… That was tough.’ I think you have to be aware of that as well. There are certain movies you can enjoy, but wouldn’t watch again. In literature, you have to make sure the person wants to pick it up again.
While Dolores is talking to her sister and friends about what to do with David and Zoey, there’s this parallel storyline at her school between a teacher and a student that gets into dangerous territory — even Dolores gets involved and invites the student to her house under false pretenses. Why did you want to explore this storyline?
Dolores wants to know what men want, and what boys want. She wants to understand at what age boys become men, and boys become culpable. There’s also the scene where the boy is being expelled; he’s in the meeting with the headteacher and the social worker. She’s thinking, ‘Oh, we can hold him responsible for his actions at 14.’ Oliver is a very good boy, [Dolores] thinks he might be having sex with a teacher but she’s not sure. Part of her wants to protect him and get in the way of that relationship, and she also wants to see how he reacts to Zoey, what his feelings are about this doll, and whether David’s reaction is natural. Her question is, ‘What do men want, and what’s my value beyond a body, beyond being a sleep and people doing what they want with me?’ Out of all the characters, Oliver is the one who shows her that’s not what men want. I was really careful. A lot of readers might assume something untoward will happen between them, that she’ll do something she regrets, and I wanted to subvert that. He was useful in a lot of ways. I really like Oliver. I don’t usually like my characters, but there’s just something so honest and vulnerable about him.
Through talking with Zoey, Dolores’ past resurfaces through her memories of her stepbrother, Gavin, and the story takes on a much darker, intense tone. What was it like writing those scenes, and why did you want to include these ideas in the book?
That’s why she’s so disturbed by the doll. It’s not that it’s a sex toy, she says at one point she has her own, even though the battery’s gone. Her moral objection is not to the doll. Her question is, ‘Did David want me to be asleep? Did David not want me to speak, to be more doll-like?’
It’s also about the way in which love and abuse can intersect. It can be very confusing. There are a lot of people I’ve spoken to who have these complicated relationships to abusers — whether it’s a family member, someone they’re in a relationship with. Oftentimes people become complicit in that abuse, and they’re not sure if it was abuse or not, whether it was their fault. In that #MeToo movement, it felt very black and white, whether someone did something wrong or not. Dolores doesn’t think that way, and I don’t think I think that way; so many relationships are complicated and there’s a question mark. I don’t think there is one with Gavin, but I think there can be. She talks, for example, about a man she dated who said that one of the ways she lures him is by saying, ‘These are the things this other guy made me do.’ And he says, ‘You can only do these things if you really love them.’ So there’s a coercive part to that relationship. All of those gray areas, I was interested in. But I only touch on them because the goal in some ways is to have the reader think about their own lives, their own interactions or sexual encounters, or other encounters that are discomforting for other reasons. Just think about it, there’s no answer.
Completely. For me, it really takes a turn once the reader links in their head the similarities between Zoey, this responsive but unconscious doll used for sex, and a sleeping human. Was this parallel the one you envisioned?
Yeah, what I want for the reader is that they’re laughing, they’re thinking it’s a bit of a romp, and then you’re confronted by your own laughter, or your ease in reading it. A lot of people are reading it, and it’s not until they get to the end where they feel they’ve been hit by a bus. If anyone ever had the energy or audacity to re-read it, you could do so in a completely different way.
I think [sexual education and communication] is a lot better now, for young people, in some ways, and in other ways, it’s more difficult. We have pornography educating everyone about what it means to be intimate. I think it’s a much bigger problem than what anyone is prepared to admit. If you talk about it, say, look, ‘Is it a problem that pornography makes choking, spitting, slapping, all of those things seen as a normal part of a sexual relationship, is that a problem? Am I anti-feminist? Not sex-positive?’ Well, no, not really, I’m just asking questions. I think this easy access to pornography is pornography is probably really dangerous for everyone, in terms of the power dynamic, in heterosexual porn, women being the subjects, the ones getting destroyed or slammed. But again, it’s difficult to talk about it, because then you admit you have some knowledge about it. No one wants to admit it. But you also don’t want to act like you’re not a sex-positive person. ‘No, I’m cool!’ It’s such a hard thing to talk about. It’s a difficult thing to bridge in civil society.
You wrote an interesting tweet recently that says it’s tough to speak about a book’s themes because “I write fiction because finding a straight line through ideas is my problem and story writing is my solution.” Maybe this antithetical to what you wrote, but do you want to expand on that idea of how you approach a thorny idea through fiction?
It’s so much easier! Because it’s a story, and someone can reach their own conclusions. Story writing is about creating empathy with one person, and seeing the world through their eyes. I was asked by my publishers in both the US and the UK to do op-eds and articles. I just can’t. I don’t know how to talk about these things in a nonfiction way, where I don’t wrap myself into knots where I don’t say the wrong thing. I don’t think in fiction I can say the wrong thing. I can just tell a story. I really admire journalists and anyone who does nonfiction writing, because you need a thesis and to be able to write in some kind of straight line. With this novel, I didn’t; it’s quite spiky, and it could bloom outwards. The piece that speaks to you, you can hold onto, and the rest, you can let go, in a way.
Totally — I liked how Hey, Zoey doesn’t end on a definitive note, with a solid moral compass on everything you discussed.
I don’t know about you, but I’m so fickle in my ideas. I have an idea now, and then in three years someone will say something and it’ll change my mind. I don’t know what my view is. I’m 46, and I still have no handle on what I really think is true. I think that’s a decent place to be; I’m open to people influencing me. Nonfiction doesn’t allow for that, and this stuff stays online forever. And if it’s narrative nonfiction about your own life you could hurt people, but I can disguise things and create characters and I’m not betraying their privacy. There’s so many benefits to writing fiction.
Finally, what’s next? You said you’re working on another book, can you say anything about its themes?
I’m working on my next adult book, and tinkering with ideas for young adults. I think the next thing I’m gonna write about is grief. My mom passed away a couple of years ago, and it was a really strange experience, and I didn’t know how to write about it, again, without invading privacy or getting sued. But I want to write about the pain of losing someone and being shut out in those last moments. I think I’ll stick to prose for it — I like the short-form scenes. I can miss out quite a few boring bits when I do that.
Kim Gordon has released a new single, ‘ECRP’. Produced by Justin Raisen, the non-album single arrives with a video directed by her daughter, Coco Gordon Moore. Watch and listen below.
Party Dozen – the Sydney-based duo of saxophonist Kirsty Tickle and percussionist Jonathan Boulet – have announced a new LP, Crime in Australia. It’s set to arrive on September 6 via Temporary Residence Ltd., and the new single ‘The Big Man Upstairs’ is out now. The track arrives with a video that uses documentary footage to tell the story of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the “hillbilly dictator” who ran the Queensland government for two decades. Check it out below and scroll down for the album’s cover art and tracklist.
“It’s a story full of such unbelievable corruption and thirst for power that feels sadly relevant to the state of the world at the moment,” the band said of ‘The Big Man Upstairs’ in a statement. “A government rife with corruption and an inevitable explosive response of punk rock, activism and counter-culture. There were some very important movements happening at the time but of course we had to focus our scope more on the music side of things. It just doesn’t seem real. A special police task force waging war on music??”
The duo wrote, recorded, produced, and mixed Crime in Australia themselves. Boulet explained:
Marrickville in the 1960s-70s was a notorious crime hot spot. If a car was stolen, or someone was missing, they’d look for them in Marrickville. Since then, the area has been highly gentrified and slowly the once grimy industrial warehouse lined streets are being swapped for monstrous apartment blocks with palm trees.
We began without any theme in mind, just the beginnings of some song ideas. As we were discovering the songs for this album, each song felt more and more at home in an old cop tv series soundtrack. The Crime theme quickly became apparent. The record feels split into two contrasting sides: The first half is ‘order’, being as listenable as Party Dozen has ever been. Each song is law abiding and dignified in its own place. The second half is ‘disorder,’ becoming more unlawful, unhinged, louder and noisier.
Crime in Australia Cover Artwork:
Crime in Australia Tracklist:
1. Coup De Gronk
2. Wake In Might
3. Money & The Drugs
4. Les Crimes
5. The Big Man Upstairs
6. Judge Hammer
7. Bad News Department
8. The Righteous Front
9. Piss On Earth
10. Jon’s International Marketplace
Los Angeles quartet Dummy have announced their sophomore album, Free Energy. The follow-up to 2021’s Mandatory Enjoyment is set to arrive on September 6 via Trouble in Mind Records. It’s led by the single ‘Nullspace’, which comes with a video from director Emma Maatman. Check it out below.
Free Energy Cover Artwork:
Free Energy Tracklist:
1. Intro-UB
2. Soonish
3. Unshaped Road
4. Opaline Bubbletear
5. Blue Dada
6. Nullspace
7. Minus World
8. Dip in the Lake
9. Sudden Flutes
10. Psychic battery
11. Nine Clean Nails
12. Godspin
Arguably the most excellent film ever made, The Shawshank Redemption doesn’t shy away from top viewer and critic lists even in 2024. Directed by Frank Darabont, the film follows two convicts (played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman) whose friendship leads to a redemption based on compassion.
The Shawshank Redemption’s iconic quotes continue to inspire audiences decades later. Similarly, for those aiming to improve their skills, esports coaching at achievemindscoaching.com offers tailored guidance to help gamers achieve their potential.
Award-wise, The Shawshank Redemption had a tough time, even though it’s considered a cinema classic. The film received seven nominations at the Oscars but no awards, even in the Best Acting categories. Yet, critically speaking, it’s the number one film on IMDB, rated at a magnificent 9.3 out of 10. The film has an audience score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
There are some great quotes from the movie that have stuck with us since its release in 1994. Here are some of our favourite quotes from The Shawshank Redemption.
Quotes from The Shawshank Redemption
Andy Dufresne: Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Red: Sometimes it makes me sad, though… Andy being gone. I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.
Andy Dufresne: If they ever try to trace any of those accounts, they’re gonna end up chasing a figment of my imagination. Red: Well, I’ll be damned. Did I say you were good? Shit, you’re a Rembrandt! Andy Dufresne: Yeah. The funny thing is – on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook.
Andy Dufresne: I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Red: Andy Dufresne – who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.
Red: Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
Red: I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
Andy Dufresne: That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you… Haven’t you ever felt that way about music? Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn’t make much sense in here. Andy Dufresne: Here’s where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don’t forget. Red: Forget? Andy Dufresne: Forget that… there are places in this world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s something inside… that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch. That’s yours. Red: What’re you talking about? Andy Dufresne: Hope.
Red: Same old shit, different day.
Red: Forty years I been asking permission to piss. I can’t squeeze a drop without say-so.
Red: I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.
Andy Dufresne: What about you? What are you in here for? Red: Murder, same as you. Andy Dufresne: Innocent? Red: Only guilty man in Shawshank.
Red: I don’t know; every man has his breaking point.
Brooks: Easy peasy japanesey.
Red: We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men. Hell, we could have been tarring the roof of one of our own houses. We were the lords of all creation. As for Andy – he spent that break hunkered in the shade, a strange little smile on his face, watching us drink his beer.
District Attorney: And that also is very convenient, isn’t it, Mr. Dufresne? Andy Dufresne: Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, I find it decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found.
Warden Samuel Norton: I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you’ll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank.
A posthumous SOPHIE album has been announced. The eponymous LP serves as the follow-up to the producer’s sole studio album, 2018’s OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES. Co-produced by Benny Long, the record was close to completion when SOPHIE tragically died in January 2021, according to a press release. It’s set for release on September 27 via Transgressive and Future Classic. Listen to the first single, ‘Reason Why’ featuring Kim Petras and BC Kingdom, below.
In a statement, the producer’s family wrote:
When we, Sophie’s family, took our first steps towards bringing this project to fruition we contacted the dear friends with whom she envisioned the album. We wrote, “We have been finding comfort in the music Sophie left us, it is a gift that we truly cherish as we try to find a way forward, with Sophie forever at the centre of our worlds.
Sophie didn’t often speak publicly of her private life, preferring to put everything she wanted to articulate in her music. It feels only right to share with the world the music she hoped to release, in the belief that we can all connect with her in this, the form she loved most.
This album has always told the story of Sophie’s musical journey, a cacophony of skill and creative vision eclipsing time and genre. Her unique sound world moves at an emotional level, encouraging the listener to intuitively embrace the ever-evolving landscape of light and dark, soft and hard, to the end of self-love and joyful self-acceptance. Emphasising contradictions of sound and material, Sophie’s work supersedes the pure aural to create the dimension she dreamed of.
Now, it holds another poignant meaning, it tells a life story, from mysterious unknown, through wild clublands, to euphoric immateriality.
Sophie gave all of herself to her music. It’s here that she can always be found.
Allegra Krieger has announced a new album titled Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine. The follow-up to last year’s I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane is set for release on September 13 via Double Double Whammy. Check out the new single ‘Never Arriving’ below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
“In this song I imagine a world without violence, or possessiveness, where we keep moving through life, for the sake of wonder and curiosity, not for the sake of attainment, or arrival,” Krieger said of ‘Never Arriving’ in a statement. “I think the true points of arrival are birth and death, and everything in between, all of the turmoil and fighting, are the makings of our own corrupted souls. It’s a song begging for softness, in a world that can feel so harsh.”
1. Roosevelt Ave
2. Never Arriving
3. Came
4. Burning Wings
5. I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow
6. Over and Out
7. Into Eternity
8. Interlude for the Undefined
9. Absolve
10. How Do You Sleep
11. One or the Other
12. Where You Want to Go
13. New Mexico
Been Stellar is an NYC-based five-piece made up of vocalist Sam Slocum, guitarists Skyler Knapp and Nando Dale, bassist Nico Brunstein, and drummer Laila Wayan. None of the members are native New Yorkers – Slocum and Knapp started performing under the Been Stellar name in Michigan, but it wasn’t until they went to NYC that they met the rest of the group; Wayans and Brunstein arrived from California, while Dale is from Brazil by way of Sydney. Upon discovering that the DIY scene they dreamed of being a part of had effectively just died, they learned how to stage their own shows and cut their teeth playing in the few venues that would have them. Eventually, they caught the attention of the UK indie label So Young, which released their self-titled EP in 2022. They went back on the road, supporting Fontaines D.C. and Shame, and signed to Dirty Hit last year. Their debut album may be wryly titled Scream from New York, NY, but in many ways, it shares the spirit of the Irish post-punk bands they’ve toured with as much as the New York luminaries that serve as foundational influence. The four singles preceding the release attest to the band’s versatility; as a whole, the record is as gauzy as it is guttural, menacing yet tender, and emotionally raw even as it muses on the ineffable. There’s hope amidst the unrelenting noise, even when you can’t find the words for it.
We caught up with Been Stellar’s Sam Slocum, Skyler Knapp, and Nico Brunstein for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the band’s journey, their relationship to New York, their shared language, and more.
Skyler and Sam, you met during your freshman year of high school a decade ago. Do you mind sharing your first impressions of each other? What was your friendship like at the time?
Skyler Knapp: Sam had been going to this school that we went to – he was on the track from middle school to high school, but I was a transfer student, so I went to a middle school in a different town and then transferred into his high school. So, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have any friends. But I remember, from really early on, I was like, “I’m gonna go to this school, and I want to start a band again,” because I had a bunch of bands in middle school that kind of simmered out. I was like, “I need to find someone who I can do music with.” I tried out for the tennis team but didn’t make it because I’m really bad at tennis, so I had to do another sport and joined cross country, where I happened to meet Sam.I was wearing a Vampire Weekend shirt, of all things, and Sam was like, “Oh, that’s cool, you like Vampire Weekend?” From there, we became really good friends and soon started working on music together. It was mostly just him and me in his room at his house, making stuff on his laptop. By the time we were juniors or seniors in high school, we started playing shows with a band of people we had put together, and we realized, “Oh, this is way better. This is actually what we want to be doing.” We graduated high school, we both got into NYU and moved there. We met the rest of the band within the first couple of weeks of being at NYU, and the rest is history.
Sam, what was it like from your perspective?
Sam Slocum: Kind of similar, I guess. I had band since 5th or 6th grade – I think it was the summer before middle school when I first started playing music with friends. We had a band that I will not be sharing the name of, and then there was another group I played in. I had an older cousin who turned me on to indie and alternative music. I was really into bands like Starfucker and MGMT, who are still bands I love. When Sky and I met, it was definitely one of those moments where you just click with somebody. When we started recording stuff, I remember we were always talking about it as a side project. We were still doing things with our old bands, so we were recording, but at the same time we were making stupid videos; it did just feel like were just being creative without any big goal in mind.
SK: The creative energy was really interesting because our old bands were playing really different things. My first band was very White Stripes-y, almost Nirvana-y – the guitar was always distorted, I never learned how to play guitar itself without it being run through a ton of crunch. I remember the first time Sam and I jammed together, he was like, “I guess we should just plug in,” and I was like, “Aren’t we gonna run it through a pedal or something?” And he was like, “Nah, just play clean.” I was like, “Fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.” I came from a more distorted guitar rock world, while Sam grew up playing piano and had more of the musical foundations already down. We became best friends and still are to this day. When you’re around someone all the time, you start to speak the same language. Now, luckily, the band, with Nico, Laila, and Nando, has reached the same point. But those were fun, innocent times – just two teenagers in Michigan with no one else who liked music and nothing else to do, because it was a really boring town. We were just messing around.
SS: Totally. We’ve been saying recently, with all the relative success we’ve found in the past year or two, it just feels like this joke keeps going further and further. Obviously, we take this more seriously than anything else in our lives, but at the root of it, there was just this playful energy, trying to have a good time and let something out. When we met Nico, Nando, and Laila, it was very organic because we just met by circumstance. We were all living in the same dorm, and Laila was in the same program as Nando and Nico. It was crucial for us to all find the same things funny and just enjoy being around each other, and we all did. We focused on playing live, and it wasn’t until we started to get to the end of college that we really hit a stride with getting on the same level creatively and in terms of collaboration – up until that point, it was still kind of me and Sky writing everything. Then everything changed once COVID happened and we started jamming together. I’m very proud of how we’ve all learned to collaborate, because it’s a difficult thing when you’re younger, learning to let go of ownership over ideas and trying to serve the song, no matter whose idea it is. I think the key to it, for us at least, is we’ve found that comfortability with each other on a personal and friendship level. We’re incredibly close and spend a lot of time together, whether it’s about music or not.
Nico, what was your relationship to music before you joined the band, and when did you feel like it was really coming together in that way?
Nico Brunstein: Music was a later thing for me. I started learning bass and making stuff on my laptop when I was 16. I didn’t have much intention to do music in college, it was more of just a hobby. I had my own cover band in high school, which was fun doing with friends, but I always wanted to write stuff. When me, Nando, and Laila started in the band, it was just fun playing live, but it wasn’t a real creative outlet. And yeah, during COVID, when there were no more live performances, there was a really deep reflection of what this meant for me and Laila. Right when the pandemic started, Sam, Sky, and Nando started renting a practice space in Ridgewood, and they were just writing for fun, without much intention behind it. I was studying for school and Laila was busy with work, but we would come in every month or two and we would get caught up on a lot of the ideas. I think that iteration of us focusing on writing music that we all enjoyed playing and had input in was really important for the change of direction in the band.
Tell me about your relationship with the city’s music scene. What appealed to you or made you feel disillusioned around it?
SK: I always knew I wanted to move to New York and do music since I was a little kid. The biggest thing was all the bands that come from here and how inspired I was by them – I was really obsessed with the idea of this alternative lifestyle that people were living. I think a lot of it is because growing up in Michigan, it’s a great state, but very sterile and boring. I didn’t really feel like it wasn’t a place I belonged. New York has that effect on most people in the US, or even beyond – it’s where you go to see crazy things or do crazy things, and I was always very attracted to that. In high school, I was really into New York bands like DIIV, Beach Fossils, all of that stuff, and it seemed like this healthy, organic scene where they were all playing at the same few venues, and the DIY thing was booming. It seemed really exciting. And then we moved to New York, and it was like we moved just as they all basically closed. The Silent Barn, the last sort of vestige of that era, closed a week after we got there. There was really nothing cool as far as DIY venues, and the same three 250-capacity rooms around New York were really expensive and difficult to get booked at.
There wasn’t much cool music in the vein I thought there would be. There just wasn’t anything exciting or any kinship that we felt with other bands. We had to start throwing our own shows, not in venues, because venues didn’t want to book us. We would rent out art galleries through an app called Peerspace, where you could rent a place for like a hundred bucks for two hours, and we’d charge five, ten bucks at the door. That’s how we had to do it basically until we got signed at So Young.
NB: Well, there’s a couple that would have us.
SS: There definitely were. Here and there, we’d get an opening slot at places like Baby’s All Right, which was a big deal for us the first time we opened there, or get put on a four or five-band bill at Mercury Lounge. But, to Sky’s point, we never actually felt good about doing that kind of thing. It didn’t really feel like the space we wanted to fill. It just felt like no one in that crowd was enthusiastic about going to a show with five bands on the bill. It’s not curated; it was just thrown together and mismatched. For lack of a better word, it’s not cool. It’s hard to believe in, really. We played those gigs, but the first time we actually felt in control of the space we were filling was when we rented out these galleries, had friends display art, and played. We did it all by ourselves, and I think people really enjoyed it. Obviously, I don’t think the shows sounded great, necessarily, but the energy felt more like, “This is cool, we’re actually taking ownership of what we’re doing. We don’t fee like pawns in a weird, almost corporate-y New York scene.” That was really big for us.
SK: I couldn’t really believe it, because every other era in New York had produced stuff, but no one was being vulnerable with their music. Everything was tongue-in-cheek, like, “We’re an ‘80s glam revival band.” If you took it too critically, you were missing the point. It was all a very annoying, ironic thing. That was the thing that struck me initially: None of these people are actually giving me anything to believe in. No one’s really committed to writing a good song. It all felt like a waste of time. There were definitely some feelings of doubt that I had; I wondered if I had moved to the wrong place. But the thing about New York that’s always exciting is that if you keep turning enough rocks, you’ll find something cool. It’s not always guitar music – I remember the first time we went to a DIY venue called the Glove, this illegal gallery space that closed. They put on insane experimental bands – not that we make experimental music, but the first couple times I went to those shows I was like, “Now we’re talking.” Even if it’s someone doing a noise set where they’re screaming their head off or whatever, that person’s really just putting themselves out there and being very committed. That filled us up with a bunch of hope.
SS: New York was a very confusing place, it still is. Musically, there were these polar sides to the scene –you were either doing a cookie-cutter, borderline cover act or it’s a guy an illegal art space triggering samples on the soles of shoes. [laughs] It felt weird because we were neither of those things. We wanted to make music that’s accessible and catchy, but we’re trying to make something really honest. It was a weird few years, but I think it made us really driven.
When did New York become something that you realized was at the center of your debut album, rather than something in the background?
SK: I think our first record was always going to be our New York album. New York is the unifying thing between the five of us. It’s been like a sixth member of the band – figuring out how New York works, how the New York music scene works, has always been a unifying factor for us. This is kind of what we’re about, and I find it an interesting New York story to tell. To some extent, I’m very wary that we’re transplants here – we didn’t grow up in the city, we’re not poor immigrants, so I’m very conscious of taking up space when it comes to New York stories. But at the same rate, when you look back at the lineage of New York music, a lot of it is stories of people who move here because they have something they really want to do, and they can’t do it anywhere else. I think in a lot ways, that is exactly our story, so it was inevitable for it to be about that.
On a more direct level – more of what the album has lyrics referencing to – is the fact that living in New York is a very difficult, all-encompassing, hyper-sensory experience all the time. You’re constantly reminded of the city itself just by virtue of going about your day. You’ll be working a job and the train will be late, or you’ll see someone do something crazy; even when you’re trying not to think about it, something always catches you out. Not to get all spiritual or whatever, but it’s like an organism of its own, and it’s always trying to remind you that it’s there. Living in a place like that, I find it very difficult not to talk about it all the time.
For you, Sam, was it always at the forefront of your mind, or did it gradually become the main theme?
SS: I don’t know how conscious of a thing it was, I think it just happened naturally over time. Sky and I talk a lot about the lyrics and themes. One thing we were drawn to before – Sky was a philosophy major, and I studied writing, some critical writing and theory stuff, so naturally we were drawn to big existential or philosophical ideas, and that was just naturally what we would talk about sometimes. This time around, I think we moved away from that a little bit. Some of the songs, like ‘Start Again’ and ‘Can’t Look Away’, specifically deal with New York, but for the rest of the songs, New York is the setting – obviously, an imposing one, and it sometimes drifts into being more than just a setting. The title of the album was something we had for a long time; it was just a funny turn of phrase I thought of when we were freshmen in college. Once that was brought back up, it just made sense. We didn’t overthink it, and I’m really proud of how naturally it all flowed for us.
You recorded the album in New York, but you wrote parts of it while we were on the road in the UK, and you’re on a UK-based label. Do you think there’s a part of the album that’s less about living in the city than feeling distant or haunted by your vision of it?
SS: At least in my mind, those ten songs all take place in the city. We did the vast majority of the writing and working on these songs in the city. There were only a couple of instances where we had to write on tour; there was really only one song we were finishing on our first tour in the UK, ‘Passing Judgment’, which coincidentally has the least references to the city and feels a bit disconnected. The bulk of ‘All in One’ was finished on the road when we were touring with Shame. But everything else in between, we were here in the city, just living our lives, working out jobs, practicing 4 or 5 days a week.
SK: I’ll say this – the reason why we worked with so many British people is because they kind of just took to the music way more than people did in New York.
SS: It’s poetic.
SK: In some way, it fuels the influence of the record. Because this record isn’t us claiming to be these New Yorkers telling their story – New York has always been this untouchable, distant thing, even while we’re living here. Moving to New York has always been this golden ideal that we’ve been separate from. In a lot of ways, it makes sense that people outside of New York take to it more because that’s a more relatable feeling. We’re not trying to be the sound of New York – this album is an ode to our fascination with the effect the city has had on us, as outsiders in many ways.
One motif is this idea of words failing you or escaping you, and the lyrics themselves fall somewhere between raw and obtuse. I’m curious if the limits of language is something you’re conscious of when you’re writing, especially when you’re writing about a place or a memory.
SS: Yeah, definitely. It’s kind of hilarious to try to write lyrics for an album whose main theme is that words aren’t enough. It’s a bit difficult when you start to overthink it. But the way I was trying to approach it, Sky and I got interested in mixing really personal, raw lyrics with stuff that’s universal. Sky studied Heidegger in college, and at the end of my degree, when I was writing my final paper, I was really hooked on this theory of the work of art, where he talks about how art reveals itself and this opening of truth that happens when you recognize that art was made by a person who really felt those things, recognizing that this is someone’s reality being transmitted through art.
SK: We were also really into William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method – not necessarily talking about specific books, but his philosophy behind a really good work of art or story. He believed that if you write a strong enough poem or story and cut up every single line, rearranging them completely, you’ll be able to get the same feeling because there’s this spiritual quality that’s there.
How would you describe the musical language you share as a group?
NB: I think the fact that the five of us have been friends for so long, and now that we’ve been touring for the last three years – just being in a van together, honestly, helps this kind of broader cohesion. I feel like since touring, we’ve been a lot more like on the same page creatively. I think a big part of it is we’re all kind of listening to the same thing when we’re in the van, but also, we’re just understanding each other a lot more as humans. I feel like when we’re writing songs, sometimes we’ll throw out references in terms of what we’re going for, like a specific guitar part or drum part, but overall, the songs came together on their own. The album feels really cohesive without there having been conversations like, “Oh, it’d be really cool to have a song like this.” I think the best songs, and the songs that ended up on the album, were just songs that the five of us were super happy with and there wasn’t much of a conversation behind them. It was just more of like a innate response where we’re just all looking at each other, jamming to it, knowing that this is something special.
SK: I think that’s the reason why all of us have kept doing this for so long. There’s no experience like being with five people, and you’re doing something where you don’t even need words to explain what you’re doing. It’s going to sound super cheesy, but you’re speaking through the instrument that you’re playing, and this natural, universal emotion comes across everybody. That’s what makes it worthwhile. As soon as you try to put that into words, you are getting away from this platonic ideal of whatever emotion it is you’re trying to convey. Words will only distract you from this pure experience that you have when you when you’re making a piece of collaborative art.
SS: The closest other experience that I can compare it to is really falling in love with somebody. There’s times where you’re not speaking and you’re laying there looking at each other – one person will smile, and then the other person will smile, and you’ll keep looking at each other, and the rest of the world just kind of melts away. I feel like that’s the same moment, when the music’s really good and you’re really not thinking about it too much – what people call the flow state, where you’re fully in it and all that exists is the five of you: that’s when we’re really the closest and and speaking the most, in a way.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
