Lifeguard is the Chicago indie rock trio of Kai Slater (guitar, vocals), Asher Case (bass, baritone guitar, vocals), and Isaac Lowenstein (drums, synth), who have been playing together since high school. Case – whose father is in the experimental group FACS and also played Disappears and the Ponys – and Loweinstein – brother of Horsegirl’s Penelope Lowenstein – formed the band in 2019 while serving as the rhythm section for Horsegirl. Slater, who at the time was playing in another local band, Dwaal Troupe, soon came on board, and Lifeguard released their first EP, In Silence, in February 2020. A couple more releases and they were signed to Matador, the established indie label that reissued Crowd Can Talk along with an unreleased EP, Dressed in Trenches, in July 2023. Last month, Lifeguard came through with their debut full-length, Ripped and Torn, and just kicked off their North American tour in support of it. Produced by No Age’s Randy Randall, the record is buoyant, destabilizing, and incandescent, splicing together bursts of power-pop, dance-punk, dub, and concentrated noise with the playful, organic immediacy of a group constantly tuning into each other as much as their influences. Lifeguard’s music may occasionally sound unsettled or claustrophobic, but it’s never totally, well, guarded; as a collective and part of a broader DIY community, their goal is to keep opening it up.

We caught up with Lifeguard’s Asher Case for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the response to Ripped and Torn, their ongoing tour, band dynamics, and more.

Your five-week US tour kicks off tomorrow in Chicago. Are you more nervous or excited?

I’m excited because of the bands we’re going on tour with. We’re playing with our friends, Parking and Autobahn, and those are bands that I really like. We did a tour a couple of years ago now with Horsegirl, and it was a similar thing where it was just really good friends that make touring in a group a lot easier than if it’s just the three people in your band.

Is it more the musical aspect or the practical realities of touring that’s stressing you out?

I think it’s more the length of it. It’s just gonna be a lot of time spent away from home. We’ve never had to play that many shows in a row. In terms of the musical and performance of it every night, I’m a little bit nervous, but I’m not feeling super stressed out about it. I think we’re gonna have a lot of ways of switching up how the show goes and making it exciting every night, because we are all pretty prone to getting bored easily with playing the same set every night, or playing songs in the same order, or even just playing the same songs every night. I feel like we’re gonna be really figuring out ways to make the set exciting for ourselves, whether that’s playing a bunch of covers or playing old songs or trying to write new songs while we’re on the road.

Ripped and Torn has been out for a few weeks now, and you’ve had the chance to to play these songs in Europe. Given that you had a very specific approach to recording it, do you feel like it started taking on a new life in those recent shows?

Definitely. It was interesting because we made that record over a year ago at this point. We recorded it last March, and last summer when we toured in Europe, we were playing a lot of those songs that ended up being on the record. It was interesting to see people who had seen both of those shows, the one from last summer and the one from this summer, and their response to the songs was completely different. I feel like since they’ve come out, the songs are coming across a lot better. I guess that could be a thing of, now they’re released and people can listen to them so they know what they’re hearing when we’re playing it live. But also, I think just for us, we’ve had a year to really dial those songs.

Another part of that record for us is that it’s different from how we’ve worked in the past because the songs were not really labored over before they were recorded. We tried to have it be a really immediate process, so we wrote them quickly altogether at the same time and recorded them pretty immediately. So all of the little tricks that you learn from your own songs as you play them on the road, and as they exist for multiple years at this point now, have all come out in the live show. They aren’t even in the recordings, but I think it’s perceptible by people even if they’re not tuned directly into the specific parts we’re doing. I think you can tell that we are more comfortable with those songs now than we were last summer or than we have been in the past.

I think you’ve said that the songs on this record were becoming “less live” as you were making the record, and I was curious how you were feeling they were now becoming more live.

Definitely. We also have all of these effects and layered harmonies and electronics that we’re figuring out how to do live too, which adds to that as well. It does sound different from the record, and the way you can make a live room sound is not gonna be so mono in that way that the record feels, but I like that contrast. In terms of instrumentation and using the baritone guitar, for instance, which is an instrument that we used for the first time on this record, we’ve been amping it through a guitar amp instead of just through the bass amp, so the actual way the stage feels is changing too.

The record does have this compressed element to it, which extends to the way you bring together different styles. Do you find yourselves letting loose some of that condensed energy in a live setting, or do you try to keep it airtight?

I feel more prone to let it out when we’re playing live shows, but I strangely don’t think we’ve been doing that. A big part of our live show, at least in the past, has been live improvising and making noise on stage that’s not exactly planned and having it fit in between these songs and contextualize them in a different way that is more, more noisy or more full of abstraction. On the record, we definitely did stifle that. It was going to be something that had more of those interlude parts; there’s a song called ‘Music for 3 Drums’, and it’s spliced together from some four-track recordings of Isaac’s drums and some recordings of guitar feedback. That’s hard to do in a live setting because you can’t recreate the fidelity, but we’ve been learning how to play those songs as our instruments. In that way, we are sticking to the record, at least the way the European tour went. Tomorrow, for instance, we’re playing our entire record in order in full, and we’ll be doing those songs as they sound exactly on the record. But I think with five weeks of touring, we will get a lot more into the abstraction again and improvising as a main part of the set.

When it comes to messing with the order of the songs, is that something that affects your energy or contextualizes the songs in a tangible way for you?

Definitely. We try to change up the order every night; we write a new setlist before every show. To avoid doing the same thing every night, and because I think the feeling can get lost for us. But some sounds will happen on a set that’s like, “Oh, this actually feels really good.” It could be a really strange order that we wouldn’t have thought of when we were sequencing a record, but for this show, it really worked. And then sometimes that gets repeated. Usually, we’ll find a song that makes sense to start and then start every night with that song, same with the ending. But generally, it’s better for us to always be changing it up because it’s interesting and keeps it fresh.

What’s that ritual like of figuring out the setlist before a show?

It’s usually pretty rushed. It’s actually in the five or ten minutes before we go on stage. We’re sitting there, and we’re all very distracted, and it takes a lot of, “Come on, we have to write this or we’re not gonna have a set to play.” We never have the setlists from the night before, so we can’t really reference it. We just kind of throw out songs, and if people agree with that, they say yes. And if they don’t, they say a different song, and somehow there’s a set that’s made. It can be quite intense because it is a very small but still creative decision. Everybody’s interested in playing the set that they wanna play, and to make compromises with that is the same as anything else in our band that takes putting out an idea and having the other two subjecting it to their feedback and their criticism.

Sometimes it’s hard to get over yourself a little bit just because you want your thing to be what happens, and then people have different opinions, and you have to be okay with that. You still have moments of anger with each other or confusion at why someone would disagree with you, and with a setlist, it can seem so middling, but it’s just as important because you’re so focused on keeping up the energy and making sure that everybody is invested.

I see the dissonance you whip up on the record, these moments of disruption, like a fire breaking out that you quickly contain. Are you in any way visual or conceptual when it comes to structuring a record or a show? 

The way that we write our songs and conceptualize our music is that it should not overstay its welcome by any means. We’re trying to make the point come across in the least obtuse way of doing it. We’re not trying to linger on long, slow, meaningless jams. Every part is supposed to feel like it has bite and a reason to be there. And it’s the same with those interludes in the middle, where those things could be obviously a lot longer than they are. I think it would be easier to lose the meaning of those little pieces, but it’s also meant to be like you’ve taped all of your fast punk songs over some weird found experimental thing. The way we write these songs is not meant to be stripped down by any means; it’s more that the actual length of time is meant to be stripped down, and we’re trying to pack in as much bite or memorable poppiness or noise or rhythm into short segments that leave an impression without being super self-indulgent.

It’s been six years since you first started playing with Isaac as a Lifeguard. Do you feel like your dynamic, in terms of the way you play or just communicate around music, has kind of solidified, or does it change from day to day?

It’s definitely changing. I think we want it to change. In some ways, it’s been very similar to when we started. We’re all coming from very different musical backgrounds, and I think the way that that comes across in our music is that we never try to go for something specific. In the past at least, it’s not like we’re trying to come up with concepts for our records – we are into what we’re into, and whenever we’re writing, we’re all pretty locked together on what we’re listening to and being inspired by. We improvise when we’re playing together, then we hammer it out into verses and choruses and song structures. And that has really not changed at all, which I’m grateful for.

But if you go into writing a song or writing music without any type of association for it or any type of direction to go in, it’s hard to feel close to that music, or like it’s really achieving anything when you play it live for people. And I think it’s important to be able to feel like your music is doing something for you or doing something for the people around you in order to make sure that it’s engaging and effective and has a purpose. I think when the three of us can get into our zone and just pump out some quick music that’s not super super outwardly different from stuff we’ve made in the past, it can get kind of cyclical, like, “What exactly is the point? What exactly are we trying to do with this?” That’s something we’re figuring out in terms of continuing to write, because we haven’t written a lot of music since this record was recorded.

You all have your own individual projects too, which are quite stylistically disparate. I know Kai’s work has seeped into Lifeguard on songs like the title track, but I’m curious, more broadly, what you feel like those outlets serve for you, not just individually, but collectively. Do they make the Lifeguard thing more concrete or easier to zone in on?

It’s definitely easier for us to focus on what we actually like doing when we’re in our solo projects, or what we’re inspired by in more of an everyday sense. With Lifeguard, we do have to put in the work of being together and finding things that we’re all interested in. I think the solo project thing is helpful because it’s kind of an immediate gratification, and it can give you this experience with writing songs or sequencing or putting together records without having to have the pressure of impressing the two other people – or not exactly impressing them, but fitting their opinion as well. You can just go straight to whatever the output is gonna be. And then with Lifeguard, it’s more of a compromise. We have those skills of writing, or of taking influence, but it has to be contextualized with two other real people. It can’t just be all in your head. I think of it as something that’s really helpful to a band dynamic, especially one that tries to be pretty even and split up fairly,  just because you can let off steam with your interest and not have all the pressure be on this collective project.

What’s your relationship with your own project, Laurie Sara-Smith, at the moment?

I can bring more confidence to writing songs generally because of the Laurie stuff. It’s easier for me to hear stuff that Kai or Isaac would bring as parts of a song rather than just this part that I can then plug my own thing into. In terms of conceptualizing things before you just start blindly adding music to them, I think it’s definitely helpful. When I write for Laurie, it’s all pretty improvised and quick, and they’re not exactly pop songs. They have weird, sparse vocal parts that are not super melodic, but it’s all directly from inside of me. When I think about my influence for that stuff, I’m not coming up with specific references. It’s just, what do I naturally gravitate towards? What am I able to just put out quickly that makes me feel good about it?

There’s also a big element of it that is the live show, because it’s a guitar and saxophone duo when it’s live. Some of the time, I’ll go over parts with Seamus [Moore], who plays saxophone, and we work out the notes he’s gonna play. But a lot of the time, the songs open up into these longer sections, and we can both just improvise together and listen to each other. It’s not very rhythmic, it’s not very melodic, but it is also very melodic.  It revolves around the main idea of the song, but he is also able to get pretty percussive and strange with his instrument in a way that I think works really well with a delayed guitar. That’s a totally different sort of process to anything with Lifeguard.

You mentioned contextualizing the songs with other people in the band, and part of that on Ripped and Torn are the vocal harmonies. What did you enjoy about fleshing out that part of your sound in the studio, and what’s it like embodying it onstage?

When we were recording it, I don’t think I was nearly as developed of a singer as I am now. It wasn’t super theorized or planned out in terms of what makes sense with how vocal harmonies work in intervals – it’s more so just what feels good and fits the part. For a song like ‘Under Your Reach’, pretty much the entire vocal part is a harmony, where our voices are distinctly differently sounding, differently pitched, but they’re still saying all the same words. That type of thing, I think, is really interesting especially in punk music, because so much of doubling vocals is just singing the same thing or having it be kind of atonal. But then you can make these really subtle changes to it where you are keeping a consistent pitch, but the two voices make it more of a chord. To me, that really changes how that part sticks in your mind, and it makes it more hooky.

What do you hope you take away from this upcoming tour?

I hope that I can kind of get a more complete understanding of what these songs do for people. I feel like the best results of releasing this record for me is just seeing how people respond to it. I want it to make people dance. I want it to make people feel comfortable in that space and feel close to us. It’s hard when there’s bigger crowds of older people that are less engaging to to to see from the stage and reacting to your music, but then you have conversations about it, and you have all of this connection with people that really makes the music make a lot of sense This is part of that thing where you can’t really feel it being objective until you get out of yourself completely and you see it from other people’s perspectives. I just hope that by the end of the tour, I can really see this record as something that is different than just a record that we’ve made or a record that is super internal. I want to be able to disassociate from it, almost, and to watch what people are thinking about it as it’s happening. The way that songs generally feel to me is very impenetrable and guarded or clouded and confusing, just because I’ve labored over them so much, especially with Lifeguard. That has an effect that really strips meaning from them. Now that these will be much more present in my life again, I can hopefully have new associations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Lifeguard’s Ripped and Torn is out now via Matador.