Live at Project House in Leeds: Slow Pulp

Slow Pulp are uniquely acquainted with the process of regrowth. Singer and guitarist Emily Massey met childhood friends Henry Stoehr (guitar), Alex Leeds (bass), and Teddy Mathews (drums) in Madison, WI in the mid 2010s, kicking off a decade-strong musical bond. Raised on ’90s alt-rock radio and coming of age during the 2000s indie wave, they took a pan-American approach to rock music—transcending the genre’s inner boundaries in service of a sound critics across the board have applauded but struggled to describe—that made them stand out in the small city’s scrappy scene. But in 2018, the lifelong Wisconsinites left their comfy surroundings for the midwest’s metropolis, transplanting from Madison’s rich soil to Chicago’s concrete grid.

This was just the first of Slow Pulp’s new beginnings. Riding high from their second EP’s notable reception, they arrived in Chicago with the wind at their backs. They found their new scene more than welcoming, but other issues sprung through cracks they didn’t know existed. Living and touring together, they realized this constant proximity was “not the most conducive to figuring out how to be a band,” Massey says. “There were a lot of growing pains.” Work schedules conflicted. Massey caught Lyme’s Disease and Mono, and her mother and father, the latter, a veteran musician, was seriously injured in a car crash. She used her time taking care of them in Wisconsin as an opportunity to record vocals with him. These vocals appear on the band’s groundbreaking 2020 debut LP, Moveys.

A 2022 COVID scare forced Massey to write many of the lyrics for that album’s follow-up, Yard, in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, but the band took it in stride again, sending stems back and forth across state lines. “I discovered that it felt good to be completely alone,” Massey says. “That level of isolation was huge for my creative process.” Beyond those parts, though, Yard was a full-band effort, and this synergy is evident from the first chord. Blending the raw power of their early tapes with sharper lyrics and arrangements that showcased their stylistic range, it established them in indie rock’s highest echelon. If Moveys put Slow Pulp on the global stage—on tour with the Pixies and Death Cab and Alvvays, bands they’d bonded over in those early Madison years—then Yard proved they belonged there.

Slow Pulp started the songs that comprise their third album Melodie, due out September 18 via ANTI-, with nothing to prove to the public. But reflecting on past lives and past relationships forced them to reevaluate their approach and, once again begin anew. The result is a record that balances power-pop euphoria, acoustic heartbreak, and the ocean of sound between them.

This time, they looked to their collective past for inspiration. In most of Slow Pulp’s time living in Chicago, lyrics have mostly been helmed by Massey’ (hence the solo trips north). But back in Madison, words flowed more freely between her and Stoehr as they bounced ideas off of each other until they coalesced. The seedlings of the songs that comprise Melodie germinated the same way. “Emily and I were reconnecting with how we wrote together when we first met,” Stoehr says.

“Better Man” jumps off of the wax like a brush fire. It begins with what sounds like the bell at the start of a boxing match but is actually the sound of Stoehr smacking the strings of his guitar behind the bridge to produce an atonal chime. Nevertheless, the track is an epic bout, between the ideal self and the real self, the man we hope to become and the man we are today. As Melodie’s lead single, it’s one of five tracks on the album whose lyrics were written solely by StoehrThe emanation of Stoehr’s words from Massey’s mouth cause some intriguing incongruities, such as the gender swap in “Better Man,” which is even further complicated by the peculiar turn of phrase Massey added late in the writing process to the final line of the song’s final verse: “Maybe lead me to a better man / Who can be someone to tell myself to leave.”

Throughout his creative process, Stoehr never wrote with Massey’s voice in mind. “I was writing straight from the heart,” he says. “I've tried writing stuff to cater to Emily's perspective, but it doesn't work as well because it's hard to monitor my own writing in that way.” Part of the brilliance of this album is that, without looking at the credits, one can’t be sure whether Stoehr or Massey wrote any given track. This is especially true of the songs into which both writers injected pieces of themselves. “Entertainer,” for instance, felt to Stoehr and Massey like a full return to the era when an endless stream of verses and hooks flowed between them. Though the track ended up expressing Massey’s fear that she was doomed to embody the stereotype of the messy, emotionally unstable artist, they created it by combining the best parts from the fully fledged versions they’d each written.

Melodie is too large for any single style of rock to contain. The tastefully folky tracks that open the album are mirrored by electrified slow burns at its end. There’s some subtle dream pop and several breathtaking ballads. But clustered around the album’s midsection are four righteous takes on power pop. Along with “Better Man” and “Entertainer,” “Melodie” and “Red Car” rush forward on the backs of Stoehr and Massey’s perfectly distorted guitars, Mathews’s punchy drumming, and Leeds’s sturdy bassline, heading for either a glorious arrival or an epic wreck.

The genesis of “Red Car,” the album's most platonic feel-good jam, was simple: Massey had been listening to the Cars a lot and was driving in her car when she came upon another car—a red Mazda sports car—that was blasting a song with a cheesy but infectious drum pattern. Back home, she programmed the beat into her drum machine, laying the track’s foundation.

No Slow Pulp song is completely breezy, though. Even as she wrote above her extremely ’80s drum track, forcing herself to lean into its kitsch despite her kneejerk misgivings, Massey knew she wanted to “make it a bit darker,” she says. The track’s lyrics, though simple and catchy, contain a subtext of unrequited uncertainty, the panic of feeling unsure within a relationship with someone who’s ready to take the leap into a more serious stage. The band were struggling to achieve this vision instrumentally until Elliot Kozel, the first outside producer they’d ever employed, stepped in, subtly tweaking the arrangement to give it the anxious undercurrent Massey was looking for.

Working with Kozel was a new experience for everyone in the band, but especially for Stoehr, who’d produced every Slow Pulp album on his own up to that point. Melodie also marked the first time he’d brought Massey into the booth. As an admitted control freak, he says ceding some of that power was hard at first. Quickly, though, he found that splitting production duties with a trusted bandmate and a seasoned pro was just as enriching as sharing lyrical ideas with Massey or instrumental ones with the full band. Loosening the reins allowed him to focus on his enhanced role as a songwriter. Above all, though, it was a symbol of his complete trust in his collaborators.

“When Emily and I started writing together, there was a built-in trust,” Stoehr says. “When I met Elliot, I felt completely understood. He knew what I was about and what I wanted to do.” Bringing Kozel into the fold felt, on the one hand, like entering uncharted waters. On the other hand, Kozel is something of a Wisconsin legend, and Stoehr, Mathews, and Leeds had all grown up as fans of his old band. And beyond his unknowing connection to Slow Pulp’s pre-formative years, Kozel’s chops—and his experience producing for the likes of SZA, Rosalía, and Yves Tumor—helped them take their sound to the next level. “We were trying to go big with this album, and that required digging into the past,” Leeds says.

Slow Pulp are masters of concealing sadness in their most upbeat songs, but they also write pure sorrow as well as anyone. “Not for Nothing,” nestled in Melodie’s geographic center between “Red Car” and “Entertainer,” is a quiet piano song Stoehr wrote about a series of compounding heartbreaks: the heartbreak of feeling powerless to change your emotions, the heartbreak of knowing those emotions will swallow you whole, and the heartbreak of the real-world consequences that ensue. Massey’s appropriately intense delivery, set against Stoehr’s somber chords and a plaintive banjo played by Kozel, is mournful but not totally morose. “Once you forfeit your control and let that feeling in, you're subject to your emotions, and you can't really lie to yourself,” Stoehr explains. “You stop trying to censor your own thoughts and you break your own heart, but it’s also cathartic. It’s a loss, but there’s really no other option.”

If the first 10 tracks of Melodie don’t make you cry, “Slip Away” will. The album’s closer—just Stoehr’s electric guitar and Massey’s voice, as raw as it's ever been—is engineered to absolutely ruin anyone who’s ever felt the need to retreat within themselves to avoid becoming a burden on the people around them. “Walked to the hardware store / I guess you don’t know me anymore,” Massey sings. While unassuming, it might be the album’s most devastating lyric. “I was in my early 20s and out of control and alienating myself, and I was walking to the Ace Hardware in Madison and saw a couple of people I used to know and then saw them ignore me,” says Stoehr, who wrote the song. The incident, though mundane, was an existential gut punch, a confirmation of his distance from the world of the living. Now 32, Stoehr feels less volatile now than he did back then. But while he used to feel the need to partition that part of himself, he’s come to accept that it’s a side of him he needs to learn to live with. “I’m reconnecting to it and trying to understand it as an adult,” he says.

Leeds, too, feels like Melodie is about returning to the past. “There’s the sense of a full circle, tapping back into things and transforming through them,” he says. A song is like that too, he believes: “not just a document of what you feel but also a vehicle for understanding how you feel.” Massey, who returned to Wisconsin to record with her dad this time, too, agrees. “Song writing is always like that,” she says.

“There’s a very cyclical energy to a lot of these songs,” Massey reflects, ruminating on the decision to begin Melodie with its most retrospective, seasonal track, “Yellow and Green.” Beyond its thematic significance, the track’s title is a shoutout to the Green Bay Packers, an organization that counts Massey and Stoehr’s families among its roughly 539,000 partial owners. The Packers also symbolize the tenacity that’s allowed Slow Pulp to regenerate after every challenge they’ve faced: No matter where they live, they’ll always be Wisconsinites.