File under: Carefree bangers for a girls' night out

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Personae: Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo

Thanks to both canny use in a pivotal scene of the HBO show Girls and a memorable cover by Sesame Street‘s Cookie Monster, Icona Pop reached mega-fame months before even releasing their debut album. Their scorching dancefloor stomper “I Love It,” penned by dark pop songstress Charli XCX, has been practically inescapable since its first appearance on the internet last May. The duo’s meteoric rise is all the more impressive given that Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo come from a DIY background, and thus handle their own maximalist production on This Is…Icona Pop.

Despite these bragging rights, Hjelt and Jawo remain relatable, using their high-profile debut to promote girl power — just like their collaborator Charli XCX did on True Romance. Their record is full of shout-along songs that are more focused on friendship than romance. While other artists might have struggled with their newfound fame, Icona Pop rose to the challenge of following up their breakout single with a batch of songs that are just as catchy.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller phoned Hjelt — Jawo was out sick — to talk about writing empowering songs, how their hippie families informed their wide-ranging musical influences, and how they opened up their sound for a larger audience.

“I Love It” is the perfect example of a post-breakup party song.

It’s a very angry song with a lot of emotions, but it’s also kind of empowering. When you’re singing “I Love It/ I don’t care,” it feels like you’re leaving something behind. When you break up with someone, you get devastated and you think that you’re never going to smile again and you just want to stay in bed. But then there’s one day where you feel a little bit stronger, a little bit better, then you get into the “fuck it” mode, and the “I love it” mode. You’re like, “I don’t care anymore, I love it.”

Did you try to sustain the feel of that song on this album?

We have some songs that are still empowering and have the same vibe, but the album isn’t 15 songs that sound exactly like “I Love It.” The people that found out about us through that song will get to see some new sides of ours.

What are some of those sides?

We take it down a little on a few songs. Some people just know us for “I Love It” and we’ve been writing this album during a lot of different states of mind and in a lot of different cities. You get the whole of us. Not just one feeling, one emotion, one state of mind.

We’ve been working on this album for such a long time and we’re so proud of it. We just want to show people what we’ve been up to over the past four years. We want to make music that makes people feel so we hope that people feel a lot of emotions from this album.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when you were putting together the album?

Time and the logistics. We’ve been so inspired and have written so much music. We joked that we have maybe five albums worth of songs to release. But it takes awhile to kill your darlings and find the songs that really connect. So that was the hardest part — not writing or creating it, just finding the time to finish it. Starting a song is easy, but finishing it can take some time.

Did you and Aino set out to write empowering songs, or is that something that happened along the way?

When we go into the studio we never think, “Today, we’re going to write a song about this.” We just go in there and it’s our little Icona Pop world and we create based on how we feel that day. Or maybe we’ve been through something, or maybe our friends told us a story that inspired us, or maybe we rode the bus with someone who inspired us. But then I think, it needs to reflect who we are and how we feel together, and we feel very strong together. I think that’s where the message comes from. We are all about girl power because we feel the girl power.

You’re one of the few pop artists right now spreading that message.

Thank you. That makes me happy.

Who are some of the artists you looked up to growing up, and while you were writing?

We grew up in hippie families where we listened to everything from reggae to classical music. When we started Icona Pop, we were so inspired by Prince and David Bowie. We’ve also looked up a lot to PJ Harvey, Tina Turner, Beyoncé, Patti Smith — really strong female artists that are so great at what they’re doing.

That’s a really expansive group. Were you hoping to bring as much eclecticism on the album?

Yeah, I feel like we do that all of the time. We don’t have any rules when we write and we really feel like we can do whatever we want in the studio and call it our pop music. We can go into the studio and can do a reggae song but we can also write an EDM song. There’s a lot of mixed genres on our pop album.

You’ve found a spot in the indie crowd but you’ve also opened up your sound and it’s such a big part of mainstream right now. Why do you think your music appeals to such a wide array of people?

When we’re having a show, we’ve been having old biker guys come up to us and say, “I usually don’t listen to pop music but I love your music,” and then we have the cutest little girl standing in the front being at her first concert, or boys that are singing every lyric. It’s such a mix and that makes us so happy. I think people can relate to our music a lot because we’re not trying to be cooler than we are or anything — it’s just us doing what we love. We’re two normal girls from Sweden, and I think people can feel that it’s genuine and real.

File under: Dark-pop with chart-topping ambition

For fans of: Charli XCX, Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Bat For Lashes

From: New York

Personae: Lizzy Plapinger (vocals) and Max Hershenow (instrumentals, production)

“We fear rejection, prize attention, crave affection/ Dream, dream, dream of perfection!” That’s the refrain of “Salty Sweet,” a song MS MR wrote about signing to a major label — but on their stellar debut, Secondhand Rapture, it would seem that the duo’s fears didn’t materialize. Not only do Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow deliver an array of haunting, period-skipping pop gems: They strike a rare balance between maintaining their DIY background and opening up their sound for a larger audience to enjoy. By meshing classic pop with more experimental sounds, they’re making up their own rules, as well as borrowing from the playbooks of some of the bands Plapinger helped launch on her label Neon Gold, like Passion Pit, Gotye, Ellie Goulding and Icona Pop. MS MR’s approach is similar — as they put it: “Pop rooted in an indie ethos.”

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with each of them about the transcendent power of pop, embracing Tumblr as a way to give listeners visual context, and their ambitions for this project.

On keeping their project under wraps:

Max Hershenow: So much of this record is about the fact that no one knew that we were doing it. Our friends didn’t even know. No one but the two of us was hearing these songs for a really long time, which means that the music comes from a genuine place.

Lizzy Plapinger: When I started writing on my own, it was a very private thing — it didn’t feel appropriate to let other people know that I was exploring music because of my work on the industry side of things. I had started to make a name for myself with Neon Gold. We didn’t want the music to be judged, for better or for worse, by my reputation and name. We wanted to let the music come out. There was no pressure.

Hershenow: Nothing about the project was premeditated. It all came very organically. It wasn’t until after we had collected enough material to release an EP in May 2011 that we thought, “OK, maybe we are a band and need to figure out a name.” We liked the anonymity of MS MR and the fact that it’s formal but also really informal and genderless.

Plapinger: There was something sacred about that experience, and Max and I bonded more because it was a secret. The other side of it was that Max and I are very much a pop act — we love pop and totally embrace it — and we talked a lot about pop music [getting] a bad reputation because it becomes so much more about the personalities or the celebrity aspect of a project rather than the music itself. That’s not something that we’re interested in — and it’s not our personality. So we wanted the music to stand on its own and be recognized, I hope, as credible pop artists that weren’t coming from a machine.

On the darkness of their standout single “Hurricane” and the rest of the album:

Hershenow: We wrote the album in 2011-12, years shrouded in potential apocalypse and impending doom. We write our best songs when there’s a storm coming or a sense of unease in the air. New York City becomes electrified in those moments. “Hurricane” is obviously the most exaggerated example. I wrote the track the morning after Hurricane Irene passed, sent it to Lizzy, and she sent me lyrics and the melody within an hour. We recorded it the next day. It was the fastest we’ve done a song. It just kind of poured out of us.

Plapinger: Max and I love this juxtaposition of extremes: Really dark elements combined with the lighter pop sheen. Sometimes the music offsets the dark lyrics and sometimes the lyrics brighten the music. It’s all about combining those unexpected elements, just like our love of collage and visuals. We’re always hoping to bring together things that shouldn’t fit together but do. When people meet Max and me, we’re much lighter and normal than people would expect but I think there’s a real darkness in us — in everyone — that’s difficult to communicate right off the bat. But, because we were writing in secret, I think we allowed ourselves to really go there and explore those darker sides of ourselves because there was no pressure or fear of exposing that.

On the story behind the gorgeous strings-laden “BTSK”:

Hershenow: From “Hurricane,” I really loved the French horn and became obsessed with that sound. I wanted to continue to explore that on “BTSK” and let it be super orchestral and ethereal. It’s a MS MR take on a power ballad. It’s pretty poppy at its core but the melody is so weird and the lyrics put you off balance because they’re not what you expect.

Plapinger: As we were writing this album — it sounds cheesy, but — I fell in love. It was nice for me to explore that other side of my personality and write a pure love song. “BTSK” is about the process of me [going] from a sadder place in my life to finding someone who made me happy.

On bending pop into new shapes:

Hershenow: One of our goals is to push the boundaries of pop — what you can include and still [call] it pop. We’re just starting that exploration. As we develop as artists, we’ll continue to bring in new things. We both have very different backgrounds in music and most of the overlap is pop. I grew up listening to lots of folk and rock like Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Natalie Merchant — that range of things has given me an appreciation for good songwriting. As I grew up, I started listening to more pop. I have a deep love for pure pop like Robyn and Beyoncé. I think Charli XCX has a really incredible, interesting ear for melodies that I think Lizzy has.

Plapinger: Max and I come from different backgrounds in terms of our relationships with different genres but we overlap in our love and appreciation of pop. Pop is an awesome term because it means everything and nothing at the same time. It can be found in any genre, whether it’s electronic, R&B, rock, punk, folk, country. So for us, it felt like the door was wide open to experiment. I feel like every song on the album has its own personality in that way. It’s an experiment with all of those different genres and time periods. I can’t shirk the bands that are deeply rooted in my listenership: Beach House, the Weeknd, Lauryn Hill, Cocteau Twins and Boards of Canada. We’re using our own voice to put a spin on the artists we grew up listening to.

On pairing their music with a fully-formed aesthetic:

Hershenow: Tumblr allows us to create an environment in which we want our music to be listened to, for free. Making music in the 21st century, people are going to be listening to your music in the environment of their computer screen no matter what so I think artists have the opportunity to control what that environment looks and feels like.

Plapinger: We’re always looking for interesting avenues to relate to an audience, whether that be Tumblr, or a physical CD or vinyl. It’s about creating a balance between those industry personalities.

Hershenow: We’re both very visually inclined and that possibility excited both of us, so we really took it to the next level with Tumblr. We created a rich landscape that mirrors [our] sonic landscape, so they work in tandem. What’s cool is that because we could do it for free, and make the record so cheaply, we worked in secret for so long that we developed a core identity as artists both musically and visually. That’s allowed us to maintain control over every element of the project — even though we’ve continued to bring more people to the team. Even now with our major-label record deal and a lot of people helping out, every decision and creative choice comes from us, which is an opportunity I don’t think a lot of artists at our level have.

On the merging of indie and pop:

Hershenow: I think it’s a healthy push for both things. That’s happening in mainstream pop as well. Gotye, Foster the People, Mumford & Sons, or even Adele — 10 years ago you couldn’t have imagined those musicians being in the Top 10. There is a shift combining [to] indie elements in pop music. I think it’s a really exciting time to be making pop. There’s no limitation on what you can do or what you want to bring into it.

On taking career cues from Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem:

Hershenow: We’re really proud of the fact that our music is DIY and independent. That’s the impetus for our project but we also have big aspirations. We want to make this a long-term thing and we want to make it a career. Those things are balanced in that relationship. For me, it’s important to maintain that sense of exploration and curiosity. When people ask us, “Who are your inspirations?” It’s hard for us to nail them down but the artists we look to are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem, who played the long game and stayed really true to their visions while becoming increasingly popular and building it in a really organic and healthy way. That’s sort of the trajectory that we look toward.

Plapinger: We’re incredibly proud of our indie and alternative roots and that’s something we always hope to stay true to but Max and I are ambitious people and we have massive aspirations. We’re always like, “How are we going to do this for the rest of our lives? How are we going to grow as a band? How are we going to get to headline Glastonbury?” — which is, like, my ultimate dream in life. We really want to prove that we’re much more than a buzzy band. The careers that we admire in other people are Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. Those are bands that have always stayed true to their left-of-center aesthetic but write great music and have really grown with their audience. It’s not about choosing whether we need to be indie or mainstream. Those worlds are colliding more than they ever have. There’s an opportunity to bring those universes together so I think we’ll always play to those extremes.

File under: Dream pop with classical roots

For fans of: James Blake, Cocteau Twins, Bat For Lashes, Beach House, Bon Iver

From: London via Guernsey

Personae: Kate Sproule (vocals, lyrics), Stevie McMinn (acoustic guitar), Sebastian "Bassi" Fox (production, electric guitar), and Alex Mitchell (drums)

When Kate Sproule started Mt. Wolf in 2011 with her childhood friend Stevie McMinn and his college mates, she’d hardly sung a note. Still, she was so committed to pursuing music that she turned down her first post-college job offer to stick with the band. It’s a risk that seems to have paid off: Mt. Wolf’s delicate indie rock stands out among London’s current sound sculptors, savvily blending bass music, folktronic and indie R&B. Only two EPs into their career, Mt. Wolf have already established a signature sound that’s organic and soothing even while Sproule’s lyrics tackle emotionally-abusive relationships and the drabness of 9-to-5 life.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Sproule about the darkness underlying their Hypolight EP, the far-out space where it was recorded, and how it felt to receive props from Diplo for their cover of Usher’s “Climax.”

On bringing together their knowledge of different genres:

I’d never been in a band before, but my brothers were always handing me amazing records like Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Massive Attack. I had formal training, [both] classically and in jazz piano and violin, and I did a bit of vocal [training] at university. I had a classical choral scholarship at Cambridge, so I sang quite intensively. I’m sort of still obsessed with vocal harmony and the range that you use in classical; it’s rare in mainstream pop music. I had to learn how to let go of all that training, but there are definitely undercurrents of it. The guys all used to play in guitar bands. Our drummer played heavy rock and Stevie took me along to see him. It was so loud, I had to put my headphones in. So we’ve tamed that side [of him] since we’ve become Mt. Wolf.

On rebelling from her classical roots:

My mom and dad were very musical people. They met when they were classical singers in London, so that was quite an influence growing up. The school at which I trained was well known in the UK, and quite intense. We were made to practice extensively, and it was quite a rigid classical music regime. By the end, I had grown tired of that and wanted to be a bit more expressive and write my own music rather than interpreting other people’s compositions. There’s a definite catharsis I found in writing something from scratch that I didn’t find with the more formal stuff. I guess Mt. Wolf is a rebellion from that; letting go and doing what you want is quite freeing when you’ve trained extensively. This was the first time I’d ventured into actually making three-minute, four-minute songs.

On differentiating their music from London’s sounds right now:

London has just exploded electronically over the last few years. As much as I think it’s really interesting to draw influence from what’s going on in London right now, we like to keep our own methods.

We like to draw on lots of different stuff and play around with it. Our songs are very structured in a lot of ways, and they come across more like a band’s than some of the more sprawling electronic compositions. When we play live, we play everything live. We don’t need any kind of backing track or decks. So for us, it’s more a case of picking from different things that we like. Our sound is very sample [based]. Rather than using synths and programmed sounds, we try to manipulate acoustic recordings. We’ll have a guitar line or a vocal line that is sung in, and then we chop it up. We can play around with it in Logic, play around with it electronically, reverse it, sample it again, and make a rhythm out of it. So we’re basically trying to recycle acoustic sounds to create the soundscape that you hear.

The story behind the title of the Hypolight EP:

I got a bit obsessed with the idea of the space that’s created just beneath light, where it’s almost darkest. I thought of a street lamp, and how you get that dark space just under the glare of the street lamp, and what that meant across a number of themes. The EP sort of muses on how to break free from that really dark space. So it’s quite solemn and it’s quite somber. I always find it interesting and surprising when listeners get a lot of positivity from our songs, or find them quite relaxing. For me, these songs are the inner workings of something dark and difficult. It’s quite emotional for me, and almost disturbing. So it’s funny when people say they find it relaxing, because I find it quite the opposite. Musically, it’s more confident than our first EP but it’s a lot more fragile, in terms of [the] darkness and sadness it talks about.

On their melancholic lyrics:

I get obsessed with imagery that weaves its way in and out of my life. “Veins,” for example, I wrote quickly in the confines of an office space looking over the City of London — all the busy people dressed in black wandering around. It’s basically a song about trying to break out of something, a place or a feeling that you don’t want to be, and thinking about how to get somewhere else. “Shapeshift” is about the feeling that you’re being held in an emotional place, trying to get away from something or someone that’s not allowing you to break out. That song is an emotional tussle — you know you should be getting away, but so many natural instincts make you want to stay. The whole EP is about lyrically trying to break into new, happier ground.

How their cover of “Climax” came about:

We were asked to do this show last summer in London, a really great project called The Coveryard. A girl I went to university with gets together an orchestra and then invites an artist to come along and have their songs reworked or perform covers. So she asked us to do [Massive Attack's] “Teardrop” — which was also amazing — and then we chose to do “Climax.” At first I was a bit skeptical of doing the song, I couldn’t quite hear how it would sound. But I think it translated pretty well [and] we brought kind of a new dimension to it. We were pretty amazed to see that Diplo mentioned it on his Facebook wall and seemed to enjoy it. So that was a big comfort to us, that we hadn’t totally ruined someone’s song.

On the studio space where they recorded the EP:

Bassie, who produces all the stuff, has a studio down in the countryside in Dorset. We went down there in January and recorded it in front of this huge bay window that overlooks the English countryside, and it was just beautiful. There’s nothing for miles; just green hills. It was a great place to do it [and] encapsulated that disturbing and isolated headspace on the record.

On the meaning of their name:

There’s a song on the first EP, Life Size Ghosts called “Cry Wolf,” which we wrote before we named the band. We found the wolf imagery quite alluring. It’s a dangerous creature, but [it also] has this mysterious element. We liked the idea that [Mt. Wolf] might be somewhere that doesn’t really exist and is ethereal but also has this element of darkness and potential danger. When we actually found out that it was a real place, it made sense to us because our music sounds celestial and otherworldly but at the same time the subject matter is pretty down-to-earth and grounded in real time and a real place. Obviously it’s not anything new in terms of band names — quite a lot of wolves out there.

File under: Spellbinding breakup rock

For fans of: Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Kills, The Cure, Lightning Dust

From: Chicago

Personae: Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo

At this point, the breakup album has been bent into countless shapes. So rather than try to re-shape it, on their debut album My Gold Mask’s Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo simply amplified its effects. They didn’t skimp on dramatics, with Rochelle’s pleading vocals, Armondo’s spiraling guitar riffs and lyrics that grapple with psychosis and reference Gothic literature and Italo horror flicks. The result achieves a spellbinding emotional intensity that’s easy to inhabit.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller chatted with the duo about their Jane Eyre-meets-surf-rock aesthetic, dealing with panic attacks through song, and maintaining a sense of humor throughout their theatrics.

On being influenced by Chicago:

Gretta Rochelle: We do a lot of our writing during the winter. It gets really frigid here, which lends a hand to our writing. We bury down in our studio, which is this warehouse that doesn’t have heat.

Jack Armondo: Chicago influences our music environmentally, but not as much musically. Stylistically, there are a lot of great Chicago bands, but there aren’t a lot that we fit in with.

On the origins of My Gold Mask’s aesthetic:

Armondo: I was always in more hard rock and pop-punk bands, which is very different from what we do now.

Rochelle: I had played in high school riot grrrl bands — I love me some Bikini Kill — and a rock-pop band before this. When we first started, we experimented with different sounds and tones and vocal approaches.

Armondo: We’ve said from the beginning that there aren’t any rules for what My Gold Mask can be. Our first nine songs were really different. There are clues in all the early EPs that have kind of led to our heavy vibe now. The album is a natural extension. We wanted to hone in more on specific feelings: lost love, longing and conflict of emotion — wanting something even if it’s not good for you and pursuing it anyway.

On taking inspiration from Italo horror films:

Armondo: When we were writing Leave Me Midnight, we were on this Giallo kick — old Italian murder-mystery, horror films from the ’70s. There’s usually a lot of psychosis involved, visceral moments. It can be kind of hokey, but that mood, tension and dramatic feel is something that we try to do with our music. We try to create tension and a cinematic [feel].

Rochelle: Suspiria is one of the most gorgeously-shot horror films from that time and has so much beauty and darkness. It inspired me to play around with layering vocals and try to capture that same dark beauty.

Armondo: The album art was our tribute to [Suspiria director] Dario Argento, but we didn’t want it to look exactly like it was lifted from the movie. We wanted it to look like something from the past that could also be from the future. We wanted something that was pretty, but also foreboding and a little mysterious.

Rochelle: The album deals with duality, which we tried to capture in the artwork and the title: Leave Me Midnight, can be either inviting [midnight] or warding it off.

On writing about panic attacks first-hand:

Rochelle: A lot of times, I write from personal experience. I feel like I have to have experienced something to be able to convey it accurately. I suffer from panic attacks, and “Lost In My Head” is very true to that. It’s a very personal song to me.

Armondo: That song was something Gretta really wanted to talk about. Because she deals with panic attacks, the way she talks about it in the song is very accurate to the way it feels.

Rochelle: People are always talking about stress or anxiety, but when you live with panic attacks, that feeling that lasts about 20 seconds feels like death for an entire day. So I thought it was important to flush that out for myself.

On the album’s Gothic moments:

Armondo: “Wound,” to me, sounds like someone that’s trapped in this big old Victorian house in this relationship with someone who is completely neglectful. This person is left alone in the house and is sort of numb to the whole situation. A lot of the album has to do with relationships that didn’t turn out the way you imagined when you started. Love and loss and conflict of emotion – wanting something even if it’s not good for you and pursuing it anyway — are all themes on the album.

Rochelle: It’s a lot about the bittersweet moments that may not be so healthy for us, but we crave those things regardless.

On Gretta’s zig-zagging vocals:

Rochelle: My vocals emulate a drugged-out state on “In Our Babylon.” It’s one of those party songs about a party you shouldn’t have gone to.

Armondo: It’s about the downside of partying like staying too long and thinking, “Oh God, I should go home, but I can’t.”

Rochelle: I want the listener to get dropped into the song and kind of swim around with us. I think after a couple listens the lyrics will pop out.

Armondo: We like having a little bit of murkiness in our lyrics. When I listen to music where you can’t hear the lyrics too well, I almost listen closer, because I’m trying to hear and understand. That can draw you into songs, and that’s why things aren’t ultra-clear. I think our songs grow with a few listens. That can be a dangerous game in today’s world, when people can listen things only once and move on, but we still like music that reveals more the more you listen.

On balancing the darkness with a sense of humor:

Armondo: We’re lighthearted people — we’re not sitting in a cave wearing monk outfits. We take our art seriously, but we think it’s important to have a sense of humor in our personal lives. We weren’t trying to be campy on the album, but at the same time there is almost a melodrama to it, and we’re aware of that. Like, “Burn Like the Sun” has a lot of post-apocalyptic imagery — “letting it all burn like the sun” and the idea of watching things melt. It sounds like a natural disaster, but that’s because some relationships are like natural disasters!

File under: Deconstructed R&B with art-pop sensibilities

From: New Orleans

Personae: Arthur Ashin

Call it a case of either good timing or musical clairvoyance, but Autre Ne Veut’s Arthur Ashin beat many of his indie peers to the punch when it comes to re-framing R&B. The Connecticut-born musician premiered his falsetto’d, synth-laden take on the genre in 2010, and has fine-tuned it with each new release. Anxiety, his sophomore album, is his most wrenching to date, pushing his unhinged vocals and diary-like lyrics about a failed relationship to the forefront. He’s still finding ways to outstrip his contemporaries too, either with gospel-nodding harmonies — contributed by the Zambri sisters, Cristi Jo and Jessica — or with the unparalleled earnestness in his vocal delivery.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Ashin about his love for soul and R&B, his willingness to write about the failure of a relationship while that relationship was still in progress, and how his study of psychology informed his music.

On the roots of his moniker, Autre Ne Veut:

Years ago, I was up at the Cloisters, a metropolitan museum on the Upper West Side with a lot of Medieval artifacts, and there was a gold and amethyst hat ornament and on the back was inscribed “Autre Ne Veut.” I can’t verify this at all — in fact, I’ve even called one of the historians there who says that there’s no evidence of this being true — but I have this memory of someone telling me that it was a gift from a French duke to his mistress. I can’t speak a lick of French but it translates to “I want no other.” I thought the tension of the space between what one has and what one wants was kind of poetic. I chose it then and I’m stuck with it now.

On his musical beginnings in college:

I had a rock band for a while and [then gradually] started making Brian Eno-rip off music for cinema. My band was ’90s-nodding alt rock and had a Pavement, Yo La Tengo vibe. I screamed on top a lot. I’ve always been into songwriting and, except for a stint trying to make ambient electronic music, it’s always been something that I’ve thought a ton about. To me, songwriting is the crux of everything I do.

On his move from away from rock:

I’m a big folk music fan still; I love Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classic female folk songwriters. I love, love, love Van Morrison: Astral Weeks is one of my favorite records, ever. But rock isn’t my thing now. I feel like rock is a technology that’s really reached its limit. I like music that sounds like it’s pushing some sort of boundary and, to me, that’s what’s exciting about hip-hop and R&B. It’s still an evolving form and people are constantly looking for new sounds, and even the highest level of popularity. There’s still new things happening and new approaches, and I don’t think that’s really happening in rock. I’m trying to work against what’s there while still maintaining a healthy level of respect for what’s come before me. My approach is a little bit different than other peoples’, in terms of production in particular.

On re-imagining R&B without nostalgia:

I have problems not being nostalgic enough in my life. Even my first record — which, incidentally had a lot of similarities to [other music that was nakedly nostalgic] — I was not going for that. Any similarities [to earlier music] came from being an amateur with synthesizers, which a lot of people were in the ’80s, because they were just getting their hands on them. I’m against nostalgia as a creative practice. I listen to a lot of old stuff, but it’s not because of nostalgia.

I listen to lots of R&B, and have all of my life, so I don’t mind being classified as R&B. [Anxiety] is definitely a pop record. I’m working against it as much as I’m working with it, but I’m definitely working within those modes on the record. The musical references on my previous recordings were more classic soul, and I think that the Stax Records paradigm for songwriting is at the heart of everything I’ve ever done. I was definitely looking to make something more contemporary on this record, so a lot of the melodic decisions were more related to R&B rather than soul or reggae — which my older stuff nodded more heavily to.

On his tribute to Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”:

I’m pretty unsentimental, but Whitney Houston was unbelievable in the way that she walked that line between making soul, gospel, R&B and pop. The restraint that she had — and everything about her — freaks me out. I was pretty bummed out when she died and wanted to make a little homage, so I titled my song after one of hers.

On keeping his identity under wraps for so long:

Music has been my fantasy — and the fact that anyone cares at all is amazing — but my big Plan B was to be a clinical psychologist. My music started happening and I wanted to preserve a clean Google search. Clinical psychology is super conservative as a field and it’s also really rigorous and competitive and it’s one of those things where it’s supposed be your priority 100 percent. With jobs and fellowships, I don’t want the first thing that comes up in a search to be a video of me jerking off on stage.

On bonding with How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell over their chosen genre and student status:

He did an interview for Village Voice a few years ago and the way that he wrote felt so private to me in an exciting way, so I hit him up while he was still doing his mixtapes and we’ve been in touch since then. I don’t know how he multi-tasks — all I’ve done is complain to him about it.

On his diary-like lyrics:

I do stream-of-consciousness singing — I mostly sing on the spot. Most of the ideas are really personal and are about relationships I’ve had with different people and complicated moments that I don’t really know how to deal with, so I put them into songs. “Play By Play” is a song about jealousy and paranoia. “World War” is a portrait of my relationship with an ex and some of the difficulties with that. Those two are the most powerful to me and were the hardest to deal with.

The record was written over the past three years. I was in grad school and intense psychoanalysis, and the record is about this period of my life where I felt particularly overwhelmed and anxious about a lot of things. It was interesting: I was in a relationship at the time and the songs are not all positive, and her response was complicated. But, at the end of the day, the difficulties are what make music feel important.

On championing his earnestness:

I’m a super sensitive dude, really fragile, but I also function in the world. So I have to take myself with a grain of salt. On one level, I’m being completely earnest and on another level I’m aware of the fact that it’s kind of corny to be as earnest as I am. I spent my whole life hiding from my earnestness so there is a wink in there, a little bit. But I get more out of people taking it seriously, even if I can’t.

On putting his vocals at the forefront of the record:

I think it’s something you have to do at some point: strip away the veils and try not to hide. I felt ready. The recording space is a safe space for me. I loved being in the studio and working with Dan [Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never]. He’s been my music consultant since I started demoing out this project in 2005 — he was the first person to hear it. I’ve been a singer for a long part of my life and I’ve been a vocalist in live projects before, and I think I was trying to make things more complex than I needed to in my earlier releases. I decided this time I’m going to really sing and see what happens.

File under: A warped crossbreed of glam rock and riot grrrl striped with piano jangle and melodic hooks

For fans of: T.Rex, Bikini Kill, Ronnie Spector, Patti Smith, Bat For Lashes

From: Toronto via Chicago

Personae: Meghan Remy

That Meghan Remy’s retro solo project is called U.S. Girls is perhaps the first indication of the duality lurking in her music. “I knew I was going to be only one person making music, but I thought the plural was funny,” she explains over the phone from her Toronto home. Her playfulness might seem unexpected given the gravity of topics she writes about – abortion, depression, suicide, lost love and loneliness – but there’s a tug-of-war that takes place throughout her four-year career. That especially comes across on her most recent full-length, GEM. On it, Remy graphically catalogues a variety of women’s issues while remaining squarely within the realm of pop, pairing devastating lyrics with light-hearted melodies.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Remy about marrying feminism with pop, her riot grrrl beginnings, and working with her husband and co-producer Slim Twig.

On starting a riot grrrl club in Joliet, Illinois:

My first ever boyfriend, in junior high, was really into punk and hardcore music so he gave me Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped and I got into that scene. I tried to start a riot grrrl chapter in my town and put up flyers for the first meeting but only one person came, and she became my friend. As I entered high school, I met a few more people through shows, but I didn’t have many friends who shared my interest. When you’re forced to be alone, you get really good at entertaining yourself. Music was my outlet throughout school and got me excited about life.

On making pop music from a distinctly female perspective:

Everyone’s experiences are unique, but I would like to live in a place where, if I had to be a teenager again, I could read and listen to things that somewhat prepared me for the future – like women openly speaking about their bodies and periods and not attempting to present a facade that’s so put together and beautiful all of the time. It’s not my goal to be a spokesperson or anything like that – I’m making music for myself – but I’m hoping to reach other women in an attempt to get them to express themselves as well or to let them know that they’re not alone in their feelings.

I’m attempting to meld together emotional realism with pop music – which are two things that I really love – but pop can be so plastic and uniform, so it’s a tough thing to blend. It can be hard when someone is talking about something real and it can kind of make you cringe, but it takes more work than putting together some words that rhyme well. “Slim Baby” was such an over-the-top pop song that I was nervous about doing it, because I had never done something so poppy. I felt very exposed, so I needed to double-track my vocals.

The informative works of literature that she encountered early on:

I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in school and remember reading about when she got her period and her inner thoughts about being a girl. She was talking about real stuff and what she knows while being in a really stressful situation. That had a big influence on me. Then, when I got older, I started looking to ‘zines and riot grrrl literature and Lisa Carver’s writings.

On her sonic influences:

Patti Smith was a huge influence on me. I saw a movie with the song “Horses” in it when I was in high school and I went to buy the album at Reckless in Chicago. I got into her the moment I heard her voice. What I always missed from Bob Dylan – and I love Bob Dylan – is that I wished he was a woman. That’s what you get with Patti Smith.

On working with Slim Twig, aka Max Turnbull:

I write a lot about love and being in a partnership and the ups and downs of that, and deciding to meld your life into someone else’s and get through it together. I think because what I’m talking about a lot of the time is so personal, it’s good to bring other people into it and help the idea grow. Max and I wanted to make the best record that we could and that meant bouncing ideas off him and seeing how he interpreted topics and melodies. It forced me to learn how to take criticism and not give up. I learned so much and I don’t know if I’ll go back to working alone anytime soon.

On sharing a house with Slim’s family:

We live in an artist space that’s rent-geared-to-income which is really nice because Toronto is expensive. It saved my life. We all collaborate. Max’s parents are filmmakers and his sister lives here as well and she’s an artist and actress. They help out with the videos I make and the cover of GEM is a picture I took of Max’s sister Lulu. It’s difficult in terms of space – sometimes you need your own space and there’s not very much— but we all have a goal in life which is to be creative people and good human beings. It’s a nice setup.

Stepping out from behind the rainbow eye makeup and lo-fi production

Now that the glitter has settled, Diamond Rings (aka Canadian artist and musician Johnny O’Regan) takes an understated approach on sophomore album Free Dimensional. His debut Special Affectations mostly chronicled O’Regan’s metamorphosis from the frontman to the D’Ubervilles, into Johnny O, strutting glam pop singer. Free Dimensional completes the transition, with O. stepping out from behind the behind rainbow eye makeup and lo-fi production. The more spacious arrangements are aided by producer Damian Taylor (Björk, the Killers, Robyn), who help Diamond Rings achieve a sleeker, futuristic sound, with overt nods to Grace Jones in the dancefloor ringer “Hand Over My Heart,” Annie Lennox in the minimal thumper “I’m Just Me,” and David Bowie in the propulsive singalong “Runaway Love.” O’s lyrics are more confident too, with self-declarations like “I know when to trust my vision/ I know when to show my pride” in opener “Everything Speaks” and unabashed romantic statements like “We’re never going to care what they say/ we don’t need a label” in Balearic gem “All the Time.” True to its title, Free Dimensional is just that, free: of affectations as well as inhibitions.

File under: Sweeping dream-rock with diaphanous guitar riffs and New Romantic lyrics

For fans of: Cocteau Twins, The Cure, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

From: California

Personae: Tamaryn and Rex John Shelverton

The contrast between the cover art for Tamaryn’s Tender New Signs and their 2010 debut The Waves is telling: A lush array of fuschia petals signifying new life, growth and resilience have replaced the barren, vast red-rock landscape, and singer Tamaryn’s distant figure is gone altogether. That may be because Tamaryn retreated from public life while writing the follow-up, so much so that she and guitarist Rex John Shelverton worked mostly long-distance, exchanging ideas and notes via email and phone. “The title of the record is an impressionistic idea of little glimpses of hope and little openings of life when you feel shut off and hopeless,” she explains during a rehearsal for the group’s upcoming tour. Even though Tamaryn closed herself off from the world while writing the album, Tender New Signs is lyrically their brightest collection of songs to date, lined with slivers of optimism like “Found a way to feel again/ We don’t have to see half blind.”

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller talked with her about their fresh approach, bending gender roles in rock and creating her own universe through music.

On her move to L.A.:

L.A. is pretty magical. [Like NYC], it feels like anything could happen at any moment. You can also have a lot of privacy. I sort of went into retreat and hid in my apartment and didn’t really talk to people this year. I spent a lot of time writing lyrics, holed up in Silver Lake and not seeing people at all. It’s not like New York, where you have to be surrounded by thousands of people at all times.

On the artwork for the album:

Only two [other] people had any influence on the record: Rex and Shaun Durkan (of the Weekend), who did the artwork and individual covers for every song on the album. I want to be subtle about it, but the artwork is flower petals and [Durkan's] cum. I was thinking, “Nothing says more about life than that.” It’s romantic and emotional. I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell anyone, but it’s beautiful. I wanted something surreal yet hyperreal. Those petals are real – vivid and detailed – and the paint and other stuff make it fluid, ethereal.

On working long-distance with Rex John Shelverton:

My writing process was different this time around – we wrote long-distance. Rex came up with little ditties on guitar and then I would come up with arrangements, melodies and lyrics. We’d pass songs back and forth and then fully flesh it out, and [ultimately] recorded the album in San Francisco. The distance works well, because if we’re in the same space we distract each other. It’s better to be alone.

How the distance informed their sound:

The album is all about duality – feeling isolated, but at the same time, connected. A lot of my lyrics are about feeling alone and disconnected. But at the same time, there’s this optimism throughout the record, a really romantic view. After a lifetime of disappointment, never extinguishing hope. It’s not “We Are the World”; it’s a subtle, personal outlook.

On maintaining optimism through her art:

The only thing I really believe in is creativity, and I feel like being alive can be tragic without it. There’s a lot of pain and suffering, but all human beings are connected – whether or not you sit on your computer all day. You can access all of these emotions and can’t totally desensitize yourself to them. My connection to spirituality is through art.

On the romanticism in “Afterlight”:

Lyrically, it ties everything together; simple, romantic lyrics with dissent. There are a lot of lyrics on the album about love – real, universal love versus romantic love, and the personal wisdom you gain between the two. I’m interested in taking classic themes and connecting to them so that they feel important to me – and hopefully to others.

On hoping listeners will project their own experiences onto the songs:

Great art, which I would hope to one day make, leaves things open-ended enough where the artist is connected to it, but it feels spacious enough for anybody to step in and connect to it. That’s why great films have these endings that leave you talking about them for days.

Music is so emotional, and we approach it emotionally. Everyone wants to say our guitar sound is “huge,” and I’m fine with that, but the reason we do it is because it has this vast sonic thing happening where you can hear the melody but the reverb gives it this magical quality that you can hear your own things inside. It’s interactive. On the other hand, it’s so simple and has bass tracks, drums and vocals – not much there, but all of this space between these huge modulating sounds creates a confounding symphony.

On challenging notions of gender in rock:

There are some songs I’m writing through a male perspective – in “The Garden” I switch between [genders] in the verses. When I think of shoegaze – a label we often get – like early Verve, Stone Roses, Ride, I see these boys’ club bands getting sweaty and making epic pop songs. I thought it would be interesting to do that but have [a] feminine perspective as the voice. I took influences from Kate Bush and singer-songwriter stuff I grew up listening to and applied it to [shoegaze].

I’m interested in the archetype and ideas of androgyny. My mother and godmother were Jungian and that stuff had been in my brain forever. That’s what most rock songs are about, anyway: relationships. In so many songs, guys are talking about women and you don’t hear them talking about themselves all that much. It’s all about the muse. I like coming from the perspective of a muse, the feminine energy on the other end of it – being desired, but also feeling alienated. As a woman, you want this other fulfillment that often times a masculine persona isn’t able to give. All of these different ideas are cool to use in a song, but it’s not an essay. It’s just a line in the song.

On making music her career:

Being in a band is strange, because you’re creating a universe to escape the one you live in, but then you have to invite other people. You’re trying to create a space for yourself but then you open it up to everyone. It’s a total ego trip for everyone in a band.

Music is not rewarding in the physical sense. You don’t get a lot of money – or any most of the time. But it fuses with your emotions. It can be transcendent. We’re not the biggest band in the world and we’re not rich, but we have affected people in the way that some of my favorite music has affected me.

A remarkable evolution

When one-man R&B deconstructionist Tom Krell, aka How to Dress Well, released his 2010 debut Love Remains, he was one of a a host of bedroom artists – Krell, plus James Blake, the Weeknd and others – re-interpreting FM-radio slow jams and twisting the slinky genre into new shapes. Since then, the number of contemporaries has grown while unchartered paths have shrunk, so it’s commendable that two years later, Krell has distinguished himself again, this time with tighter arrangements and more substantive lyrics.

While Love Remains‘ longing murmurs and blown-out falsettos kept listeners at a distance, Total Loss sees Krell laying out his diary pages in tight close-up for everyone to read. Written while he was grieving the death of his best friend and recovering from a recent breakup, songs like “Cold Nites,” “Running Back” and “How Many?” bare the heartbreak in Krell’s somber croon. Without the low fidelity of his previous offerings (and with help from the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald) it’s clear that the scratches and crackles weren’t a cover for a lack of a voice: Krell’s falsetto soars when refined. It’s a remarkable evolution: Somewhere in the time he was fine-tuning his warped take on the genre, How to Dress Well has moved towards becoming a real R&B artist.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with the band’s core members bassist Shayde Sartin, vocalist Tim Cohen and guitarist Wymond Miles about their artistic evolution and the surprising heartbreak lurking beneath the jubilant surface of their songs.

The Fresh & Onlys, The Fresh & Onlys

Shayde Sartin: The first album, we had a kind of loose and punk-rock way where it was like, “Don’t overthink it.” We were trying to work really fast, and we were really getting inspired by working fast. We knew that we wanted it to be pretty guitar heavy and pretty punked out, but at the same have a sort of melancholy side to it. So we would write them on acoustic guitar in the kitchen and then take them upstairs into the bedroom studio and just sort of pummel them. There was nothing really thematic on that record lyrically. It was all just kind of haze – there was a lot of drug influence at the time. Mostly just weed and psychedelics. And a lot of drinking. People sort of underestimate the ability of the alcohol-induced psychedelics. If you drink as much as Tim and I were drinking at that time, you can be pretty tripped out.

Wymond Miles: At that point, the band was Tim, Shayde and I. We had our buddy, James Kim, on drums and two girls from the Sandwitches, Heidi and Grace, with us too. Everyone was working full-time. Life was pretty busy then, but everything about making that record was so off the cuff and fun. At the beginning of “I Saw Him,” there’s a sound of about three beer cans being opened all at once, like “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop!” That was just coincidence – it wasn’t Pro Tools editing to create some party vibe. We were definitely in a party phase at that time.

Tim Cohen: I really like “I Saw Him,” but those are really personal lyrics. That song was written shortly after my very good friend passed away. It was sort of memorializing him in a way, and honoring him. But at the same time, he was a very dark person. I didn’t know whether he was very loved. The song is basically turning him into a ghost and creating a legend about him. The lyrics are very simple. “I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I saw him/ Imagine looking at fire.” It’s very haunting, in a way. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The Fresh & Onlys, Grey-Eyed Girls

Sartin: I’ve known Jarvis from Woods for a long, long time. He and I have done many records together. We were both in this band Wooden Wand together. We did records for Kill Rock Stars years ago. But I never had any intention of doing a record with Woodsist or anything. I was a fan of the label, because I was really stoked on Crystal Stilts. But I just played a bunch of demos for [Jarvis] that me and Tim had worked on, and he emailed me, and he’s like, “Hey, would you be interested in doing a record or a 12-inch or an EP?” I was like “Fuck it. Let’s do a record. We have enough material.” This was about two months after we had finished the first album. To me, it was pretty key to keep moving forward, because we had moved so far forward in those two months and I wanted people to see we weren’t just some garage-punk band. I wanted people to see that we were also approaching this really sensitive, kind of dream-pop side.

There’s a song on there called “No Second Guessing.” For me, that’s a really classic kind of Magnetic Fields song. It has very much that kind of vibe. Stephen Merritt’s one of the greatest pop songwriters of our generation, I think. He’s extremely witty, extremely talented. He can break your heart and make you laugh all at once. I was rediscovering them, and Beat Happening as well. There’s a song on there called “What’s His Shadow Still Doing Here.” That’s probably personally my biggest nod to Beat Happening, who are one of the most influential bands for me personally. Coming up as a kid, that was the first punk band that I ever understood that wasn’t, like, Bad Brains or Black Flag.

Miles: We were certainly pushing ourselves a bit mentally, too. There was maybe too much alcohol going on at that moment, maybe not. I certainly remember myself nodding off over an acoustic guitar. We’d be going for so many hours.

“Invisible Forces” is probably my favorite. It kind of broke a lot of the ideas about us just being a straight-up garage ensemble. There was a lot of mystery in it too. It didn’t have to be so straightforward. I love how it sounds, too. I had just broken in a tape delay machine, and that’s what gives the whole song this warbly to the feeling. It’s just the tape echo itself coming off the rockers and not quite working right and feeding back. It’s something we’ll never be able to get again, ’cause it was the unique sound of an old Space Echo from the ’70s on its last legs.

Cohen: I think Grey-Eyed Girls, personally, is my least favorite of our releases. We’d released our first album, done some touring, then we had an offer to put out another record on a label that we really respected and admired. The excitement around that, and the excitement around being a band and having people continue to buy our records, led us to really rush release that record.

At that point, we were really intrigued with the idea of being a prolific band. It wasn’t reaching Guided By Voices level, but it was something where we like, “Let’s keep this trend going. Let’s keep this San Francisco music scene going with our band.” We were a pretty indie band at that time, and we thought that was the way to do it. We didn’t really spend a lot of time on the sound of the record, developing ideas fully. So you have really catchy, interesting songs, but there’s no context there. It’s just a selection of poppy songs and then one long, kind of over-indulgent song at the end, “The Delusion of Man.” There’s not a lot of joy on that record. It’s sort of a black hole in a way.

I was also going through a pretty heavy breakup, so there’s really no love songs on this record. They’re more foreboding like “Invisible Forces,” “Black Coffin,” “Delusion of Man” – even “Clowns (Took the Baby Away).” It’s really dark. I don’t have a very wide emotional spectrum as a person, and as a writer, you just tap into that.

There’s actually a couple songs I did vocals for in Wymond’s garden. On the song “Happy to Be Living,” it’s a genuinely happy song, and there’s a dog barking right in the beginning of that song, which is the dog that lives next door to Wymond. After my vocal take, he barked at this perfect moment, and we looked at each other like, “Should we stop the tape?” We both were just like, “Nah, let’s keep it rolling.” I nailed the vocal take and we kept the dog barking. It’s one of those happy accidents. If you listen to that song, right at the beginning, you can hear the dog bark.

The Fresh & Onlys, August in My Mind EP

Sartin: A lot of those songs were written around the same time as Play It Strange. In a way, I really wish we would’ve married those two, because there’s this feeling that they could’ve been one piece. I really like the way this EP sounds, because it’s pretty blown out, pretty weird sounding. I think it’s one of our most underrated records. There’s song on there, “The Garbage Collector,” that I truly only think we could write. That’s not to sound arrogant – I know we’re not the fucking Beatles, or whatever. But there are songs on there that really do represent us in the most unique way possible.

Miles: What I like about “Diamond In The Dark” is that it has that really wailing guitar stuff all throughout it. That was all on the fly, in the moment. It came from Tim pushing me and getting me out of my head as much as he could. Just going for this deep down Neil Young soaring guitar, keeping it simple but heavy. I was pretty excited by that. Even the little bits, you can hear us yelling out chords where the little chord changes are going to be. It was Tim on drums, and Shayde playing these guitar chords and changing it up, not quite sure where the next chord should be. Any normal band in the world would of course been, “Well, we didn’t know what chord we were playing.” But to us, it sounded great. I love the vibe of that – chord changes being made on the fly, keys changing and trying to follow this guitar that was so achingly loud.

Cohen: We actually conceived of that song and that record August in My Mind while I was on tour in 2009, with a broken right hand. The whole tour, I was playing keyboards left-handed. The songs had this sort of chugging, caveman, masculine drive to them. When I broke my hand, I don’t want to say it emasculated me, but it turned me to someone who had to use my left-hand to play an instrument I wasn’t comfortable playing. We still had to go on tour. So I was trying to use these melodic keyboard lines and singing, and I was really into the way it sounded. It almost romanticized the songs. It took away from the chugging guitar going all the time. There are songs of despair and longing and solitude, which goes hand-in-hand with the breakup which, by that point, I had gone through it and I was kind of in this lonely place like, “Well, time to move on to the next thing.” Right at that time I was on tour, I was drinking a lot, and I was being very destructive. But this other side came out when I was breaking up that was very tender and, in a way, longing. The song “Garbage Collector” is specifically written about being dumped like garbage.

The Fresh & Onlys, Play It Strange

Sartin: I wish we took our time with that record. Looking back, we were rushing through it. We did it the same way we did Grey-Eyed Girls. We tried to make the record completely on our own. That’s one record where Tim really is kind of isolating and paranoid. I know that sounds like really cliché, but there was some pretty heavy stuff going on his life. There was a lot of these questions about commitment and stuff coming up in his life. He was kind of wandering freely. So there is kind of a twilight desert feeling on the record, and a lot of the loneliness and sort of bizarre lyrics were all fitting. “Waterfall” sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, but it’s a song about not sitting comfortably with your surroundings.

Cohen: We’d just been working really hard and didn’t let up, and it felt like that was the only way. No one was going to go out and give it to us, we had to go out and get it. So the process of recording Play it Strange was a new thing for us, whereby we didn’t have to sit there and turn the dials ourselves. We had someone in the studio doing it, I still really like that record, I think it’s got some good songs on it – but you can tell there’s more patience to it, I wanna say. We kind of had it worked out. We’d written 40 or 50 songs for that record, and ended up recording 14 or 15, maybe 16. This was the first time where we actually had a studio where we could sit back and actually listen to what we were doing and take stock in what we were making. I can tell from listening to that that Tim Green, the guy who recorded it, did a great job. And we stopped worrying or thinking too hard about what we were doing. You could say, “I want my guitar to sound like this,” and he would just reach up and turn a dial or go grab his amp and a mic, and he would make it so it was pretty effortless to record. We weren’t relying on our own bedroom sensibilities. This was the first record for me that sounds like it has that extra life to it. It’s not like a charming bedroom record. It’s like approaching what I think we achieved with the new record.

Sartin: Part of the enthusiasm for releasing so much stuff early and so quickly, for me personally, was that when I started buying records, I was really into Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, the Grifters and Pavement, and I really liked that those bands were constantly putting things out in low run pressings. They would put out a 7-inch every month or two. Quantity was a way to keep ourselves inspired and keep moving towards the next new thing, as opposed to dreading it.

A lot of times, I think that’s one of the downfalls of a lot of bands early in their careers: They put all of this weight on one record and then fail to grow during the most promising and important time of their career, which is the first three years. That’s when you’re not sick of each other and you’re inspired. Everything you do has some sort of insane magic to it. So if you’re sitting there and going, “I’ve got to make the best first impression possible,” then you’re going to fuck it up and you’re a sucker.

You have to look [at those first three years] as sort of an amplified state of being clumsy. Those are the times when the synapses are firing, things are connecting. You’re deciding what you’re going to be as a band. For us, that shit wasn’t going to happen in a rehearsal space. It had to happen on a tape machine.

The Fresh & Onlys, Secret Walls EP

Sartin: That EP is the first time we put everything in Wymond’s hands. We basically just recorded it, tracked it at his house and just let him mix it. That EP is also the first time that we fully collaborated. Tim and I wrote the music and the words, but the musical influence is so significant on Kyle and Wymond’s part that I feel like it’s truly the first Fresh & Onlys record made as a quartet, the way it is now. I think as a live band, it was the first time we ever really let that free. That was after years of touring together and playing hundreds of shows. Wymond was really getting heavily into the Gun Club, and playing with this super heavy twang. Part of why that record sounds so different is largely due to Wymond’s musical influence blossoming a lot more than it had in previous releases.

I think for Tim, the title track is a lot about his elusiveness, and his vagary as a person. The song is saying that you’ll be there for someone, but then basically you’re only physically present – you’re emotionally not-so-present. That’s a really hard thing for someone that you’re with, whether it’s your friends, family or your partner. It’s a really fucking complex thing to have to deal with. It’s horrible for people. It’s something that Tim and I have talked about a lot in discussing relationships and problems, which are for he and I both an extremely difficult thing, because we’re both selfish people. We both struggle with alcohol problems and it’s ugly. I think Secret Walls is kind of like a subconscious nod to keeping things inside. If you read the lyrics, it tells a lot more than I can tell you on the phone here.

Miles: I think Secret Walls is better than anything we had done before. That was where I took on the producer reigns more than I ever have. We started out it so democratic, but you need a leader with a vision sometimes. We started to learn to let go. We stopped fighting as much, because we could trust one another. When we were making records before, we were arguing as much as we were recording.

The Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance

Sartin: We didn’t want to make a record where [every song] sounds like it was recorded on the same instruments, in the same week, by the same person. We were just doing press in Europe and someone said, “It sounds like every song is a different band.” That’s a huge compliment. You can’t approach a song like “The Executioner’s Song” in the same way you would “Presence Of Mind.”

“The Executioner’s Song,” which is really minimal sounding on the record, that song took a lot of time. It’s an extremely textured song. There’s a lot of guitars and a lot of acoustic guitars. There’s really staggering rhythms. It was really hard to get the feeling of that song because of the way the rhythm staggers between the verse and the chorus. There was all this rhythmic dissonance as opposed to harmonic dissonance. There was something really weird about that song. When Wymond started putting guitars on top of it and the textures started to set into place, and the song really took on a life of its own.

Miles:: Here’s a great thing: So we used Lionel Ritchie’s Neumann U67 microphone. The very microphone Lionel Ritchie used when he made all his hits, like “Hello”. This really killer microphone. All of sudden, we didn’t have to mess with anything. We didn’t have to EQ it much. We didn’t have to do much of anything. We put a little reverb on there, maybe. The studio owner has been collecting amazing gear for a long time. It was his mic. He was the tour manager for the Melvins. He basically got to tour the world looking for gear pre-eBay. Basically the whole record we were using Lionel Ritchie’s mic.

Cohen: When we signed with Mexican Summer, we’re like, let’s make a record that reflects that we have a label; we have resources, we have time. Let’s be patient about recording it. Let’s make something that stands the test of time. Let’s not make something that hides my lyrics behind fuzz and reverb and delay. That’s not really the band that we are. We’re not beholden to a lo-fi aesthetic by any stretch of the imagination. We all feel really confident in the record.

The Solo Outings

Wymond Miles, Earth Has Doors EP

Miles: I think the EP startled people when that came out. [People thought] that I was trying to assert my identity away from the band. But really, it was just me without any consideration. It was written right before the Onlys started as a band, and then recorded later. It was a much different worldview, it was my mid ’20s, very cosmically-oriented. My concerns were totally different from the Onlys. There’s a song on there that was seven minutes of viola and classical guitar.

Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon

Miles: If there was any narrative to the Onlys, I’d say it was in the spirit of playfulness. Even when it has the mood of something darker. Everything with the Onlys to me is laced with our humor. We’re kind of like the Muppets, together we’re all just kind of these characters. We shine with both things, but it’s that real playful spirit that allows us to be that prolific, give the songs the feel that they do, that are really dreamy and driving. With me, I know what I was going after [with this record]. I was doing this big, romantic, guitar-pop record. There’s this starry-eyed romanticism to us both, but this propelling heavy side as well. They’re not laid back per se. I think both things are filled with a lot of romantic, star-gazing notions.

Tim Cohen, The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

Cohen: The title is totally tongue and cheek. Some of those songs’ original destination would’ve been a Black Fiction album – Black Fiction was the band I had before Fresh & Onlys. When Black Fiction kind of dissolved, one member went into an alcoholic rage and one member died. I was sort of just left standing there, holding my head in my hands. I put those songs away for a minute. That record became very personal for me, so I took them, put my name on them, and thankfully had these two small labels that were like, “We want to put your record out.”

Tim Cohen, Laugh Tracks

Cohen: My favorite moment is probably my dad singing on “Small Things Matter.” My dad is just an amazing dude. He’s not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s so cool. He’s a community psychologist. He’s had this crazy job and career for like 40 years. He’s still looks at me and what I do and he doesn’t get it, but he fully understands that this is what I want to do, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. He’s always been really supportive. I had to help with the melody, because he has no melodic sense. I’m surprised he could even sing the notes. It was one of those things where I know he could sing, but people always told him that he couldn’t sing, so he never sang. So now, in his late 60s, I’m the guy who has to be like “You can do this! You can really sing!” I was now encouraging him, and he’s been the one doing that my whole life.

Tim Cohen, Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick

Cohen: The central narrative behind that album is actually a funny story. I was at this cocktail party and our friend was putting these flowers in her face. I was a trying to flirt with her. I was like, “The stalk looks like celery. You should eat that.” She was like, “Nah.” I was like, “Well, I’ll do it. I want to see what it tastes like.” So I ate the stem of a flower. Everyone stood around and watched.

Almost immediately, I felt this burning sensation in the back of my throat – this sharp, pins-and-needles feeling in the back of my throat. I felt my throat starting to swell up. I started trying to spit out the flower. The girl who was working the bar or something – there were only five people there – started pouring me shots of whatever she could find. I was like “More! More! More!” I was just trying to make the burning go away, but it just made it worse. I went to the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit up the flower. Then, I just had this horrible feeling in my throat, my upper chest and my mouth. I was trying to eat as many peanuts as I could. We went to this place the Homestead – one of those places where you can throw peanuts all over the floor —and I was just trying to take a ball of peanuts and cram them in my throat. Kevin looked up the flower on Google and it said that eating the stem of this flower can cause convulsions and death. It actually is a poisonous flower to swallow. I refused to go to the hospital. I’m not going to let a flower kill me.

So one of the songs on that album is called “The Flower.” It’s about the near-death experience. It’s sort of the over-dramatization of the fact that I ate the flower and knew that my life was over. I felt like I looked death in the eyes. There’s that and there’s another song on that record, “I Looked Up” which is about passing. One of the lines is “I crossed the long way into dreaming.” Then there’s the song “I’m Never Going to Die” on that album. The pretty central theme of that is “I beat death” sort of thing in a way. That was my magic trick.

File under: Sequin-encrusted goth pop with operatic vocals, towering synths and unshakable melodies

From: London via Hertfordshire

Personae: Charlotte Aitchison

Charli XCX’s dancefloor-ready songs of lost love and new crushes may seem world-weary coming from a 19-year-old, but the rising starlet is already a performance veteran. Since beginning her singing career at warehouse parties in London at the age of 14, the art-school dropout has spent the last five years carefully constructing her persona.

As her clever Twitter bio declares, Charli champions a new era of empowered female pop stars, counting Grimes, Skylar Grey and Little Boots among her contemporaries. Those three even appeared in the U.K.feminist magazine that Charli co-founded, Shut Your Pretty Mouth, which spotlights emerging creative females.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Charli about presenting herself as a strong role model, crushing on Karl Lagerfeld, and changing the way people think about pop music.

On her first performance:

When I was four, I went on a very tacky family holiday on a cruise ship and entered the talent contest and sang “Barbie Girl” on the stage with no backing track. My parents thought I was going to break down and cry, but I was fine. I got up there and won the contest because all of these white grandparents were like, “Oh she’s so cute.” I remember thinking the microphone was so heavy, and that I was the coolest person because I got to sing “Barbie Girl.” It’s a really sexual song, but I didn’t know that. I just loved Barbie at the time and thought it was about dolls.

On the one time she tried to rebel:

One of the funniest memories that I have of both my dad and mom was when I got a gig in this crazy illegal warehouse in London and I was like, “Yeah I’m going, do you wanna come?” I was thinking they’d say no, but they were like, “Yeah, let’s go!” So we all went up to London in a family car and got to this warehouse at like 12 a.m. and stayed there till like 7 in the morning. There were all of these crazy people on Ecstasy, and my mom and my dad were standing in the back, totally oblivious. It was my attempt at rebellion, and it turned into a weird family outing.

On making an unforgettable impression in art school:

On the first day of class we had to make something that showed who we were as an artist. So I made a sweet shop with sugar mice, but instead of using sugar mice, I used real mice. So I bought a load of dead mice online and dyed them different colors and put them in jars and left them in my art school, and everyone thought I was this weird freak. I had just moved into an apartment with kids I had never met before and I was storing the mice at night in the freezer to make sure they didn’t rot and my flatmates thought it was really weird.

On her penchant for Uffie:

I was probably 13 or 14 when I discovered Ed Banger. I was listening to a lot of Uffie records and I thought she was really cool. She’s a really strong female and I kind of model myself after people like that. Also, she had this punk energy which I really liked, and the way she rapped was really cool. Something about her reminded me of “Rapture” by Blondie, like a total white girl who can’t really rap, but it sounded really dope. I like to make my music really talky and slow, like I’m a little sedated when I do my rap stuff, and she was the first to inspire me to experiment with that kind of stuff.

On rising to the challenge of the female pop star:

A lot of my music is about heartbreak, and telling a guy to fuck off, and being strong but “Stay Away” is about wanting someone so bad and being a helpless female involved in sexual domination and not really understanding what’s going on. I don’t want to put out a political message in any of my songs but it’s really important to me as a performer, and as someone who is really interested in fashion, to be a strong female role model. I don’t want to be walking around in a sexy shirt with my ass out. I’d rather be sexy in some crazy grunge Disney shirt.

On the inspiration for her style:

I look up to film characters like Wednesday Adams, Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club, or Kirsten Dunst in Drop Dead Gorgeous. My style is a mix of film characters and a club kid, but there isn’t specific pop star I look up to apart from the Spice Girls. I think they have the best sense of style.

On hoping to one day cross over into the fashion world:

I think Vivienne Westwood is so cool, and I love where she comes from. Her clothes are amazing, the tailoring is amazing, and she’s punk at heart. But it would always be amazing to do something with someone like Chanel. I find Karl Lagerfeld weirdly sexy. So maybe I could get a little hookup there and I could be his straight wife.

On her hasty writing style:

I like kind of banging out songs and then having them be done. I don’t have an attention span for revisiting stuff. I don’t really have a writing process. I kind of write whenever, wherever. Sometimes it will be a lyric, sometimes a melody, sometimes I’ll come up with a whole track. There’s no set way. I wrote “Stay Away” in two hours with Ariel before I had to get on a plane, which is fucking cool.

On her involvement with the zine Shut Your Pretty Mouth:

It was started by myself and a couple other people and we wanted it to be about upcoming female musicians and photographers and we had a DJ night where we got them all to come and play. It was female-inspired, led by females, and we wanted it to be a platform for new girls to do their thing. We did 30 issues and we interviewed people like Grimes, Little Boots, Skylar Grey.

On belonging to a new generation of female pop stars:

I don’t want to sound cocky but I think girls like Grimes and Skylar and Azealia Banks are pretty fucking rad, and I’m on their level. We’re all pretty powerful females and we’ve all got our own styles. Hopefully people like us will be able to shake pop music into something cool again.

Even though pop music is great, some people are still a bit embarrassed to say that they like it so it will be really great if we can change peoples’ perception of it. At the moment, music is getting better and better and I think something really interesting is about to happen in female pop music. We’re all about the same age, coming up at the same time.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Scally and Legrand, individually, about their visual approach to music, their mutual love of Wong Kar-wai, and the moment Teen Dream ended.

You spent a long time touring behind Teen Dream and then working on Bloom. So I was wondering: What’s the strongest non-music memory you have from the past two years?

Victoria Legrand: That moment for me was the end of touring behind Teen Dream, after our last show in Washington, D.C. It’s a bittersweet feeling — you’re exhausted, you’re grateful, you need a break, but you want to keep being creative. You’re full of love because you had a great show. You just feel lucky, so many intensities happening all at once.

Alex Scally: One that really stands out in my mind was going to Japan to play a show. It’s a really mesmerizing, beautiful, and enchanting place. It wasn’t my first time in Japan; I went when I was much, much younger for school and I felt like I really understood it a lot more this time around. I think you get a lot more out of traveling when you’re older.

We spent a lot of time going to see temples and insane clothing stores. Everything there is informed by an aesthetic that is completely foreign to Western mindset. Even just the interactions between people, the unspoken agreements that exist within the society are all foreign and there’s an ancientness there that’s so beautiful. If you pay attention you can try to feel everything that’s going on. We love travel in general and feel super lucky about how much we travel and try not to take it for granted.

On Sub Pop’s site it says, “Bloom is meant to be experienced as an ALBUM,” whereas, you’ve said that Teen Dream was song-oriented. What prompted this shift?

Scally: I don’t think it was a change, really. We’ve always worked the same way and we’ve always been an album band. It feels sometimes like songs on an album don’t really go with one another but I think they go hand in hand more than ever on [Bloom]. As we wrote, each song affected the next.

What considerations were made when you were sequencing the album?

Scally: We wanted it to feel like a story and to have a certain feeling at the beginning, middle and an end. It’s all based on feeling so maybe it wouldn’t be a good sequence for someone else but for us it’s what felt right.

You mentioned a narrative within the album. Can you expand on that idea a little bit? What’s the general storyline?

Scally: I really think people should find what they want in it. We always try to avoid saying what the narrative is, because what a song means to us is irrelevant. You have a feeling, you have an idea, and it informs the song. But then once the song is created, it’s for everyone to take whatever it means to them. Trying to control people’s reactions is pointless, especially for the kind of band that we are: We work in abstractions so we just let something exist.

Who are some artists that you feel have the same approach to their work?

Scally: Every painter. When you go see a painter you don’t ask him what his painting is about, right? You just experience it. You look at it. Maybe that’s what it is: We think of music in a more visual way. Maybe it’s less of a narrative, like Bob Dylan singing about protests. [Our music] is just not simple like that. It’s more abstract.

Do you follow the visual art world closely?

Scally: Not as much as I’d like to but we both love film. Sometimes you find stuff that’s really exciting and inspiring.

Who are some of the artists and filmmakers that you and Victoria like?

Scally:Wong Kar-wai is someone we both love a lot. Victoria and I have watched In the Mood For Love three times together. That movie never stops being amazing. The narrative is actually not that important for his films, and I’ve heard that he shoots a lot of his films without telling the actors what’s going on in the scene. He just gets them to behave in a certain way and then pieces it together later.

Is there an ideal way to experience Bloom?

Legrand: In a variety of ways: in a group setting, as an individual, on headphones, in a car, on a train. Music has a lot of motion in it and music is also shape-shifting; there’s a myriad of experiences to have with it.

Compared to 10 years ago, things have accelerated so much in the Internet “world” — which is not reality — and so a lot of [music] is really expendable. I think people are missing out on a more physical relationship with music, not just with our record but with music in general. People who love music deserve to take time out for themselves to indulge, the way we used to do it when we were teenagers and would go to the record store, grab a CD and go home and spend hours just reading the lyric book. And don’t forget about your dad’s record collection — that stuff is awesome. I used to always believe that [track] eight on an album was the best song. It isn’t true, but it’s what you do when you’re young and obsessed. Nothing beats finding something special on your own and having that gestation time, like “I really got into this record this week,” and you give it to your friend or you make a mixtape. That stuff doesn’t have to go away. That doesn’t have to be replaced — it’s still there and it’s always going to be the most awesome.

What was the last LP you bought?

Legrand: I got a record at a show the other night: Ed Schrader’s Music Beat. Ed Schrader is from Baltimore and his lyrics are really amazing, I love him a lot, and I just bought his vinyl — a record called Jazz Mind. So I supported a friend. I basically try to buy fellow artists’ vinyl and I try to buy old vinyl. And I also like to give those as gifts if someone has been looking for something forever. The irony is that because of the Internet you can find vinyl that you wouldn’t be able to find in your local record store.

File under: Glossy, melancholic pop with a disco, funk and R&B swing

For fans of: Prince, Bootsy Collins, Arthur Russell

From: London via Peterborough, England

Personae: Adam Bainbridge

Though his music is a swirl of garish saxophones, slap bass, syrupy synths and the kind of sung-rap samples that last saw radio airplay in ’83, Adam Bainbridge, who records as Kindness, isn’t being ironic. He’s just firmly committed to the idea that these elements make for the best-sounding dance music. The fizzy pleasures of “SEOD” and “That’s Alright” from his debut album World, You Need a Change of Mind make it difficult to argue.

Aside from delivering pure pop bliss for restless dance fans, World also provides a captivating puzzle for crate diggers and studio geeks. You could spend an entire afternoon trying to count the layers of piano on the chorus of “That’s Alright. (Spoiler Alert: There are close to 30.) Breaking down Bainbridge’s dense tracks requires commitment — but he’d be pleased if people took the time.

“People are surprised by something taking any amount of time anymore,” Bainbridge says over the phone from Geneva. That statement perfectly captures Bainbridge’s painstaking methodology. He recorded nearly every instrumental live and didn’t rush release his album after the positive reception of his first two singles, “Swingin Party” and “Cyan.” Instead, he spent months refining his sound with producer and Cassius band member Philippe Zdar. The results are both dizzying and irresistible.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Bainbridge about his decision to keep a low profile, what makes Philippe Zdar crack a smile, and how he’s bros for life with Grizzly Bear.

On the insularity of the internet:

When I was growing up, there wasn’t much to do in our provincial town except to make music and swap creative energies. We educated ourselves with the limited resources that were there. Now kids [in Peterborough] have greater access to a higher cultural standard through the Internet, but I can’t tell if that makes things better or worse. It’s too easy to communicate with like-minded individuals on the Internet and not make the effort to communicate with people around you who might not have the same sensibilities, interests, or taste in music. It’s a day-to-day struggle. We can either indulge ourselves in fulfilling online relationships with people who already share our worldview, or we could make the effort to socialize with people who aren’t on our wavelength.

On why he rarely participates in the online community now:

I put a wall between myself and people who are enthusiastic about what I do, but there’s a kind of narcissism on Twitter that makes me uncomfortable and gets wildly out of hand. And the fact that we can Google ourselves any time of the day is incredibly unhealthy. There might be psychology textbooks 100 years from now that say, “People really lost it when they had the ability to find out what other people thought of them. That was the beginning of the end of psychological stability.”

On what Cassius member/Kindness producer Philippe Zdar finds funny:

The fun was the glass of wine at the end of the day and the moments of reflection, as opposed to the other parts which were just us staring at each other and waving our fists. There was a time where he asked the session musician if he was going to do the “helicopter” to celebrate after we had just recorded a song and the musician asked, “What’s the helicopter?” Philippe said, “It’s when you take your penis outside of your trousers and spin it around. Since you finished first today, I think you should be the one to demonstrate the helicopter for us.” I have some footage of it but I think that will have to remain in the archives.

On the space of Zdar’s studio:

It was built when there was a lot of money in the music industry. Some French producer went to California in the ’70s and saw all of those classic-rock documentary-style studios with lots of wood and big granite speakers in the wall. He ordered the same kind of wood from a forest in England and had the granite shipped from California. It was kind of derelict for a while but now that Philippe’s renovated it, he’s restored the Fleetwood Mac-esque appearance. You feel a recording history there. A lot of fun ’80s French pop groups recorded and mixed there so there’s pop music and eccentricity bleeding out of the walls.

On the coolest piece of gear used on the record:

The Yamaha CS-80 needs tender loving care and it’s the most incredible synthesizer I’ve ever used in my life. We managed to squeeze it on every track somehow. I keep telling friends who have spent years buying gear that they should sell all of it and just buy this one. Philippe uses a lot of ghost notes and ghost instrumentation that you don’t really hear but are on the edge of perception. There might be a kazoo, a bass harmonica, and someone making soup in the corner of the room. All of those things might be in the mix but they’re little whispers of sonic textures.

On how the dense composition of “That’s Alright” came to be:

I came to Philippe with a pretty finished demo for that song because, fundamentally, the instrumentation is a Trouble Funk sample. I thought the song had more potential as an R&B track because the Trouble Funk version has a lot of sing-rapping on top. The demo was just the sample that you hear so Philippe said, “We can’t just leave this. Every other song has a drum on a drum on a drum; a synth on a synth on a synth. The guitar is using incredible effects that I’ve spent 20 years collecting, and this is going to sound like a sample.” So we painstakingly started adding a tuned 808 on top of a kick drum, on top of a snare drum, on top of reverb, on top of a saxophone. That’s when it really became something interesting. It would have been a conservative moment on the record if we just left it where it was.

On why he’s an analog enthusiast:

I find that the guitar and electric guitar sound best the way they were recorded from 1979 to 1983. That was the peak of Nile Rogers-style guitar; no one really managed to get it to sound better. You can say the same of a bass guitar: It never really went beyond Bootsy Collins. Those guys nailed what it was to have a guitar on a five-minute dance track and we just wanted to get the best sound out of those instruments. We use the same vocal chain as John Lennon, late-Beatles, because it just happened to be the best way to record my voice. People perceive it as referential or nostalgic but we’re just saying, “This will be the best way for this instrument to shine.”

On crashing on Grizzly Bear’s couch:

During the earliest days of social networking, I came across Edward [Droste] — who’s always been the king of the Internet — and he sent me some Grizzly Bear demos. I thought, “Holy shit. This guy is incredible, talented and funny.” He was coming to Berlin — where I lived at the time — so we hung out, and the next time I passed through New York he said, “There are these bros in my band, I’m sure it’d be fine if you wanted to crash on their couch.” So I ended up staying with Chris Bear and Chris Taylor for a few weeks. If you have someone sleep on your couch then you’re pretty much bros for life.

On the time he laid down freestyles with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor:

We used to record in Garage Band and make absurd freestyle rap tracks. Those are also in the archives. Someone asked me about it the other day. They said, “Do you know where we could find ‘XCX”?” — which is the unmentionable title of a popular track that we shared amongst our friends. I’m really glad that one’s missing.

File under: Retro-futurist transmissions hovering between the AM frequencies on your analog radio

For fans of: Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Tim Hecker, Emeralds

From: Brooklyn via Massachussetts

Personae: Daniel Lopatin

Despite his stoner demeanor, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin is as thoughtful in conversation as he is on tape. His abstract synthpop outfit’s sixth full-length, Replica, is built from snippets of ’80s commercials, gauzy loops and an almost-scientific curiosity about what music is. Though he says they’re mostly improvised, Lopatin’s instrumental meditations feel deliberate. Using DVD compilations of old ads as opposed to user-directed YouTube searches for specific words, Lopatin sought out to create Replica from a place of total objectivity. His plucking of certain phrases and sounds from the videos comes from a place of “curatorial attachment,” rather than nostalgia. The approach makes sense: Lopatin studied indexing and archiving during his graduate school practicum in library science.

There isn’t a ton of conventional warmth or intimacy on Replica, largely because of its shadowy melodies and lack of vocals, but Lopatin has an ironic sense of humor that manifests itself in a few odd moments across the LP, as well as in real life. eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller caught up with Lopatin to talk about his stoner high school jam band, his need to watch sports while he records, and how his library science studies inform his music.

I read that your first gig was in a jam band called The Grainers with Al Carlson (of the label Mexican Summer) and Joel (Ford, who co-runs Software with Lopatin). What did you like about playing in that format, and was there any conceptual or technical overlap between that and OPN?

Your question is so beyond the level of sophistication of that juvenile band, it’s blowing my mind right now. We can’t even talk about that band in a real way. We were, like, 16 years old, the goofiest, nerdiest kids. One of our parents has a VHS of us playing at the high school theatre and I would just implode if I had to watch it. It just sounds like bad Carlos Santana.

Were you into jam bands in high school?

Kind of? Not to pin it on them, or throw them under the bus, but [Al and Joel] were the ones into Phish when we were growing up and I didn’t really get it. I liked aspects of it, and the jazzier shit and fusion shit. So, there was overlap, but at age 15 my brain hadn’t yet even gripped the possibilities of music.

It was kind of sad that in our suburban microcosm the closest that we could get to feeling like we were musically free was through jam bands. Unfortunately, that was the vibe of the town where we grew up. There was no punk. There was very little cultural variation and there were theatre kids and fake hippie kids. That was where I grew up and I had to grow up and figure out what else was going on.

Would you ever consider covering [your old band's song] “Nugget”?

You’re fucking with me so hard right now. No, I would never cover “Nugget,” ever. It’s so fucking bad. It’s the worst thing you’ll ever hear, just garbage

You went to graduate school to study library science — do you ever think about returning to it somewhere down the road?

Yeah, I would love to be an archivist. I was in grad school from 2008-2010, got my archival certificate, and I had a practicum; that was my last job. I wanted to work in the public library, but that was around the beginning of the recession, and there weren’t a lot of jobs.

I’ve been very lucky to have music be my work, but it definitely wasn’t planned that way. It started taking off in my last semester of grad school. During finals, I was making plans to leave for tour and was going to go back to school after a series of short tours, but when they ended I started getting more and more gigs. If and when there’s a circumstance where I can’t do music, I would try for a career in archives. The thing is, it’s difficult too, because it’s really exclusive, and if you haven’t done it for a while, it’s hard to just jump into it. There’s a lot involved. But, yeah, I would love to work in a library.

Is there any technical overlap between that career and your process in music?

Archivists have to follow very specific, formal encoding procedures and there’s a lot of boring stuff that I don’t do at all. So, not in procedure but in spirit I work in an archival manner with that approach. I like categorization, indexing, putting things into folders.

That kind of organization comes across in Replica, because each sound feels intentional. How many of your compositions are planned and how many are improvised?

They’re planned in the sense that I categorize different sounds in folders on my computer. I’ll have the name of a track, and then a hierarchy inside of it, with things like “the rhythm section,” “vocals,” “beat sounds” or “pads” — those are just metaphoric, cut-up samples. There’s something about those samples that represent conventional instrumentation or conventional pop music, but it’s just an approximation. I’ll guess that those things will work together — and sometimes they’ll work together, sometimes they won’t — then I’ll move everything into a real-life sampler and perform samples of the different parts and try to repeat everything to my best ability. Improvisation is a huge part of what I do.

The piano bits on Replica sound like inverted jazz, particularly “Power of Persuasion.” What has your relationship with jazz been like?

I love ECM records from the ’70s and ’80s and that jazz sound Jack DeJohnette, David Holland, Jan Garbarek, John Abercrombie, stuff like that. ["Power of Persuasion"] was my approximation of really mellow, laid back Scandinavian ECM jazz, but it ended up sounding slightly different. It became more uptown or American jazz.

You switch off between the piano and synths on this LP. What advantages does the piano have over a synthesizer?

Piano is very pure and beautiful. It’s an instrument that requires you to put your body into it in a way that a synthesizer doesn’t. There’s all kinds of different ways that keyboards or synthesizers will mimic the sensitivity or the velocity and physicality of the piano, but at the end of the day, the piano is the most physical way to play. That’s what makes it so amazing, and so difficult, as an instrument: It demands that your personality be in it.

The piano seems inherently warmer than synths, too, and that feels heightened on the LP amidst all of the disconnect. Are you aware of when it pops up, and do you bring that warmer presence into a song at a certain moment?

The piano is a way to cut to my melodic ideas more directly without a lot of other additions. I agree that the piano is inherently warmer but this piano isn’t; it sounds beautiful, but we ran it through tapes and we made it into what it is. What interests me is where things are striated and where things are smooth, how things match up.

Would you ever consider making a piano album?

I don’t think I’m talented enough to do an all-piano record [laughs]. It took me so long just to wrap my head around that one piano track that an all-piano record would probably take me three years. There’s a lot of overdubbing and multi-tracking and cutting and trickery that goes into what I do, even when I use the piano, so I don’t know what I could offer.

That’s been done already and done much better than me. The Bill Evans record, Conversations With Myself, is one of my favorite records ever and it’s just all overdubbed piano. I feel like that would be my only way in: I would just be ripping off Conversations With Myself.

Which of the commercial snippets used in Replica was your favorite?

I didn’t even watch the commercials, I just listened to the audio. There was one commercial that gave the impression of this upper class, aristocratic “good life” with mood lighting, a couple by the fire, but it was really just a commercial for coffee. The message was, “drink this cup of coffee and you’ll have this refined life.” The dialogue was between this woman and man while they were sipping coffee and gazing into each other’s eyes, and I listened to that to try to get the sound of them sipping, exhaling and the end with them laughing and giggling and tried to do something interesting with those gestures [in "Sleep Dealer"].

You moved from the bedroom to the studio for this recording. How important is your environment to your work?

Moving in the studio was circumstantial. I wanted to make a record that was more hi-fi, and I couldn’t have done that at home. My older recordings were really dance heavy, and dynamically that just wasn’t there. I wanted to make a record that was really contemporary and heavy on the bass and rounded-out, and really powerful and big-sounding. I couldn’t really do that at home, so it was a luxury that I got to record in the studio and make a high-fidelity version.

When I’m recording a lot of the time I need to be horizontal, laying down and listening to stuff, so I need to have a good couch. The lighting needs to adjustable, and not fluorescent, like day and night. And I need there to be as many screens and monitors around as possible, so I can put sports on. Like, if the playoffs are on or the NBA; that’s really important. Just having basketball on makes me feel really comfortable. We made the recording at the very beginning of baseball season, and I’m not a huge baseball fan but Fenway Park home games are really meditative so having sports on is really helpful.

Ideally, how would listeners experience Replica?

It’s not up to me. I get a lot of feedback when I’m playing shows, people come up to me and they’ll say, “I really love such-and-such release. We always listen to it when we’re falling asleep at night,” or “I like listening to this when I’m cooking.” To me, that’s really great because it’s not up to me to dictate how people experience music. They bought it and made the decision to interact with it any way they want and that’s beautiful to me. If they just want to listen to one track on their iPod that’s cool, if they want to listen to the whole thing with a group that’s cool too. I enjoy the fact that people use music in different ways.

Transforming tension into harmony

Nightlife comes from a place of unrest. Written as Phantogram’s Josh Carter and Sarah Barthel toured behind their debut album, Eyelid Moves, Nightlife recounts the tensions the Saratoga Springs, New York, duo felt while on the road: balancing their public and private lives, the inability to suppress their problems — with both each other and themselves — and their struggle to remain optimistic throughout the anguish. You can hear that tension in the music, too, in the push and pull between the hip-hop beats, glossy guitars and astral production; fortunately, Phantogram are able to transform their tension into harmony. The sturdiest of the lot, “Don’t Move,” is balmy and propulsive, and balances a skittish vocal sample with Barthel’s lush vocals. An accordion skips across the hook as she sings “A hole is in the sky… just the feeling like you’re gonna die,” but the music stays glued to the dance floor.

A psychological thriller

Creatures of an Hour is a psychological thriller. Panic lurks in the lyrics, time hazily contracts and expands within each song, and vocalist Tessa Murray tries to keep a grip on her own sanity as she navigates a tumultuous relationship. Despite these tensions, Creatures rarely feels strained because Murray, along with songwriter Greg Hughes, Leon Duffy and Luke Jarvis, offset the high-stakes narrative with detached vocals and subdued arrangements.

There’s a lot of pain, both involuntary and self-inflicted. Rife with C86 crackle and ’60s pop harmonies, single “Cuckoo” comes from a desperate speaker, struggling to define the relationship she’s in. A jagged guitar is the only solid element in the song; the phantasmal organ and muffled drumbeat seem to heighten the distance Murray feels from her lover. That isn’t to say that Murray sings without agency — though she may be unsteady, she’s fully aware of both her psychosis and its consequences, asking at one point, “Do you think it’s strange to live without pain?”

Dee Dee is poised over the phone, too, when talking about her past year. Though she says she’s not “terribly vocal” about her emotions, she generously shared her feelings with eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller about her mother’s passing, touring with her father, coping with songwriting and battling insomnia and displacement.

I saw you tweeted a can of alcoholic whip cream. Are those any good?

Yeah, it was delicious. I was at my sister-in-law’s house at Queens, holed up there for the hurricane [Irene], and she had a party — you’re supposed to use it to top tropical cocktails, a more trashy version would be on top of Jell-O shots, I guess — but it was really delicious; dangerous, I would say. I tried a spoonful of it. Maybe on top of hot chocolate, that’d be how I’d do it. I’m more of a Bailey’s sort of person.

Was her house evacuated?

Thankfully, no. I live on the Upper East Side so there was less chance of a flood here but I was freaked out so I wanted to be with family. Their place was fine.

Does your dad live in New York City, or is he still in the Bay area?

He’s still in the East Bay. He spends a lot of time in the mountains. He bought a home there — his little retreat.

What was it like having him on tour with you recently?

It was great. I know that probably sounds counterintuitive, but he’s just got a very particular take on life. Even though he’s old, he’s very active, very healthy, and enthusiastic about traveling and seeing things. He’s watched me try to do music with my life for over 10 years; he knows that I’m doing it better now, but it was interesting for me to see him sort of get the real “take” on what’s it like to be in a band, and a band that tours a lot. I checked with the rest of the band beforehand but he’s pretty hands off, so no one had to change the way they live. He befriended everybody. He bought a leather jacket. He gets why now I might come home from a tour and I’m sleeping for three days, because I haven’t slept for three months. I don’t have to apologize for being a sloth for a week.

Did he ever take you to shows when you were growing up?

He took me to my first show when I was 11. We went and saw Garbage. He sat through it and thought they were “quite good.” But he’s always been a good dad and supportive and has probably attended every show I’ve played in the Bay area since I was 17.

You said he was pretty active. Did you grow up doing things outdoors with your family?

Yeah. We didn’t do international travel really, but we’d go beach camping in Mexico. We spent a lot of time backpacking and camping in Yosemite. We’re very nature-oriented, and that’s something I’ve missed a lot for the past 10 years since I’ve been on my own. It’s hard for me to coordinate stuff like that, and my husband didn’t really grow up doing that sort of thing, so it’s not something we think about all of the time. But I’m really hoping I can get back into it. My younger brother is very much still into it. He just came back from a three-week backpacking trip in Yosemite where he was shown this secret, coveted paradise and he now knows the 11 mile through the thick path to get there. I’m supposed to exercise a lot, and then maybe I’ll go with him if I’m in shape. This was some kind of unbelievable half-rock climbing, half-hiking, switchback for three days — which I would maybe die during.

You tweeted that “‘Coming Down’ isn’t a break up song unless you want to break up with life.” What triggered that tweet?

I was probably stoned or something [laughs]. I try not to read reviews but for some reason something crossed my path and it wasn’t that they weren’t spot on — you can interpret things however you want — but it was the tone that they wrote with and it was dismissive. I was like, “Fuck you. You think you know it all. Give me a break.” And that’s just something that I can’t stand. There’s just so much attitude — good or bad, that’s fine — but I hate people that are snooty about it. It was just a knee-jerk reaction.

It seems like the most emotionally raw track on the album; maybe even more so than “Hold Your Hand.” Which one was harder for you to write?

Well, they’re really different. They bookend the whole experience. I wrote “Hold Your Hand” immediately after [my mom's] diagnosis, which came very, very suddenly and completely out of the blue. It was an immediate shift in my life, because it wasn’t a diagnosis like, “Oh, you have cancer, and these are the steps we’re going to take” — because she’d gone through that before. She had cancer twice in the past, but her health had been questionable, we didn’t know why, and then something major happened and she had to have massive head surgery, and she never really recovered. She was never completely herself again and it was just a decline from there.

That song was the beginning of the end, I suppose. “Coming Down” is essentially about the last two weeks that I was home. It was awful, it was so traumatic. It was crazy to see — to become friends with a hospice worker who could just look at her and tell you where she’s at in this transition. I was taking a lot of Valium and Ativan. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do in that sort of situation, but I was not doing it well. “Coming Down” is about all of that.

“Hold Your Hand” is very poised considering you wrote it as everything started to unravel.

I wrote it when I wasn’t at home so I think it was a bit more objective. I don’t think I was in denial but it definitely didn’t sink in for a very long time. It was just surreal. It’s almost been a year since she passed away, and I think only now that I’m starting to get it. It’s weird how the brain works, especially someone like me because I’m not terribly vocal with my emotions. I don’t do that very well.

How do you balance your private and public lives when you’re writing autobiographical songs? The memoirist Richard Rodriguez says that eventually all writers betray their families. Is that something that resonates in your own writing experience?

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I am a very private person, yet I put out a private record in a very public format. But it was sort of like I didn’t have a choice. I’m a songwriter, so that’s what I do, and it was either write the songs or don’t write songs. It wasn’t like I could make a list of other things that I could write about.

For me, everything needs to have a seed of something that I can relate to, because my entire life was totally tossed upside down. That was all that I had, really, in my head. That’s all that I could get out, so that’s what I did. This record has no betrayal on it, per se, but I can understand that sentiment, because at a certain point all you can do maybe is write what you know.

Did you start writing these songs as a way to cope, or were you already trying to write a record when your mom was diagnosed?

I wasn’t trying to write a record. I write songs as I have the time to do them, and I tend to write a lot in one bill. So it was more, like, if I had some time off on tour and I’ll sit down and write two or three songs. That was just how it happened. It definitely was one of the only ways I was dealing with the situation but it wasn’t intentional.

“Just a Creep” is decidedly more lighthearted than the rest of the songs. What kind of space do you see it occupying on the record?

It definitely stuck out as the sore thumb when I was looking at the songs but, to me, I thought it held a good place sonically, because it’s simple and catchy. I remember the weekend I wrote it: I was home at my dad’s house, in between tours, and he was out of town so I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt really uncomfortable in this house. I had some records with me, most of them were boxed up in storage, but I had a record that Nardwuar had gave to me — it was the Girls in the Garage record — and I needed something like that; something fun, catchy, just something I could dance to while I was doing the dishes. I listened to a lot of Nancy Sinatra as well, just looking for something carefree. It was tough. I couldn’t put on the Smiths, or I would have had a mental breakdown or something.

So that was what I was listening to that particular weekend, and because of everything that’d been going on, I was even more sensitive to things than usual. I was reacting to things that I normally would have brushed off. I was feeling like it’s really necessary to have a thick skin if you don’t have one naturally, and it’s important to develop one in this lifestyle I have. The song is essentially about that: about needing to basically shrink down these potential issues and problems and brush them off because these people don’t matter. They’re just creeps. It’s pretty figurative but it definitely stems from a variety of experiences that are all of one.

I read that you based “Bedroom Eyes” off of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti poem. Are there any other Dum Dum Girls songs that have been informed by things you’ve read?

This was probably the first Dum Dum Girls song that was pretty significantly inspired by something that I’ve read. I’m always reading, so ideas can come from that sort of stuff, but this literally was: I was in bed, I’d been unable to sleep for a week, freaking out, really lonely, on the Internet. I gave myself astigmatism because I didn’t sleep, and I used my computer all night long. I finally got my hands on some sleeping pills and I was literally Wikipedia-ing insomnia out of desperation, and then that changed because I was like, “Obviously, I have to write something about this,” and “Bedroom Eyes” kind of popped into my head. I was like, “There’s the chorus, there’s the catchy pop phrase for a song that is more significant.” I looked up insomnia on poemhunter.com and all sorts of shit popped up, like that [Rossetti] came up. It was devastating and beautiful. I’m not sure who he’s referring to in the poem — if it’s maybe more spiritual or someone he loved — but it seems to deal with separation and its contribution to insomnia or its relationship to it. And I was like, “Wow, that’s exactly what’s going on here.”

Did you sleep better after you wrote it?

I slept better after the Ambien kicked in. [Laughs]

The alcohol-, drug- and tobacco-free venue ignited a DIY scene across the country with its positivity and all-ages accessibility. In a room adorned with changing pastel murals and handmade posters, the Smell offers a handful of weekly shows near the cost of $5, a bookshelf with an assortment of free-to-rent books and ‘zines, and a delicious vegan snack bar. The house bands, most notably Mika Miko and No Age — who became a staple in 2002, first as Wives — blast percussive-heavy art-rock but, even within the moshing, the crowd maintains a peaceful and collaborative vibe. The Smell offers other styles of music too: from Abe Vigoda’s “tropical punk” to HEALTH’s glitchy and metallic electronics, Ancestor’s psych-descended drone rock and Captain Ahab’s chiptune, electro-punk, the Smell is a rainbow of musical creativity with different sounding bands occupying the same artistic and physical space.

Nonprofit and volunteer-run, visitors can meet Smith at the door, spot L.A. resident Steve Ellington (aka jazzy beat-maker Flying Lotus) in the crowd, or catch No Age’s Randy Randall leaving the bathroom with a wrench in hand. (Randall vowed to rig the plumbing of the venue’s trenched loo back in the mid 2000s but it still lacks a lock and reliable flushing.) But it’s not just these names and Smith’s lead that sets apart the Smell from other DIY venues and its successors. Spilling into the alley between 3rd and 4th streets or gathering beneath the “Weirdo Rippers” graffiti on Main Street, collecting admission, and spreading the word, The Smell’s collective residents are what’s keeping its doors open.

“Nick is disgustingly prolific,” says Kattner. If there’s resentment in his voice, it’s only because Kattner lost a summer’s worth of work with his own band, Man Man, while being audited by the IRS. Now back on schedule, he’s spending what few free hours he has working on a series of books for children with Thorburn. Plummer, onetime drummer for the Shins and longtime drummer for Modest Mouse, splits his time between solo projects, performances and composing work for the likes of Les Savy Fav, the Cribs and the Black Heart Procession. And Thorburn — who helped put Montreal’s indie scene on the map in the early 2000s with the Unicorns and, later, Islands — writes comics, and is self-publishing his first in the coming year.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller chatted with each of them alone about their eccentricities.

What’s your first music-related memory?

Joe Plummer: Watching my grandma play the organ at 5 or 6. She was a church organist and she had a big organ in her house. That sounds weird [laughs]. I didn’t pick up any keyboard knowledge from that. I should have but I didn’t.

Ryan Kattner: I’m an Air Force brat, so I moved around a lot as a kid and I lived in the Philippines when I was little. My grandfather had a house there, and there was a grand piano at the top of the stairs. I used to run up and down them and bang my head on the piano. So, I find it ironic that, years later, I’ve made a career out of banging my head on the piano.

Nick Thorburn: I have a couple. One is my parents peaking into this room I was in and catching me dancing to Michael Jackson. I was probably 4 years old, got really embarrassed, and I haven’t danced since. The other one is listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland at age 5, [which] had a profound impact on me and still does. That record is top-notch.

Did you ever see Michael Jackson live?

Thorburn: I never did. I used to fantasize in kindergarten that I’d come in [carried] on his shoulders and be the coolest kid in class.

What’s an album that you would give to someone that you love?

Thorburn: Jim Guthrie, Now More Than Ever. I was introduced to his music by the drummer of the Unicorns, who was friends with Jim Guthrie. It’s near perfect, lyrically and musically, and it’s pretty slept-on, too, which is kind of a shame. But it’s a really beautiful record that I would definitely give to someone that I loved. I’ve shared it with a person that I love; [they loved it] maybe even more than I.

Plummer: Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen. A good friend of mine in high school gave it to me [when] he took me to see fIREHOSE, which was a post-Minutemen band. I listened to it a lot, [and] still do. I’ve bought copies of it for some people, but I don’t remember who.

Kattner: Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies’ Man. I feel like I’ve given it to someone. Did the relationship last? No. I think when you give Death of a Ladies’ Man to someone you love, you can’t expect too much longevity. I didn’t get into Leonard Cohen ’til a couple years ago, and then I got to see him play and realized that I was blowing it. I waited too long to get on board. But I love that era as well as later, when his voice gets deeper.

What’s an album that you would give to someone that you hate?

Thorburn: The Van Morrison contractual obligation album called Bang on a Can. He was in a terrible record contract and had one more album left, so he recorded an album of intentionally terrible-sounding music to get out of the contract. It’s about 24 songs of varying lengths — mostly not more than 30 seconds to a minute and a half — of him making up chord progressions and writing songs about donuts, and other things. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and good for somebody that you hate.

Plummer: I wouldn’t give anyone I hate anything, except for a tongue lash. But Throbbing Gristle‘s first record is obnoxious and I would somehow force them to listen to it at a loud volume.

Kattner: A Man Man record [laughs]. I’d probably give them no wave stuff — but, no, I’d want to keep that. So, maybe the Jeff Foxworthy album You Might Be a Redneck If…

What is a favorite album from each of your bandmates’ projects?

Plummer: Six Demon Bag is my favorite Man Man record. From what I’ve heard about the new Islands record, I think that’s going to be my favorite. I heard some of it, secretly in a car with Nick. It’s beautiful but that’s all I’ll say.

Thorburn: [Laughs] Jeez. I think the newest Man Man, Life Fantastic, is a huge step for Ryan. My favorite Man Man songs are the gentler, quieter ones, and the ones on there like “Oh, La Brea” and the title track are absolutely beautiful.

What do you think he’d say is his favorite album of yours is?

Thorburn: He wouldn’t be able to decide which one of mine was his favorite because he loves them all.

Kattner: I really like the Unicorns album, obviously. Those first couple Islands records were really good too, even the stuff he’s doing now — I gotta be political about this.

What is one thing that you’d love to possess?

Thorburn: One of those islands in Dubai in the shape of me.

Plummer: I would like to live in a place where I could have 100 dogs around me at all times, and all kinds: big, small, mutts, even full-breeds. My girlfriend brought a Scottish terrier into my life and — outside of practicing, even playing music, which she doesn’t like — we do exciting things: drive around, do errands, go to the park, nap. We have a similar lifestyle when I’m home.

Kattner: I would love to have a home.

What kind of home would it be?

Kattner: I think any home would work at this point because I don’t really live anywhere. I’m a serial subletter.

What are you doing on a Friday night?

Plummer: Going to dinner with my girlfriend when I’m not on tour. We like to eat fancy food.

Thorburn: I follow the Paris Hilton logic on weekends: go out on weekdays, [when] there’s less riff-raff. That sounds terrible, but it’s not a classist thing. Crowds just spook me.

Kattner: I do most of my bad-decision making during the week and when I find myself in a scenario where I’m like, “Wow, this is a really fucking annoying scene,” I realize it’s a Friday or Saturday and I realize how fortunate I am to have such an alternative life.

What would you be doing if you were staying in?

Kattner: Nick and I are trying to work on a revamp of the Hardy Boys so we’ve just been plotting that out because we want to write a series of children’s books. We’re calling it The Tardy Boys — they show up to solve a crime, but it’s too late. But it’s a hard time to get Nick to commit to characters and story lines. He’s starting a band every week.

Thorburn: I would be writing music, reading, watching the Larry Sanders Show, or drawing comics.

What kind of comics do you draw?

Thorburn: Lighthearted, humorous but sort of dark, ’70s-inspired comics, like R. Crumb. I’m self-publishing the first one, Howie Doo, but I’m hoping to find someone for the next one [and] I’ve already started working on it. I’ve been drawing since I was an infant; that’s preceded everything else. It’s like an anti-anxiety medication: I just sit and draw and really calm myself down.

Kattner: Nick is disgustingly prolific, it makes me sick. I admire his work ethic.

How long were you working on the new Man Man record?

Kattner: For quite a while. I lost an entire summer because I got audited by the IRS. It was really funny because I was living out of a storage unit and I was like, “You’re auditing me?” But all they got, aside from money, was an entire summer of mine. I got to the point where I didn’t even want to play music anymore. It used to be an outlet and then it became a source of a lot of bad energy but I was able to rediscover the reasons why I was playing got through that Man Man record. It’s a bummer that it slipped under the radar — I’m really proud of it — but at the same time I feel like [the] things that I’ve enjoyed in my music life are usually things that I stumble across. If people stumble across that record and find a connection to it then that’s how it’s going to be.

What’s the worst day job you’ve ever had?

Kattner: I had a summer job in St. Louis [painting] houses when I was a kid. It was mostly exterior house painting, and that was the worst outdoors ’cause Midwestern summers can get pretty brutal. During the same summer I was also working at a KB Toys store. So I alternated days, but I was so exhausted at the toy store that I would just find places to sleep. I used to climb up on third level shelves where they [kept] plastic wading pools, curl up, and tell myself that I would close my eyes for a couple seconds. But I would fall asleep, and someone sleeping and snoring in one of those plastic pools was a very rude awakening to shoppers. This was pre-mustache so I looked a little more trustworthy.

Plummer: The worst day job I ever had — which I lasted a day on — was roofing. It’s scary, it’s hard, it’s dangerous, it’s hot, it’s painful.

Thorburn: McDonald’s. I was the burger flipper for an entire year when I was 16. I dyed my hair a lot at that age, so they kept me in the back, and I slacked off a great deal and would just hang out in the dumpsters with my friends who’d show up. They would never fire anyone, because I think it’s such a shitty job that they can’t bear to lose anyone, so they put me on probation. There’s not really a positive outlook on life at that corporation. I became a vegetarian shortly after I quit and have been for 14 years.

What’s your go-to recipe for cooking?

Thorburn: It’s a weird thing that I’ve concocted: brown rice, chickpeas, red onion and sometimes green peppers, with nutritional yeast fried into it so it gets kind of cheesy; avocado on top of the rice, arugula, pomegranate seeds if I’m feeling fancy, and then a tahini-balsamic dressing over the top of it.

Kattner: Rub salt on a chicken and then pop it into the refrigerator for 24 hours, bake it, and that’s it. I just learned about salt rub, but I haven’t done it yet because I don’t have a kitchen.

Plummer: An olive oil-based pasta with garlic and chili flakes and maybe broccoli.

Pretty simple.

JP: I like eating weird stuff.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Plummer: Natto. It’s rotten soybean with a consistency of snot, smells horrible, and is the most dynamic yet disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. I have a friend in San Diego and we talk about food a lot so she brought that up years ago and asked me if I’d ever had it and one night she made a big dinner and took me aside and said, “I have Natto, do you want to try it?” and I tried it. I didn’t get sick.

Kattner: Joe’s like a WWI war hero. That’s his vibe. If there’s a trench warfare going on, Joe’s going to come out of it courageously and glimmering. He’s a very dapper man — god, I wonder how the hell I’m going to come across in this.

What are a few of the best concerts you’ve seen?

Plummer: Firehouse. Neil Diamond in ’90, the Canadian punk band SNFU, the first time I saw Man Man, Wooden Shijps, and the first show I ever went to which was a hardcore band called Breakaway. I enjoyed a little bit of slam-dancing in my youth.

Thorburn: I hate to sound like a jaded, cynical person but since I started doing music and playing shows for a living, I find that I’ve lost a lot of the joy and excitement for seeing concerts. [That said,] Ratatat, cLOUDDEAD — this backpackery, alt-rap group in Montreal — opening for Blonde Redhead with the Unicorns, Lollapalooza in 1994 when I was 12, hitchhiking to the nearest town with Alden from the Unicorns to see Fugazi when I was 17, and JEFF the Brotherhood. They’re a band that I’ve seen lately. I think they’re onto something.

Kattner: Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, [and] Prince at Coachella. Granted, I was on mushrooms, and I’m not the biggest guitar solo fan, but Prince didn’t guitar solo; he made sensual love to my ears. I was like, “I understand why you’re a symbol!”

Did you catch him backstage after?

Kattner: No, he was surrounded by a security and purple smoke so you couldn’t actually see him. He arrived in a UFO and as soon as I saw the UFO descending on Coachella I got wet. For a guy, that is a uniquely Prince experience. And this was pre-mushrooms when I got wet.

Do you have a mentor who is also a musician?

Plummer: They may or may not know it but I look to the Melvins for cues. They keep making good music, they’ve done it forever, they’ve survived a lot of things, experienced a lot of bullshit, and they’re very open-minded about things. Dale and Buzz are wise fellows and they impress me.

Thorburn: I sort of think of Jim Guthrie as a mentor. He’s definitely someone I look up to, whose opinion and direction I take very seriously.

Kattner: I wish I did, I feel like I might have been more successful if I did. If I could it’d be Leonard Cohen.

If someone else was going to join Mister Heavenly, but not Michael Cera, who would your ideal fourth band member be?

Thorburn: Flannery O’Connor. She would play bass, tell jokes, do all of the banter, and definitely write the lyrics.

Plummer: Gary Oldman. He would play bass and sing and speak in a funny accent.

Kattner: Can you play bass?

Nope.

Kattner: Then Nicolas Cage. He would be amazing. And if he can’t do it, fuck it: Let’s get Keanu.

Musing on adult themes via melodic pop

“Ganglians” could be the name of a crusty punk group wreaking terror in a back alley; instead, the Sacramento-born outfit sound like they combed back their hair and zipped into khakis on their latest LP, Still Living. Picking up where they left off with the surf-freak sound of their debut album Monster Head Room and their self-titled EP’s “Never Mind,” Ganglians tightened their production and cleaned up their aesthetic. Such a refined sound is a natural progression for fuzzy bands with a bigger budget (like West Coast contemporaries Wavves and the U.K.’s Male Bonding); in this case, it led to Ganglians asking Dirty Projectors‘ Robby Moncrieff to produce their record. Opening with droopy vocals singing, “This is a sad, sad song for all you sad, sad people,” “Drop the Act” has an ambiguity that makes it difficult to discern if the sadness they’re singing about is real or light-hearted. But the tracks that follow reaffirm that they’re trying to be taken seriously. Musing on adult themes via melodic pop, Still Living would sit well on a shelf next to Surfer Girl.

Operatic dance tracks leavened with warm vocals

Pictureplane’s Travis Edgy hails from Colorado, where a dubstep scene has steadily risen to fist-pumping proportions at college campuses in Denver and Boulder. But, unlike his geographical and electronic contemporaries, Edgy leavens his operatic dance tracks with warm vocals, keeping his fans’ ability to connect with them in mind. His sophomore release, Thee Physical, takes its title from this concept: move people on a dance floor, with music that directs more than just the feet. Tracks like “Breath Work” aren’t coy about stating their purpose: The synth-flecked jam starts with a looped vocal sample that sounds like a diaphragm exercise, and leads into Edgy panting, “Breathe in raw/ I’m breathing you raw tonight.” It’s the perfect setup for tracks that are both softer and more melodic explorations of the bass-heavy drones that have characterized dance music for the past year.

A blend of new wave and R&B that's hard to abandon

The man behind Autre Ne Veut hasn’t disclosed his name but, unlike some of his emoting, lo-fi contemporaries (ie: How to Dress Well), ANV doesn’t need to rely on the gimmick of a mysterious persona. The Brooklynite who roomed with equally synth-savvy, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin during college has a knack for Associates-level drama, in both vocals and in sound. To wit: The only information on his MySpace page reads, “Sounds Like: ‘We are trying a bit harder’.”

And Autre Ne Veut’s Body EP— the follow up to his self-titled debut, which didn’t land on any charts but gave small circles something new to play in the early afterparty dawn — is all about trying harder. Standouts “Sweetheart” and “Just Return” speak of high romantic stakes with thumping breakbeats and mid-breakup lyrics. The music, rife with woozy synths, is as wobbly as an unwanted separation. But the melodies are sturdy, making Autre Ne Veut’s blend of new wave and R&B hard to abandon.