Culture 5 min read By Trevor Kendall
Slow Pulp channel reflection and connection on third album ‘Melodie’
Slow Pulp’s third album ‘Melodie’ finds the Chicago indie-rock quartet examining alienation, revisiting the past, and strengthening the creative bond between Henry Stoehr and Emily Massey with the help of an outside producer for the first time.
Slow Pulp’s third album is an exercise in looking backward with clearer eyes. Across ‘Melodie’, guitarist Henry Stoehr and vocalist Emily Massey trace old wounds and reframe them through the perspective of people who have lived a little longer, turning personal history into indie-pop that cuts deep before pulling listeners back up.
Stoehr has long felt like an outsider, even in a city as humming and connected as Chicago. That sense of alienation, he says, has followed him his whole life. ‘Melodie’ is driven by the urge to understand it. The record’s elegiac closer ‘Slip Away’ recounts a moment from his directionless early twenties, when he was blanked by friends outside a hardware store in Slow Pulp’s hometown of Madison at a time when he was already at a low ebb. The rejection seemed to confirm his worst beliefs about himself. Writing about it allowed him to finally speak to his younger self. “That was an ambient anxiety,” Stoehr says. “Then I wrote the song. I’m like, ‘That’s actually a really specific thing I feel.’ I hadn’t put it into words.”
What makes the dynamic interesting is that those words are delivered by Massey. She sings Stoehr’s confessions with a megaphone’s directness, but she is also underlining the bond behind a creative partnership that has grown more nuanced over time. When Massey first fell in with Stoehr and his childhood friends Alex Leeds and Teddy Mathews, the way they traded ideas became the foundation of their friendship. “When we started doing that 10 years ago, we didn’t really know each other very well,” Massey says. “It’s how we became friends.”
Those exchanges underpinned their early EPs and the writing for their breakout 2020 debut ‘Moveys’, which set them on a path toward critical acclaim and tours with contemporaries like Lucy Dacus and veterans like Death Cab For Cutie. But progress was not a straight line. Massey navigated bouts of ill health and periodically returned to Wisconsin from Chicago, initially to care for her parents after a car crash during work on ‘Moveys’, and later during a Covid-era retreat to the woods. There, she found inspiration in isolation while sculpting lyrics for the grittier 2023 follow-up ‘Yard’. “It quiets my inner critic,” she says. “I can let whatever’s happening happen. I’m not too judgmental of it, or myself. Sometimes when I’m in a faster-paced place, I feel this pressure to be faster myself.”
For ‘Melodie’, the band wanted to be more hands-on, interrogating their creative habits with the same rigour they reserve for their personal lives. They fired fragments back and forth like they used to, sharing material every two or three days and writing around 30 songs that had a shot at making the record. “In a lot of ways it felt like we were getting to know each other again,” Massey says. “We’re in better communication and friendship than we have been for a while.” Stoehr adds that listening to their old material reveals how much they used to dance around difficult subjects. “I can almost hear myself dancing around something I don’t want to say out loud,” he says.
The directness on ‘Melodie’ is carried off with indie-pop vim. ‘Red Car’ pairs flashy power-pop with candy-coated rhythms as Massey needles herself over a desire to escape when things get heavy, while the synthy washes of the single ‘Better Man’ run parallel to Stoehr’s unflinching self-examination. Massey credits the trust built between them for that level of honesty. “I think the reason for that [directness] is the trust that got built,” she says. Stoehr agrees: “It was about vulnerability and transparency, breaking down any guardedness we had about our own stuff.”
That neck-on-the-line approach extended to employing an outside producer for the first time. Elliott Kozel, a fellow Wisconsinite whose old band Sleeping In The Aviary left a mark on the group, joined them in the control room. His recent work includes collaborations with SZA and Indigo De Souza, and he lends a sympathetic ear to a palette that takes in shoegazey noise, ornate acoustic pop, and intoxicating balladry. “Elliott definitely felt like a great fit for what we were doing,” Massey says.
