indie artist
The Album
Yard, out now on ANTI- Records.
The Origin
Guitarist-producer Henry Stoehr and drummer Teddy Matthews met as youngsters in a McDonald’s ball pit in their native Madison, Wis., and they’ve been playing music together almost as long. They formed a band with buddy and future Slow Pulp bassist Alex Leeds as preteens and kept making music as teens and, later, students at University of Wisconsin, Madison. That’s where they met singer-guitarist Emily Massey, who was in another band, but began writing with Stoehr for fun.
The creative relationship blossomed and Stoehr invited Massey to join the nascent Slow Pulp. Initially, Massey explains, she “was just kind of an auxiliary member,” helping with rhythm guitar and backing vocals. But while recording 2017’s EP2, Stoehr and Leeds asked Massey to sing lead on a couple of their songs. “They were like, ‘How about you sing this song as well?’ And then we started sprinkling in the songs that we had been writing together,” Massey, now 28, recalls. “It just kind of slowly transitioned into me kind of taking the frontperson role.”
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The Sound
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“Lucinda Williams’ album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, that’s my gold [standard], like, this is how I like music to sound, production-wise” says Stoehr, 29, who produced Slow Pulp’s debut full-length, 2020’s Moveys, and its follow-up, September’s Yard. Massey shares the affinity: She wrote some of Yard‘s songs at a cabin where Williams’ Grammy-nominated 2001 album Essence was one of the few CDs on hand. “She’s just an incredible songwriter,” says Massey, noting the “production cues that [Slow Pulp] took from that Americana world for some of the songs” on Yard.
Stoehr and Massey also gush about the soundtrack to seminal ’00s teen TV drama The O.C., explaining the impact the set of canonical alt-rock and indie-pop songs had on them as younger Millennials. “Overall, on [Yard], there’s a little more earnestness and exposed emotion. And I feel like that [O.C.] era of music was all about that.”
And when it comes to the tried-and-true “Artist A x Artist B = Artist C” equation, one could do worse than encapsulating Slow Pulp’s emotional and vibrant indie-rock than “Lucinda Williams x The O.C. soundtrack.” On Yard, the band’s upped the rootsy quotient – like on late-album standout “Broadview,” a gem laden with steel guitar, harmonica, and banjo that sounds like Slow Pulp exhumed and rerecorded a lost demo from Neil Young’s Harvest.
The Record
Like many young bands, Slow Pulp’s rise is forever linked to the pandemic. The quartet finished its debut, Moveys, in the early months of COVID; around that time, Massey says her own health issues and a serious car accident involving her parents were among the factors that forced the band to “take a breather for a second.”
Writing for Yard began in earnest in early 2022, and by February 2023 the band had submitted the record – and signed with eminent indie label ANTI-, currently home to an eclectic roster that includes Fleet Foxes, Mavis Staples, MJ Lenderman and Japandroids. “They were very down for just letting us take a lot of creative control, which is something that was really important to us,” Massey says.
As she did for Moveys, Massey tracked many of Yard‘s vocals in her musician father’s home studio – “It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows; we definitely are good at arguing,” she says with a laugh – and Stoehr ornamented tracks the band recorded with “sound candy type of stuff” to make them pop. The technical prowess helps Slow Pulp’s sharper-than-ever songwriting, chock-full of huge hooks and vivid lyrics, shine.
“Songs like ‘Broadview’ and ‘Yard’ have a different flavor than some of the music that we’ve done before,” Massey says. “And ANTI-, those were some of their favorite songs, like from the jump. That felt cool to have a label be excited about new things and new sounds that are kind of taking a risk.”
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The Breakthrough
When Slow Pulp released EP2, influential YouTuber thelazylazyme gave its closing track, “Preoccupied,” a boost by sharing it. “That was the turning point of, like, ‘Maybe we should look into taking this a little bit more seriously,’” says Massey, explaining how the recognition prompted Slow Pulp to relocate to Chicago.
In 2019, the band opened for Alex G on tour – and noticed a pronounced change in the audiences compared to other support slots it had played before. “That was the first tour we went on where the person we were opening for’s fans were pretty receptive,” Stoehr says. “People were liking it.”
And when touring opened back up following the pandemic, Slow Pulp shored up its indie-rock bona fides with coveted slots supporting Alvvays, Pixies and Death Cab For Cutie.
The Future
In early November, Slow Pulp took the stage – to Phantom Planet’s O.C. theme “California,” naturally – for a sold-out show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, the third of three sold-out Manhattan club shows. The raucous Big Apple crowd has been the norm since Slow Pulp hit the road days after Yard’s release.
“One of our favorite shows that we played on this tour was in Minneapolis,” says Massey, recalling the band’s second stop this fall. “The album hadn’t even been out for a week, and the crowd sang every song. It was just like, ‘What?! How is this happening?’”
The band’s wrapping the year with a European tour – and is already booked for Spain’s Primavera Sound and the Netherlands’ Best Kept Secret in June 2024. Says Massey: “It feels like this big dream is coming true.”
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The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Stoehr: “The AKG C414 [microphone]. The gold and black one.”Massey: “My MacBook.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Massey: “Ratboys. They could be huge. The record they put out this year is really so, so cool.”Stoehr: “They’re an amazing band. There’s this other small band from Madison called She’s Green that I think are really sick.”
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Massey: “Have fun. That’s something that we like have to remind ourselves of sometimes. I’ve had a really hard time letting myself just fail and make things that are horrible. That’s OK! Make stuff that’s really bad. Make bad songs and it gets you to the good ones. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
The Most Surprising Thing About the Music Industry So Far
Massey: [long pause] “People listen to our music.” [laughs]Stoehr: “Yeah, probably that.”Massey: “That’s pretty surprising, always.”
The Thing They Hope Fans Take Away From Their Album
Massey: “Letting yourself have a certain compassion for yourself. That’s the big takeaway. We all have moments of a lot of self-doubt; there are a lot of things that we’re so hard on ourselves for. And to be able to work towards finding the places where you feel you’re able to care for yourself, outside of all the things that are happening. A lot of this record is about gratitude and reflecting on relationships and things that get you to the place you are now.”
The Album
The Window, out August 25 on Topshelf
The Origin
For Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan, college started paying off before taking a single class. “Dave and I met during freshman orientation” at Notre Dame, Steiner tells Billboard. “We were both music nerds in a sea of – in a student body that isn’t full of music nerds. We showed up to college and neither of us had plans to start a band or to seek out people to play music with. We just kind of found each other really quickly.”
Before long, Steiner and Sagan were posting their recordings online and playing regional DIY shows. “The first community that we found ourselves in was in the south suburbs of Chicago, which is where Dave and [bassist] Sean [Neumann] grew up,” Steiner says. “I immediately got welcomed into this community of bands and music freaks down there that loved every type of music and were really passionate about having house shows with a million different types of bands.”
In the mid-’10s, Ratboys went from Chicago upstarts to Windy City rock fixtures, cementing their reputation with Topshelf releases AOID in 2015 and GN in 2017. That year, the quartet solidified its current lineup with the additions of Nuemann and drummer Marcus Nuccio; all four played on Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ critical breakthrough that arrived just before the pandemic in early 2020.
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The Sound
Years ago, Steiner referred to Ratboys as “post-country” – riffing on an inside joke with Sagan about the vagueness of terms like “post-hardcore” and “post-rock” – and the descriptor has followed the project, thanks to its vivid lyricism and natural fusion of sounds. Sagan’s description today is more direct: “We’re like Tom Petty,” he says. “We’re just a tight rock band.” (Steiner chimes in, “How humble of you, Dave!”)
Tongue-in-cheek or not, Steiner’s description has proven prescient for both Ratboys and their peers. “I think you were kind of ahead of your time there a little, Julia,” Nuccio says. “I mean, look at the landscape of indie-rock right now. So many bands, like Big Thief and Wednesday and Florry and all amazing bands, it kind of is like post-country, right? In the way that post-rock or post-hardcore is taking a genre and then adding a little modern twist to it.”
“Some of the tunes that we make are within – or at least paying homage to – that country tradition,” Steiner concludes.
The Record
While on tour with Foxing in 2018, Ratboys met Chris Walla, who had produced their tourmates’ acclaimed album Nearer My God out of his Seattle recording studio. In 2021, with a stable of new songs penned in quarantine, Ratboys cold-called Walla, best known for his time in Death Cab For Cutie, to helm the boards for what would become The Window.
When a tour later that year took Ratboys through Seattle, the band met with Walla; he asked them about their vision for their next album during on a walk back from a grocery store in the pouring rain. “We immediately dove into the details as if we’d known each other forever,” Steiner says. “He’s just a very easy person to spend time with.”
Soon, the band was sending demos to Walla for creative guidance, and in early 2022, Ratboys returned to Seattle to for a month to record, marking their first sessions outside of Chicago. Neumann says Ratboys cherished the opportunity to immerse and “make a record without thinking about the outside world,” comparing the sessions to staying over at a friend’s house. “There was one couch in there, and everybody had their preferred spot on the couch,” Sagan adds. “By the end of it, everybody had their own, like, perfectly formed butt groove.” (“That was the provisional title of the record, actually,” Steiner quips.)
Walla helped the band record live-to-tape for the first time, and also proved an empathetic sounding board for The Window‘s lyrical content. “I told him, ‘A lot of the songs are more personal, more real, more honest than some of the things we’ve made before – like, I just want it to be very real, unflinchingly so,’” Steiner recalls. “He was game for that. We really looked at everything in the face and [were] full-steam ahead with some of these ideas.”
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The Breakthrough
In January 2020, Ratboys received an unlikely boost. Organizers for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign contacted the band to open for one of the senator’s Iowa rallies, and Steiner and Sagan braved a blizzard to play the gig. When Sanders took the stage for his speech, he thanked Ratboys – but Steiner’s phone died as she tried to film the moment for posterity.
“I was like, ‘Well, bummer, I guess I’ll never get to share that with anyone,’” she says. Luckily, a friend captured the moment – and endearing footage of Sanders saying “Let me thank the Ratboys for their music” went viral.
The episode dovetailed with the rollout for Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ most accomplished set of songs yet, which arrived that February to rave reviews. The pandemic disrupted the band’s planned headline tour, which was to begin March 14, 2020, but Ratboys made lemonade from lemons, diving into livestreaming and writing. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Ratboys re-recorded several early songs – and a new one, the instant quarantine classic “Go Outside” – for the 2021 full-length Happy Birthday, Ratboy!; the project coincided with Ratboys’ first overtures to Walla.
Two years after Happy Birthday, Ratboys returned with the longest song of its career, the eight-and-half-minute “Black Earth, WI.” The expansive rocker – along with other new singles “It’s Alive!,” “The Window,” “Crossed That Line,” and “Morning Zoo” (out today) – flashed the band’s recent lyrical and musical growth.
The Future
Ratboys co-headlined a tour with Wild Pink in 2021, but the band is excited to finally make good on its nixed 2020 touring plans and head out on a headline run of its own next month. “We’ve never had the opportunity to do a real, ticketed headline tour,” Steiner says with excitement. “It’s finally happening!”
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The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Steiner: “A roll of gaffe tape. Very useful to have around, not just for cymbal-dampening purposes – which I know nothing about, that’s like black magic to me – but I found a very, very important lesson while vocal tracking on this record: sometimes in order to unlock the best vocal performance, you need some sort of physical object to interact with while you’re singing. At one point, I grabbed this heavy-ass roll of gaffe tape that we had and just the weight of it in my hands, I was able to sing better. That was indispensable to me throughout the session.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Neumann cites Chicago pal Nnamdï, and Nuccio teases “a secret Nnamdï surprise coming in the Ratboys world, for any of the vinyl heads out there” who buy The Window on wax.
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Sagan: “Play a show before you start thinking about any Spotify listeners. Don’t worry about how people receive your music – just play it first.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Steiner: “The music industry today kind of treats music like a public utility, and I really fear that there’s no way to go back from that entirely. The value of a song, the value of an artistic idea has kind of been washed away. If there’s some way that we could reframe the way we look at music… honestly, we’ve talked about this in the band: Spotify should be $100 a month. It’s so cheap. It’s just a matter of finding that tipping point where people will agree that this has value and be willing to pay more for it.”
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