GHOSTWOMAN want you to hear what they’re feeling

Sat with an orange wine in hand and having made sure their friends are plied happily with drinks and food, the pair took a break from the fun to speak about tambourines, grief, and tape machines.

Their upcoming album, Welcome to the Civilized World, is a pastiche of charged guitars, snare-heavy drums, all washed with their psychedelic Americana. The record has shades of Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Velvet Underground, tangibly feeling old while sounding new. “It’s a product of travelling a lot – we made a lot of this in Belgium, a lot in Austria, and a lot on the road,” Van Dessel says. “Without the benefit of having a single studio, we went back to our more lo-fi sound roots.”

Uschenko continues: “With our earlier albums we had no demos, and whatever we recorded onto tape was what we had.” It makes sense, then, that they relied heavily on using tape to record the bulk of the album, as well as harking back to more old-school techniques. “I think it just sounds the best,” Van Dessel asserts. “There’s mistakes too, and there’s a certain beauty in that it’s not perfect.”

Uschenko further explains he likes how physical it is, how “it eliminates even more time that I have to spend staring at a screen.” The album itself ends with a sound of a tape being ejected, a lasting sonic statement.

The duo’s previous outing, Hindsight is 50/50, had a glossier sheen on top of its still-stellar instrumentation, but Welcome to the Civilized World possesses the graininess and texture that you could only get from recording on tape – a sound that has a strong and growing fanbase that the duo clearly belong to. “It’s also a commitment thing,” Uschenko begins. “You only have a certain amount of tape and if you record over it, it degrades. We’ll do a couple takes, but for the most part, if it feels good, we’ll leave it.” It’s clear that this ethos was central in the development of the record, and as Uschenko puts it: “It’s kind of a ‘fuck you’ to modern society. I don’t want a million takes of a guitar part; I just want to choose from three.”

GHOSTWOMAN are far from snobby purists, though. They consistently introduce samples into their work, and they still have full access to modern mixing tools. “We’re trying to find a halfway point so we can make everything that’s awesome about every aspect of each era,” Uschenko explains. They join a growing movement of bands who actively choose to make their lives a little more inconvenient in the pursuit of a more authentic sound, not only on the studio recording but also the live performance. As Uschenko explains: “You have to be really well-rehearsed and really know your songs. In a way we try to make sure that by doing as little studio magic as possible, so our live shows aren’t lacking.”

“We mainly find stuff on [Facebook] Marketplace,” Uschenko says with a self-aware smirk. “Sometimes we’ll find something that we have no idea what it does but it looks cool. So why not spend a couple bucks on it at the thrift shop?” Van Dessel continues: “We always resell it too. One time we sold this mixing board to a kid who was really trying to get into analogue recording, and that always feels like passing a torch on for them to discover and create their own thing.”

Their joint enthusiasm for the analogue makes a lot of sense when you consider the themes on their new album. Throughout, they reference lost love, isolation, loneliness. They all but outright described it as an exercise in processing the absurdity and futility in the everyday world. Just like they said, their recording practices are a middle finger to modern society, and their attitude on their new record reflects that sentiment. Despite Uschenko admitting that he hates writing lyrics, the album is filled with vivid metaphor and illustrative description.

“Sometimes it’s hard to find the words, and sometimes we’ll have instrumentals we really like then be like, ‘Damn okay now we have to add the words,’” Uschenko says. Despite this, the album’s exploration of futility was primarily driven by one thing they both have experience with: grief. “We both have lost friends to suicide over the past couple years,” Van Dessel shares. “It’s such a weird thing to lose someone to something like that, and combined with the procedure of figuring out what the fuck is going on in the world.” Uschenko continues: “She [Van Dessel] had just lost a friend when I was writing a lot of the lyrics for this, and we definitely connected on that level. I think unconsciously I wrote from that perspective of people we knew who had given up on life.” Songs like “that Jesus” or “Dime a Dozen” take on a different shade in this context, though by the band’s own admission these are equally about escapism in the current world we live in. “This world is far from civilised right now,” Uschenko asserts.

Instead of shying away from the heavier subject matter, the duo lean closer. “I’ve always seen music, especially writing lyrics, as a way of analysing, and a strange form of therapy,” Uschenko explains. Having received messages from people who said that GHOSTWOMAN’s music helped them through bleak periods and sometimes suicidal thoughts, the duo know that the music they create – though not necessarily for that purpose – has the ability to help others process the world, as well as help themselves work through certain emotions. “We make things because it helps us escape the weirdness of life,” Van Dessel says as Uschenko chimes in: “If someone can hear something and think ‘I want to make something like that now’ or is inspired to do something similar, it removes you from that dark hole very quickly.”

Conscious of not bringing down the vibe at their ongoing birthday party, we switch gears to discuss why Van Dessel used to vehemently dislike tambourines until she heard The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs”: “I used to be very strictly into rock music. It had to be guitar, bass, drums, that’s it,” she says, “but it’s genuinely grown on me, and even though it took me ages to understand it, now that I know what you can do with a stupid tambourine, I love the tone of it.” It’s across the record, along with other ‘novelty’ percussion like shakers. “It’s like a colour in a palette really,” Uschenko continues. “You don’t want it to overtake anything, but it adds an interesting flavour.” While Uschenko searches for a parallel thing that he has one-eighty’d on, we end up uniting on how annoying ukuleles are. “They belong in fucking Lexus ads and not much else,” Uschenko jokes.

GHOSTWOMAN’s blend of psychedelia and simple but potent songwriting is clearly just as important for distilling their own experiences as it is for the strangers who find solace in it. As they head out to check on their friends, Uschenko closes out: “Call your friends. Even if they’re in a good mood all the time, call them anyway, because you never know what the fuck is going on. You can’t stop any of that, but the least we can do is be there for each other.” It’s a simple thought, but we need to be reminded of it sometimes.