On the Rise
Love Rarely

“When you’re in that environment, you sort of become subjected to chaos – like it does become your norm,” vocalist Courtney Levitt reflects over the phone. 

Pain Travels is Love Rarely painstakingly confronting the human experience in the aftermath of an upbringing where certain needs were met in certain situations, but not in others. Reflected ever so starkly in the LP title itself as well as the album artwork – a painting of a woman with her mouth open, a younger child looking up at her as a stream of water travels between their blank eyes and connects them with a simple phrase, Pain Travels – Love Rarely builds on the intense premise of just how damaging some relationships are, but also how healing some can be if you’re willing to open yourself after the fact.

“We did a hometown show a few days ago with The Callous Daoboys and my dad came to see me,” Levitt tells me, her voice holding a small smile, “Even though, honestly, just not his thing at all – couldn’t be further away from his genre of music. But I did a little shout out to him to say, ‘He hates this music, but he’s still here,’ and I think that’s what you need – that’s what you should get from people who don’t have to love what you do to support it.” 

That said, there is a certain kind of weight behind her words, a weight of lived experience and grit to get where she has. Familial dissonance is written across Love Rarely’s debut. “This is the main theme of our life and it’s not really covered a lot – some artists don’t really touch this sort of subject,” Levitt says. “So I said to Dan [Dewsnap, guitarist], ‘let’s just go with it. There’s going to be a lot of people out there that need this record and need this pinpointed in their life to make them not feel as alone. And then when it eventually came about that that’s where it was, it didn’t feel like we needed to change anything. Everything just was the way it was and it worked.” 

Levitt acknowledges the conscious decision that the record was “going to be about family and we couldn’t really think of any other route to go down. This is what’s important to us. It’s what we’ve been through.”

Singles from Pain Travels such as “Disappear”, “Severed”, “Mould”, and “Will” are immediate identifiers of the album’s theme, an embattled internal dialogue penned by Levitt amidst a plethora of guitar lines, quick, bouncing riffs, and resonant percussion; a symphonic clashing of instrumentals that is bridged together by a common thread of mourning and rage. 

“I think when you end up in a situation where you are supported so much by your parents, but other aspects that aren’t as great – you can get a little bit skewed mentally,” Levitt says. “I think you end up [in a situation] where no one can fully help you with [full extent of] what is needed. Especially when there’s bad stuff going on in the family and outside the family, you just end up with certain personality quirks that stick with you throughout your life. In my own experience of having situations where things were said to me as a kid that stick with me forever” – Levitt almost seems to shrug at this – “but then also having that still somewhat supportive and loving relationship with my parents.”

As much as Pain Travels details just how far our childhood travels with us throughout our lives, it finds relief and shielding from the love of friends and the figures we “meet along the way.” In my house, we’ve always said it takes a village to raise and nurture a human being. And sometimes the village will be where a child finds refuge, where young adults turn for guidance, for adults to look back at fondly and visit from time to time. “Friends have really become my family now,” Levitt says. “My mom and dad are obviously top of the bunch, but there are a lot of family members that have floated away, that I don’t hear anything from anymore – no support or anything – and friends have come in and filled that void.”

It’s not just Levitt – in fact, it’s something Love Rarely’s members all have in common: difficult upbringings. As much as Levitt’s lyricism comes from a place of cathartic relief as she pens the very things that have crossed her mind, that she may not have been able to express at the time, so do the aching tones of songs like “Blame”, the tormented looping of “Will”, the haunting echos in “Dormant”. Alongside bandmates Dan Dewsnap on guitar, Dan Gilson on bass, and Leo Godfrey on drums – the friends that have helped fill voids over the years – Love Rarely are a construct of the mutual understanding of how cruel life can be and being able to use art as a portal of communication. “I do find it so interesting how me, [the Dans], and Leo have all found each other and all had the exact same sort of music taste and elements of writing to create what we have,” Levitt explains. “It does genuinely feel like a puzzle piece that’s fit between us all, ’cause the very things that me, Dan, and Lou have been through are almost identical to each other.”

“Especially when you are heavily creative,” she continues. “I think anyone that is has a lot going on upstairs. I don’t think anyone that is creative isn’t somewhat struggling in a way.” Love Rarely are melded together through adversity and there really is no less judgmental environment than those who have experienced the same as you. “As certain songs got written and things got dealt with mentally, it did feel like a purge every time we finished a song. It was like: that bit of my life feels dealt with. And what came with that was a bit more clarity to write the other songs and a bit more room in my brain.”

Pain Travels is a culmination of events, some ten-year-old songs in the midst of newer work, all compiled nearly a year and a half ago, but it represents something that Levitt and company have found in common. The love of others as a safety blanket, as reassurance that they are indeed lovable and not as defective as the mind can lead one to believe. “I think the whole album has become a comfort blanket.” No matter how successful it is, she explains, it’s given them “a lot of clarity in the sense of what we’ve been through.” 

Their debut is not meant to be just a method of catharsis and understanding for themselves, but for others because, too. “That’s something we do hope for,” Levitt nods. “Some of the things that are in there, like alcohol abuse and being left to your own devices, hyper independence as a child… it’s a part of it.” Indeed, while pain travels, pain is always temporary; the love we feel throughout our lives and its impact on us will always win.