Slow Pulp are growing with the seasons

Slow Pulp has a habit of making records that soundtrack the changing seasons. Their debut, Moveys, arrived in October 2020 and Yard followed in September three years later. Now, as we fold into autumn again, the Madison-born, Chicago-based quartet return with Melodie, an album preoccupied with relationships changing shape and the things they return to, even as everything around them changes.

Its opening song, “Yellow and Green,” begins beneath an oak tree. Vocalist and guitarist Emily Massey sings about being nineteen and feeling broken on Halloween. Years pass, and nineteen becomes thirty; eventually, thirty becomes ninety, but the feelings remain strong. It's a fitting entrance to a record that reflects on the passage of time.

Slow Pulp knows something about that. Guitarist Henry Stoehr, bassist Alex Leeds and drummer Teddy Mathews grew up together in Madison, Wisconsin, making music in various forms since childhood. Stoehr remembers the band's earliest material as “definitely kind of like basement, house show music.” By the time Massey entered the picture, the trio had already released music under the Slow Pulp name, while Massey was still playing with a band she'd been part of since high school. When Slow Pulp needed a rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, Massey joined and over time, she became one of the band’s principal songwriters.

“I feel like I knew right away, like, 10 years ago when we started working on music, I was like, ‘Oh, I found my people for this,’ 100%,” Massey remembers. The group eventually left Madison for Chicago, intending to see how far they could take the band. “I feel like we moved to Chicago kind of with the purpose of we're gonna really give this thing a shot and really try to be a band and see how it goes with that type of intention,” Massey says.

While it wasn’t financially easy at first, Chicago offered the opportunity for more shows and collaboration, without completely abandoning where they came from. “Chicago just felt really right,” Massey says. “And I think there's something that we love about staying Midwestern to a certain extent too, that just felt like it was us.”

That identity followed Slow Pulp. While their early releases leaned more into shoegaze, Moveys widened the frame as they connected back to their Midwestern roots, incorporating country-tinged folk rock with bursts of harmonica and slide guitar. “Falling Apart”, in particular, placed one of Massey's most lilting vocal performances against violin and layered harmonies.

It's a song I still frequently return to because it captures something Slow Pulp does incredibly well: they can make sadness sound almost weightless without softening its edges. Massey knows how to lean lyrically into confrontation, charged with confidence and resolve, and the freedom in acknowledging when things simply aren't alright. This comes to light as Stoehr describes their records as “kind of like a sketchbook,” cohesive through more of “an attitude or an energy” even when they contain wildly different types of songs genre-wise. Massey offers the more concise descriptor: “Patchwork.”

Even the names of their records have accumulated unexpected connections. Stoehr wrote “Melodie” around halfway through the new album, and while recording with producer Elliot Kozel, whose credits include Rosalía, Björk, SZA and Eartheater, he and Massey began considering whether one of its song titles could name the record. The unusual spelling reminded them of Moveys, another familiar word that could take on different meanings if you didn't see how it was spelled. Even Yard, seemingly the exception, ended up carrying an accidental second meaning: Stoehr, Mathews and Leeds had a childhood friend nicknamed Yard because, as Stoehr explains, “they say when you hit home runs you're going yard, and he was always hitting home runs.”

“We were thinking of Melody, kind of like how you'd maybe spell it if it was, like, a person's name,” Stoehr explains, adding that the double meaning felt consistent with what they had done before. There was also something amusingly straightforward about it. “There's something funny too about calling an album Melody. You know?” Massey laughs. “We make music.” By the time Slow Pulp began making Melodie, however, change meant something different. It was important for the band to go back and figure out how to keep growing without losing the freedom they had before anyone was listening.

“Better Man” was the first clue. Stoehr remembers it as the song he and Massey began writing together during this album cycle that felt like the kickoff for whatever would come next. It also saw Stoehr take on more of a songwriting role, credited for five of the album's songs. The pair returned to something closer to how they worked when they first met: sending songs back and forth quickly, sometimes before either could become particularly attached to an idea. “It kind of felt like the doorway into this new album.”

The song turns self-doubt into acceptance, with its central figure taking accountability for the past and moving forward on the path towards becoming a better person. Stoehr wrote from his own perspective of a man, with Massey leading vocals, creating an interesting tension between the gendered language of “being a better man” and the band's unified voice. “Henry didn't write songs trying to find them from my perspective,” she explains. “They're all from his perspective, which makes them the most real and genuine.” But that distance changes how the song can be understood.

Massey became interested in “how much a song can be interpreted differently based on who the person presenting it is,” particularly when a song about becoming a “better man” is sung by a woman, yet thematically can be applied to anyone. Its rain-soaked video embraces transformation at full volume, recalling the heightened drama of early-2000s alternative rock videos like Shiny Toy Guns' “Rainy Monday” — the kind you might once have stumbled across late at night on MTV.

Slow Pulp deliberately leaned into the classic, rock band territory, shooting overnight with lights affixed to a horse stable and programmed to the song. “I feel like traditional rock band music videos are, in a lot of ways, kind of a dying art,” Massey says. For Slow Pulp, the goal was simply to make something “kind of big and dramatic” that centred their performance.

The way Slow Pulp play with perspective on “Better Man” also reflects a broader change in how Melodie was made. Massey and Stoehr returned to something closer to how they worked when they first met: sending songs back and forth quickly, sometimes before either could become particularly attached to an idea. “It's a very vulnerable thing to send a song that is pretty, pretty half-baked,” Massey says. But producing more material meant each individual idea became “less precious,” helping alleviate some of the fear around sharing unfinished work.

A decade ago, they could work that way because nothing depended on the outcome. “The nature of it was purely exploratory without having any pressure put on it,” Massey remembers. “It was just like, ‘Let's just write for the sake of writing.’” Making songs was, in part, how she and Stoehr became friends. But with a third record came the accumulated pressure of everything that had happened before it.

“We have a bunch of songs that did not work and that's kind of the best part in some ways,” Massey says. There is a strange circularity to that. Slow Pulp have spent a decade becoming better musicians, collaborators and songwriters, only to discover that growth sometimes requires recovering the parts of yourself that worked in ways you may not have acknowledged before.

It also means relinquishing control in other ways in order to leave space for growth. Stoehr had previously handled all of Slow Pulp's production, whereas Melodie brought Kozel into the process. Kozel carried his own Wisconsin connection, Stoehr, Mathews and Leeds growing up fans of his former band Sleeping in the Aviary.

“There was some sort of, I feel like, kismet energy that existed,” Massey reflects. For Stoehr, allowing someone else into the process meant confronting his own attachment to control. “I've had, like, such a tight grip on it the whole time we've been a band,” he admits. "Ultimately, trying another way was, more than anything, for the sake of growing.”

That openness seeps into the record's sound. Massey says, “We accidentally found ourselves in this kind of, like '80s adult contemporary energy for this album, pulling from Bruce Hornsby and Peter Gabriel. Also the 90’s, almost like Beck energy.” It also appears throughout Melodie's writing. On the title track, “Melodie” sways between the name of a character and the music lingering in the background of a dream. Ordinary images become containers for time like a 1996 Mazda in “Red Car”. Again and again, its narrators seem caught between wanting something to remain and knowing it won't. “Yellow and Green” sees Massey reflecting on a heartbreak that can become, years later, “the best thing to happen” to her. The things that crack you open can eventually resemble a new beginning with a changing perspective.

When our conversation turns towards getting older, Massey laughs. “Oh, well, we're in our 30s. And this is like our ‘we're in our 30s’ record.” Stoehr says the coming-of-age quality isn't something he consciously reaches for. “I think that's where I'm at [in my life], and it comes out naturally in the music,” he says. “I can't do it any other way.”

For Massey, getting older has brought a different relationship to uncertainty. “I think for me, maybe I'm in a phase of my life where I'm feeling more of an acceptance of uncertainty and change,” she says. After years of trying to fight against it, she reached the realization: “I don't get to choose that. I can't fight against it.” She calls what follows “kind of like a surrender energy.”

Maybe that is what growing up looks like across Melodie. The band aren't trying to arrive at some fixed, improved version of themselves, but rather recognizing it’s an ongoing process and hoping the people around them stick around long enough to see them through it. For Slow Pulp, that has meant sharing control with each other and rediscovering the empowerment of making music before it became, in large part, their career. Slow Pulp can't become the people they were when Massey and Stoehr first began exchanging songs in Wisconsin, but perhaps that isn't the point. A decade later, they are still changing together.