Sweeping Promises are finding resonance in hidden chambers

In the weeks leading up to our conversation, they found themselves confronting one of the record’s central anxieties in real time. Earlier this summer, The Atlantic published an investigation into AI music generators after an independent watchdog revealed that millions of songs had been scraped by tech companies to train generative models. Curious, vocalist/bassist Lira Mondal and guitarist/producer Caufield Schnug searched the database themselves and found heaps of their own material included.

We return to many of the same questions throughout our conversation: How do we continue to create as it becomes increasingly commodified? How do we value human expression when its originality keeps being flattened into data? Why are we made to feel naive when we expect better from the world?

With their latest single, “Accent”, Sweeping Promises explore authorship and what it means to express oneself. As Mondal sings, “Words without a home / Accent to another planet,” the song wrestles with the uneasy feeling of speaking into a world where self-expression can feel alien or misunderstood. She then flirts with activities that you might romanticise your life with, e.g. “Go smell a candle or a flower.” Mondal brings to mind the idea of ‘whimsy-maxxing’. At its best, it encourages people to reclaim attention from doomscrolling through candles, flowers, handwritten journals, and other everyday rituals. Yet, like so many internet-born movements, it has also become another commodified performance that invites comparisons over whose life is being ‘romanticised’ most successfully. Are these activities really grounded in a desire to create or are they distractions from reality? 

Sweeping Promises understand that impulse, and don’t desire to limit people from finding comfort in these romanticised routines. But on You Say I Romanticize, they ask what comes next. The album’s title comes from its closing track, “Write Lightly”, where Mondal sings about writing in her journal: “Oh, you say I romanticise / That my perspective’s compromised.” Sweeping Promises spend the preceding nine songs exploring the power of documenting our ideas, populated by medieval mystics, femme novelists, and anxious narrators who continued to create during periods of societal crisis.

“The narrator [on You Say I Romanticize] feels like they’re just put into a corner,” Mondal explains. “The title is an accusation – a criticism being lodged at them for wanting to use their imagination, think of a better world, express themselves through art and through writing.” Schnug also points out that abbreviating You Say I Romanticize creates the acronym ‘YSIR’ – which phonetically resembles “yes, sir.”

“There’s an animalistic, almost subservient aspect when you abbreviate the name of the record,” Mondal adds. “As if compliance at any cost. I think we’re trying to weaponise that further. Especially when we think about things in the USA – wanting healthcare and wanting equal rights for people – we’re being lumped into romanticising our existence when it’s just the bare minimum.”

It’s one of the interview’s defining moments because it entirely reframes the album. Suddenly, You Say I Romanticize isn’t simply asking whether we’re too idealistic in a way that comes across as sarcastic. The album goes beyond idealism and asks who benefits when the belief that things could be different is dismissed as naive in the first place.

That tension surfaces immediately on the album’s opening track, “Shooting Shadows”. Built around pounding drums and Mondal’s increasingly frantic refrain – “Who’s the one you’re coming for?” – the song captures the creeping feeling that nowhere is entirely safe anymore, not even our own homes.

“I feel like [writing that song] was one of those twenty-minute wonders,” Mondal says. “The music was just so fun to play. It was fun to sing and get into this character of someone who’s railing against the walls closing in on them – this kind of claustrophobia and paranoia. It was around the time that ICE was picking up steam and people were getting interrogated in their own homes. That definitely made its way into the feeling of unease in the song. It’s quite evil.”

She traces the song’s evolution through an unlikely chain of references, beginning with The Sopranos. She recalls an episode built around the FBI’s surveillance of Tony Soprano’s home, where agents track the family’s routines and wait for an opportunity to infiltrate what should be their private space. “And then I was thinking so much about the murder of Breonna Taylor and her getting shot up in her own house because of essentially hearsay,” she says. “It was weighing heavily on my mind about how futile it felt to think you’re safe in your home and then you’re not, especially with ICE. Safe in your own city, in your own state, in your own country – and then one day you’re not.”

Throughout our conversation, Mondal and Schnug rarely finish an idea without the other gently expanding on it, allowing their perspectives to challenge and sharpen one another. “I think overall we’re both always suspicious of making happy music,” Schnug says when explaining their approach to the complex themes they explore.

Schnug goes on to reference the concept of “cruel optimism” – the idea that hope itself can become a trap. “Being too optimistic and nice can become a dangling promise that leads you astray.” It’s an idea that cleverly connects back to the band’s own name. “But don’t get me wrong; I do think you can be a romantic and that can be a good thing too.”

Mondal nods: “I think it’s why we’re committed to being musicians. We do like to romanticise our lives. We do want to live in a world where musicians can be paid equitably, and communities can grow, gather, and travel the world on the strength of their art.” She pauses. “If that’s romanticising your life… well then, you say I romanticise.”

You Say I Romanticize was assembled over eighteen months, with Mondal and Schnug remaining committed to the DIY approach that has long defined Sweeping Promises. They refused to hand the record over to outside producers or studios, in favour of their at-home set-up that shaped every stage of the process, embracing the spontaneity and control that comes with making music on their own terms. This ethos also extended into their single “Cocoon”, with the band soldering hundreds of their own instrument cables. “Hand over the wires / Hand me those pliers / Hand me that string,” Mondal sings on the track, with their handmade cables strewn erratically around her in the music video like a spider in its web.

“We love the idea of the amateur,” Schnug says. “The number one most important quality of music that I look for is that the listener can imagine themselves being able to do it. It has to be close enough to the ground that you can see how human limbs did that.” Despite their reputations as a fiercely immediate live band, neither musician would describe the record as raw. “Our music is really constructed,” Schnug says.

Rather than chasing technical perfection, Sweeping Promises are interested in preserving the experience of people working together in a room. Over the past several records, Schnug has developed an increasingly idiosyncratic recording philosophy that rejects many of the conventions of modern rock production altogether, and is known for having recorded past albums with a single mic, right off the floor. “I’m not a big believer in computer beautification,” he says, “scooting notes or overly smoothing things. We just kind of let it rip.”

While the band still keeps the recording process minimal, You Say I Romanticize is one of their most thoughtfully meticulous records yet. Layers of guitars and ghostly vocal doubles create an atmosphere that feels dynamic. It’s for those tired of pristine fidelity and who would rather feel like they are in the studio with the band, hearing the recording unfold in the environment that surrounds them.

“I despise stereo and its concept in rock music. I’m interested in a magical room that is just one position and mono. I’m interested in recording resonances rather than direct sound. I think that’s political,” Schnug laughs. “Recording in a space with a two-to-three-second reverb time, also where no one has any interiority. Even headphones can cause someone to be too in their own head and can self-implode.” It’s a technique that works, as their house in the suburbs of Lawrence has become something of a hidden waypoint for touring musicians, with Schnug producing dozens of records for artists including Spread Joy, Optic Sink, and whoever else passes through town.

While many studios isolate musicians from one another during the recording process, Sweeping Promises lean into what engineers typically try to eliminate: bleed. Instruments spill into the vocal mics and the room’s echoes and vibrations become an integral part of the album. “Resonance in hidden chambers would be the tagline for this album,” Modal says. “We’re not sound purists, but I don’t want immaculate overdubbing; it speaks to my fractured sense of self, and I don’t need to replicate my voice in the exact same way on every take. I can’t even have both headphones on while I’m singing. I want to be in this room, react to it, and translate it into the mic.”

I begin to study the room the band is calling in from. Books line the wall behind Mondal and Schnug, an appropriate backdrop for a record shaped heavily by literature. While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein inevitably looms over discussions of the album, it was another of her novels that directly inspired it. “I gravitated more towards The Last Man,” Mondal says. “It was equally prophetic.” Published in 1826 after the deaths of Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and several close friends, The Last Man imagines a world devastated by plague.

“What was it that this woman was tapping into that she could envision a world completely obliterated by a virus?” she asks. “And now, a couple hundred years later, here we are living in this post-pandemic world. It also makes you wonder if we’re all doomed and none of this is actually unique. The world is cycling through destruction and recreation, but we as humans aren’t really helping matters. We’re at times just making them worse.”

Shelly is not the only womanly figure who haunts the record. “My Anchoress” draws on the life of Julian of Norwich, the fifteenth-century mystic whose Revelations of Divine Love became the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman.

“An anchoress is [someone] like Julian of Norwich, a woman who basically lived in a spare room in a church for her entire life,” Schnug explains. “She was literally locked away from society and wrote about her experiences.”

Mondal found a more contemporary parallel in Patti Smith’s Devotion, a meditation on artistic practice and the discipline required to sustain it. “I feel like she’s also kind of an anchoress. She may be out in the world, but she’s so consumed by writing and understanding the importance of having a room of one’s own,” Mondal adds.

What connects these figures is the private space in which they wrote, a space where they imagined a different future despite their hardships or unique circumstances. “The thought of devotion was something we were also very much preoccupied with,” Mondal says. “Whether devotion manifests in insanity or sometimes ecstasy.”

While Sweeping Promises explore the power of hermit-like spaces and how they influence thought and creative writing, they also highlight the power of collective action. She mentions James Spooner’s Punk for the People summit in Los Angeles, featuring figures including Kathleen Hanna and Bruce LaBruce. Mondal found herself thinking about how punk communities continue to evolve despite mounting political and economic pressures.

“They were all talking about facing different kinds of peril,” she says. “It feels more imperative for communities to cross-pollinate with one another.”

After spending close to an hour with Sweeping Promises, discussing art and prolific writers we admire, I realise that writing is never treated as escapism or, as we joke, an attempt to ‘whimsy-max’ our lives. It’s self-expression and a way of leaving evidence behind that we were here, like the writers Mondal is inspired by. It’s defiantly human. In a cultural moment that is increasingly comfortable with reducing creativity to automation, You Say I Romanticize laughs at doing things the hard way and embraces the humanity of it all. It’s not searching for the perfect experience, but being present in one’s own life, art, and community.