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Indie-folk's favorite best friend duo, Lowertown, has returned with a whimsically delightful new album, Ugly Ducking Union. The album is crafted around a fantastical duckling named Dale, who teams up with a band of outsiders to build a community through one another. Although decorated with this joyous fictional universe, Ugly Ducking Union ultimately explores Avsha and Olive's navigation of the world together. From being best friends, to roommates, to band members, to touring extensively, the pair have grown up alongside each other. This album is their return to form, both sonically, and in spirit, becoming the explorative kids they started this career as. Read on for more: 

OnesToWatch: Who are you? Give us the brief. 

Avsha: We're Lowertown. I'm Avsha, and she's Olive. We are from Atlanta, Georgia. We formed in Atlanta, Georgia, and now we live in New York. and we make music. Guitar, drums, bass and singing. We've been doing it for like eight years now. 


All the things that go into music, you can find in your music. 

Avsha: That's what I gravitate towards instead of going for genre, I'm like, “Okay, well, these are the instruments we have.”

If listeners had never heard your music before, what's the first song you would tell them to listen to? 


Olive: The one that finds a lot of people is “Best Person in the World.”

Avsha: Yeah, that's the first era of our music, when we were still really young. It’s on the quieter, textural side of us. 

Olive: “The Gaping Mouth” is one of my favorite ones. 

Avsha: If it had to be one, it would be that. That's my favorite song we've written. It's so cool that people like that one because it's very structureless and rambly, but still has enough of a hook that it brings people in. That’s some of the most experimental stuff that we get into. It’s sort of our MO, that we don’t really work in a genre. The sound just reflects what we’re feeling. 

The genre is what serves the music. 

Olive: Yes. 

Avsha: “Gaping Mouth” speaks to that. 

Olive: Off the new album, “I Like You A Lot” is a good one. 

Avsha: It’s a combo of the more punk stuff that we were doing with I love to Lie, the last album, and the softer stuff, the relationship between the two of us, both of us singing together and that interplay. Those three songs represent the eras we’ve been through over the last eight years. 

Good foundation. You mentioned the album, it’s called
Ugly Duckling Union. Tell me about the title! 

Olive: Avsha and I have always felt like outsiders in a lot of ways – with music and more. Growing up in Atlanta, there weren’t really many places we felt at home, but we found all the people we were friends with through the music scene. The album is about places for people to come together, people that don't feel like they have a home. It also praises non-conformity and appreciating everyone in their differences. Our shows have become one of those places for people as well, which is the most beautiful thing to have come out of our music. We see people finding a community and home and friends at our shows. So that was a big part of the Ugly Duckling Union, it’s a place for people to be completely themselves and to feel accepted and wanted. 

Avsha: It also came along with the concept of the album. We developed a story to go along with the project, about this main character, Dale, who is the duck on the album cover. It's his story through this fictional universe where he builds this community of outsiders that, within the story, perpetuates the things that we were trying to do with this album, which is making spaces for people to meet. The group that he ends up bringing together is the Ugly Duckling Union, so we thought it might be a fitting title for the album. 

This is such an extensive story. Did you write that concept first or did that come about as you were gathering the songs? 


Olive: It came about at the tail end of producing the album. I think for us, the concept of an album arises as the pieces are falling together, rather than before you start writing. You can almost decide what it’s about. We just make music based on how we're feeling at the time and don't overthink exactly what it has to be. Within the headspace and the time frame of when you make those songs, the general motives present themselves. We started writing this story about it because we're obsessed with things like that. 
And I also think that people who don’t feel supported often find homes in fandoms and internet culture – like we love anime fandoms – and that principle goes hand in hand with the story we created. It’s fun and we get to dive into the world of the music and visual and conceptual elements. 

Avsha: Also, our friendship blossomed from our sheer music and culture and things like that. So this story is a bit of our origin story, and we hope that it makes listeners feel closer to us. 

As your third album,
I feel like this concept is a great timeline of how you grew up and grew into friends. I'm also curious in that regard, now that it is your third project, how did you go about writing and producing this? What are the similarities and differences? 

Avsha: It was actually similar to the very first album we ever wrote; it's kind of a return to form for us. We wrote the first album when we were still living at our parents' places and we wrote it in my family house's basement. We wrote it, we recorded it, we produced it, we released it ourselves. Then we got signed, and all the projects after that had an outside hand to them. Not to knock that music, because it is some of our favorite ever, but the deadlines and pressure made us crave the unbounded creativity that we had in the first album without having to feel like there were people relying on us to deliver something. It was honestly so nice and refreshing once we got to do that again. Our friendship too, had gone through so many ups and downs – we were best friends and then we got signed, we became work colleagues, and then we moved to New York together, which is the first place we moved out of the family homes. And then we were touring nonstop, so we didn't really have time to grow our friendship in a healthy way. Once we had a second, we took a deliberate break from touring, and we realized that there were a lot of fractured things between us that we needed to figure out if we hoped to continue doing this band. The album was our journey of redefining what our friendship was. In that way, we wanted to incorporate concepts that were important to us when we were first becoming friends: things like finding things online that we really cared about, artists and fandoms, mutual obsessions, that's why it's so interweaved in this album. That is what makes our friendship something that we really need to hold on to. We recorded the album over two years. You can feel the progression of us redefining our friendship, our relationship to music, and our relationship to being alive. 

So you were mainly writing the songs first, and then going into produce them? 

Avsha: We were experimenting with a bunch of different ways to write. Sometimes we would sit down and finish the whole song right then. We never really produced on the spot. We would write a bunch, track it out in my basement, usually in four song chunks, and then we’d go back to writing again. 

I am so partial to that process, and I think you can really hear it on the record. These songs sound like they were written with an intention to create a body of work, not just as a result of session culture, and that the production and songwriting were both extremely creative and singular. Were there any sonic north stars that you were inspired by during that period? 

Avsha: Not deliberately. I’ve always loved the sound of DIY, home production. I really love how we did the first album, we clearly knew nothing about production and just felt it out. We went back to that original process, which is so unnecessarily difficult. We’d make little edits, then bounce them to my phone, listen in my AirPods, and then start over again. It's so annoying, but it felt like us. The North Star was the feeling of a child being on GarageBand. And honestly my skills have not developed that much more. My ears have developed more, but my tactics have stayed pretty similar. So I was excited to do that process again with the ears I have now, after 8 years. The album definitely has more of a distinct sound than the first album, but it still has that sort of childish tinkering to it. 

I love that. Were there any specific pieces of gear or plug-ins that you felt like you were using a lot on this album particularly? 


Avsha: I was working with less than I was working with on the first one. Maybe the Solid State Logic compressor, the SL compressor. But besides that, most of the plug-ins and everything is all Logic plug-ins. 


That's fire, honestly. 

Avsha: Yeah, it was pretty much all just what was built into the DAW. The world of plug-ins is really huge and vast and complicated to me, so, if I was to buy a plug in, I would be non-stop thinking that there was probably one much better that I didn't buy. 

No secret sauce, just Logic. 

Avsha: Just don’t be too good at it. 

I have a few fun questions to end on. Specifically for you guys, since you talked so much about the nostalgic internet culture of growing up, I'm curious what the internet looked like when you were 16? 


Olive: Poptropica I played when I was a bit younger, but I would just repeat the islands a million times. I was playing Wizard 101, Animal Crossing, Zelda games, all my DS stuff, Pokemon. I was a huge gamer.
I literally feel like I have a tendency for gaming addiction, so I can't really play games because I get sucked into it. I don't allow myself to open that box usually. 


Avsha: I was a big YouTube hole person. I would go on YouTube and just be clicking on stuff to find the craziest videos. That definitely shaped my idea of culture in general. That cache of human experience that is on YouTube is so amazing. At that point, too, corporations didn't really understand how to monetize off of it yet. So people were expressing themselves on YouTube in a much purer way. That was huge for my development. There were also so many more live music videos, MTV-type stuff, that’s how I developed my music taste and also understanding of human connection. It's so sad to hear. 

Olive: You also had a lot of friends! 

Avsha: Yes, but on YouTube I got to connect to people that were from all over the world, you know? Without it, I would have just been in this small circle in Georgia. I was in a very small school, it was the same 70 kids that I knew for my entire life. So YouTube, Tumblr, that was my first chance to really explore. I also was on Neopets, Webkins, Club Penguin. 

The best, wow. I'd love to know if Ugly Duckling Union were a candle, what would it smell like? 

Avsha: Maybe, down? Like feathers… 

Olive: What? I was thinking vanilla. 

Avsha: That’s in the same world! Like when you lay on a really old pillow, like your grandma's pillow, and it's a down pillow. 

Olive: Vanilla cedarwood. 


Avsha: Vanilla pillow. That's a Grammy pillow to me. The duck is the main character, so I had to say something about feathers. 

I'm with you. I'd also love to know what your favorite sound is right now, but like a life sound, not a music sound. 

Olive: It's definitely not the beeping of the van when we were backing it up. 

Avsha: No, not the beeping of the van. I was actually going to say maybe when I turned the ignition, that's a relief to me, when the car turns on. It was also raining last night, and we have a porch in this Airbnb, and hearing the rain coming down off of the awning of the porch, that was – no offense Toronto – but the first really nice feeling I've had about the city.

Olive: I like hearing everyone sleeping when we're in the hotel room. It's sweet, it's so gentle and makes me happy and feel cozy. 

Yeah, so vulnerable. Well, my very final question is who your OnesToWatch are. So who are some artists that you would recommend? 


Avsha: So far on the tour, I've been playing a lot of Double Virgo, the Greatest Hits album, I've been bumping a bunch. 

Olive: Also, LUCY (Cooper B. Handy). We're both obsessed with him. 


Avsha: And if you can go even further into that Western Mass scene, God's Wisdom. I would tell anyone who enjoys life to try God's Wisdom. 

Olive: Anyone who enjoys experimental great music. Experimental life.
Honestly, Young Sham from Philly. I've been really listening to his album, World of Color. He took it off Spotify recently, but I love that album. 


Those are great. Thanks so much for chatting!! 

Lowertown: Thank you!