Slow Pulp Finds Its Way Back to the Beginning on "Melodie"
Photo by Luca Venter
Slow Pulp have never made a record while they were in a comfortable place. They’ve actually built their reputation on making records when things were toughest, with 2020’s Moveys being tracked while Emily Massey was back home in Wisconsin caring for her parents who were recovering from a car accident, and 2023’s Yard coming together after a long-distance COVID scare pulled the band apart mid-process. Both records turned that instability into some of this decade’s most quietly devastating indie rock, the kind that got them booked to open for the Pixies, Death Cab for Cutie, and Alvvays, the bands they’ve bonded over as teenagers in Madison, Wisconsin before any of this was ever real.
On Melodie, their third record that arrives September 18th via ANTI- Records, Slow Pulp steers the ship in a steadier direction and return to more stable roots. Massey has historically carried the bulk of the band’s lyric writing, often literally alone on solo trips north. Melodie finds Henry Stoehr stepping back into that role for five of its eleven songs, a return to how the two of them wrote together back when the band was first forming. It’s a small structural change, but it matters a whole lot. Several songs on this album are barely discernible when you try to figure out who wrote what, and that’s the type of synergy that only happens when a band has spent a decade learning to finish each other's sentences.
Joining Slow Pulp on this record is Elliot Kozel, whose credits range from Rosalia to Bjork to SZA, and who also represents the first time Stoehr has handed off production duties on a Slow Pulp record since the band started making them. It’s a notable leap of faith for a self-described control freak, and one made easier by the fact that Kozel also isn’t exactly an outsider in the Slow Pulp cinematic universe (at least not directly, he is still canon though). Slow Pulp actually grew up as fans of his old band, Sleeping in the Aviary, back in Wisconsin. Massey, too, spent time behind the board for the first time on this record. The result is a sound that pushes further toward both extremes of the band’s range at once: simultaneously drawing in bigger and more anthemic loud moments, as well as intimate and sharp quiet ones.
That tension is on full display on Melodie’s lead single, “Better Man,” a crashing percussion and widescreen guitar boasting declaration that Slow Pulp is back and they’re better than ever. This record also doesn’t hold its cards too close to the vest, it’s kind of like Slow Pulp unchained, and we see some of Emily Massey’s best vocal performances to date. Lyrically, the song sits with the discomfort of realizing you’ve spent years shaping yourself around what you thought other people needed from you instead of who you actually are.
Melodie truly does follow the threads that the band have laid around it, and it’s proven to be their most reflective record yet. It isn’t so much about surviving a specific crisis, but about looking back on the years since to figure out what’s actually changed. Bassist Alex Leeds has described the album as something like a full-circle moment, it’s a chance to return to old feelings and see them differently at a distance. It’s an incredible dive headfirst into a memory, kind of like sitting and watching home movies with your family and seeing your (now deceased) grandfather live and breathe while you were very young, and remembering that feeling as direct from the source as you possibly can instead of circling it.
What’s most promising about this record is that Slow Pulp aren’t repairing the formula that got Moveys and Yard their acclaim, they’re a band trying to see what they sound like without the pressure that shaped their first two records. Given how well they’ve turned pressure into songcraft so far, betting on what they can do with room to breathe really feels like the right instinct and it pays off in dividends here.
Slow Pulp will take Melodie on the road this fall for their biggest North American headlining run yet, including a hometown show at Chicago’s Salt Shed and a stop back in Madison at the Sylvee, a tour that, fittingly for this record, retraces a lot of the same ground that the band has been circling back to all along.
Listen to Melodie below:
