Slow Pulp Bring New Perspective to ‘Melodie’

It often seems to Henry Stoehr like he’s alone in a crowd. Slow Pulp’s guitarist likes being in Chicago, feeling the hum of the city and the buzz of lives being lived around him, but as he sits in his apartment poring over ideas for songs, he is also keenly aware of his own isolation. The Packers cap he wears throughout our interview is one thing, the tell of a Wisconsin boy in Illinois, but there’s more to it than that – being out of place isn’t only a matter of geography.

“I’ve felt like that my whole life,” he tells NME over Zoom, framed at the kitchen table alongside guitarist and vocalist Emily Massey. “I’m trying to get further in understanding what makes me feel alienated, what part of me wants to connect, and what part of me is pushing that connection away.”

The indie-rock quartet’s third album is driven by that reflective impulse. Throughout ‘Melodie’, Stoehr and Massey pick off scabs and trace scars – it is an exercise in reconnecting with the past and reframing it through the accrued knowledge of people who’ve been around the block a couple more times. Its elegiac final song ‘Slip Away’ is its lodestar, recounting an incident from Stoehr’s directionless early twenties when, already at a low ebb mentally, he was blanked by some friends outside a hardware store in Slow Pulp’s hometown of Madison.

That rejection seemed at the time to confirm his worst beliefs about himself – that he deserved to exist outside the rest of society. Writing about it allowed him to speak to, and understand, his younger self. “That was an ambient anxiety,” Stoehr says. “Then I wrote the song. I’m like, ‘That’s actually a really specific thing I feel.’ I hadn’t put it into words.”

But, in an interesting dynamic that plays out across ‘Melodie’, those words are delivered by Massey. “I yell it through a megaphone / Figure it all out on my own”, she sings, spilling Stoehr’s guts for him. But she’s also underlining the bond behind a creative partnership that has evolved and grown more nuanced over time. When Massey first fell in with Stoehr and his old friends Alex Leeds (bass) and Teddy Mathews (drums), the way they traded ideas became the foundation of their friendship. “When we started doing that 10 years ago, we didn’t really know each other very well,” Massey says. “It’s how we became friends.”

Those fizzing exchanges underpinned their early EPs and writing for their breakout 2020 debut ‘Moveys’, a record that would set them on the path towards critical acclaim and tours with simpatico contemporaries such as Lucy Dacus and template-setting veterans in Death Cab For Cutie. But they soon found that progress wasn’t a straight line.

Massey navigated bouts of ill health and periodically returned to Wisconsin from Chicago, initially during work on ‘Moveys’ in order to care for her parents following a car crash, and later during a Covid-era decampment to the woods. There, she found inspiration in isolation while sculpting lyrics for its grittily melodic 2023 follow-up ‘Yard’. “It quiets my inner critic,” she says. “I can let whatever’s happening happen. I’m not too judgmental of it, or myself. Sometimes when I’m in a faster-paced place, I feel this pressure to be faster myself.”

They tackled these shifting circumstances with care and empathy, apart at first and then together as sketches became fleshed-out Slow Pulp songs, but of late they have wanted things to be more hands-on. Tapping into the reflective bent found across ‘Melodie’, its writing process was about interrogating their creative habits with the same rigour reserved for their personal lives. They fired fragments back and forth like they used to and drummed up material to share every two or three days, writing something like 30 songs that had a shot at making the record. “In a lot of ways it felt like we were getting to know each other again,” Massey says. “We’re in better communication and friendship than we have been for a while.”

“It’s interesting listening to our old stuff. I can almost hear myself dancing around something I don’t want to say out loud” – Henry Stoehr

At times, it’s like ‘Melodie’ has a direct line into both Massey and Stoehr’s emotional centres. Its moments of realisation and analysis can be lacerating, but they are carried off with indie-pop vim – these are could-be-hits that’ll bum you out before pulling you up from the floor. ‘Red Car’ is all flashy power-pop and candy-coated rhythms as Massey needles herself over a desire to get out when things get heavy, while the synthy washes and strutting confidence of the single ‘Better Man’ run in parallel to Stoehr’s unflinching, almost cruel, unpicking of self. “Did I fuck it up again? / Maybe leave it to a better man”, Massey sings, her hook stridently refusing to get pulled into the gloom. “I think the reason for that [directness] is the trust that got built,” Massey observes. Stoehr agrees: “It was about vulnerability and transparency, breaking down any guardedness we had about our own stuff.”

This neck-on-the-line approach extended to employing an outside producer for the first time, with Stoehr and Massey joined in the control room by Elliott Kozel, who neatly split the difference between where Slow Pulp are coming from and where they hope to go. A fellow Wisconsinite, his old band Sleeping In The Aviary left a mark on Massey, Stoehr et al, while his recent work has taken in collaborations with SZA and Indigo De Souza. He lends a sympathetic set of ears to the palette on ‘Melodie’, which takes in shoegazey noise (‘Melodie’), ornate acoustic pop (‘These Days’) and intoxicating balladry (‘Not For Nothing’). “Elliott definitely felt like a great fit for what we were doing,” Massey says. “And it allowed Henry to not wear nine million different hats and focus on the writing.”

“I do a lot of it in isolation and bang my head against the wall,” Stoehr adds. “I’m always like, ‘I don’t know how to wrap this up.’ I think it was helpful to be with another person. For both of us, there was always someone there to either confirm or shut down an idea. I’d be like, ‘Is this worth pursuing for another half hour?’ And he’d say, ‘Hell no!’ There was a lot of support, and it was validating for my own process. It was a lot more fun, and less lonely.”

Really, that’s the crux of it. ‘Melodie’ goes to some isolated, pitiless places, but there’s always a hand reaching out in the form of a belted refrain, a string flourish or a rush of distortion. Packaging hard truths in digestible packages isn’t a new trick, but it remains mightily effective when a band can do it with the earnestness and pop savvy that Slow Pulp now have on tap. “We’re both in our early thirties and understand the importance of being direct with yourself,” Stoehr says. “It’s interesting listening to our old stuff. I can almost hear myself dancing around something I don’t want to say out loud.”

“I think we found a lot of beauty in the fact that we were able to process things in such an open way,” Massey concurs. “I don’t think either of us ever had that with songwriting before, and that created clarity. At the core of it, there are a lot of sad or hard things. But we also really love pop melodies and feeling good listening to music. Both things can exist together – complicated emotional processing, but also a song that makes you want to go on a walk and enjoy the day.”

Slow Pulp’s ‘Melodie’ is out on September 18 via Anti-.