Los Angeles band Steel Wool recently released their self-titled debut EP (cassette and digital) via independent LA label Bug Body.
The group, consisting of Sean Lissner (guitar/singing), Jaden Amjadi (bass/screaming), Sam Schlesinger (guitar), and Evan Landi (drums) have developed a reputation for their boisterous live shows in garages, backyards, and DIY haunts of all stripes.
Their eponymous debut finds the emerging dream-pop collective travelling to the edges of the otherworldly, fuzzed-out and shoegaze sounds that inspired them, these explorative and widescreen atmospheres distills the feeling of coming to terms with the passage of time and gnarly emotional knots, that are hard to untangle. A ode to wasting away, ‘Fading’ layers a hazy soundscape of reverb coated licks and wistful vocals, before erupting into an onslaught of feedback and noise. Meanwhile, tracks like ‘Another Sunday‘ and ‘Tired Movements‘ revel in the tension between Lissner’s pining vocals and the interplay with the band’s ruminative instrumental concoctions. On ‘Heaven or La Brea,‘ the band are let off the lead, crescendos burst forth into anthem fuelled by a blistering collage of distortion pedal riffing. Here they talk us through the EP track by track.
Fading:
‘Fading‘ was born out of a desire to synthesize different sounds and influences into one standalone track: a dreamy, lilting verse offset by a screaming uppercut of a chorus. It’s not a complicated song, but it helped prompt lines of inquiry into what we even wanted Steel Wool to feel like. Something we play around with when songwriting is the idea of “Steel” and “Wool” as elements of composition. Those soft clouds of reverb – there’s the wool – with the harsh overdriven lead as something sharp and cutting like steel. But you can invert it, too – “wool” invoking fuzzbox saturation, versus cleaner guitar tones sparkling like stainless “steel”. Trying to articulate this makes it sound somewhat nonsensical, but at the same time, we’ve found it helpful to invent a bit of band lexicon to avoid getting trapped in the snares of genre conventions.
Another Sunday:
Writing ‘Another Sunday‘ felt like pouring concrete mix into quicksand. Sam had the chord progression – a moody, strummy thing inspired by The Sundays’’ ‘Here’s Where The Story Ends’ and The Cranberries’ ‘Sunday’, but it was bloated, twice as long, a total mouthful. Evan took it into surgery and gave the song its eventual structure, excising a key change here, grafting a prechorus there, and suturing it back together with enough breathing room for Sean to lay down some saxophone interludes. We re-recorded it more than a dozen times, replacing every part, save for that elephant-sounding fuzz in the chorus, which we left intact from the very first take. It’s the only part of the song to survive the endless iteration and operation. Even the name was an eleventh hour audible, replacing the longstanding working title ‘Jangle‘, but when we finally said pencils down, it was a sigh of relief you only get once the cement has set and you can finally stand upright on solid ground.
Eyes Closed:
‘Eyes Closed’ was the first song to reach escape velocity and make it out of demo purgatory on Evan’s hard drive. We’d spent several hours in his bedroom studio cooking up something else, and it just wasn’t sitting right, so in the last fifteen minutes before midnight, we cranked up all the modulation pedals and recorded a really simple chord progression over some MIDI drums. Sam threw in the lead riff in one take, and we parted ways for the night, reconvening the next day to add bass and give it some more texture. When a song comes together so effortlessly after a long session of strain and uncertain footing, it’s like water finally bursting from a clogged gutter, and we all felt purified by its ease and cleanliness. None of us remember the belabored demo that preempted it, and we’re not keen to reminisce.
Heaven or La Brea:
With ‘Heaven or La Brea’, we wanted a longer song where we could really sprawl out and stretch. It gave us an opportunity to write from our rehearsal space rather than the studio, continually building energy and releasing it until crescendoing into an explosion of turbulent, frenetic noise. That style comes so much more naturally in a live setting, as the song would take on a slightly different shape each time we played it, and still does with every show, inflected by the audience, the setting, what we had for breakfast that day, etc. With this recording, we retained the best aspects of each run-through, like Jaden’s tumbling-down-the-stairs bass line in the breakdown, Sean’s tip-toed fingerpicking, Sam’s ozonic downstrokes. Accordingly, it’s the most fun track to play on the EP, cathartic every time.
Tired Movements:
‘Tired Movements’ is our melancholic outro, drawing heavily from Sean’s background in folk. Delicate and vulnerable, it’s initially sparse in its arrangement, before blossoming over time with whispered contributions from the rest of the band, like Jaden’s earthy bass part, and the gentle rain of Evan’s percussive elements. It’s a song about the moments you don’t pay attention to, that space between thinking and doing, the time you spend on the shelf. There’s an uneasiness that comes with realizing how much of life is automatic, like noticing yourself breathing, and ‘Tired Movements’ is quietly grateful reflection on that liminal unconsciousness.
