Like a Family

As a band that grew up together, Slow Pulp have known each other for so long that they’re a small family. Over a decade ago, they were playing different music with a different name, but the chemistry all began before high school. While they’re too embarrassed to talk about their previous band names now, they chuckle and say they sprinkled in “uninformed funk.” The band began when bassist Alex Leeds’ dad would wrangle the kids and drive them to practice.

Drummer Teddy Matthews welcomed me into the band’s Logan Square apartment on one of the first hot days of the year, when April greets us with summer and winter days during the same week. The Madison, Wisconsin natives each moved to Chicago over the past several months, as they finished school.

Nowadays, the band is living together, recording together, and touring together. The band even use a few instruments Leeds’ father crafted now that he’s learning new skills early in his retirement (Post Animal’s Jake Hirshland, another friend from home, is also testing the gear). “He has always been really good about having a parallel interest,” Leeds said.

Matthews moved here earlier than the rest of the band, securing their current apartment, and has since moved down the street to live with his friends in Twin Peaks and Post Animal. Frontwoman Emily Massey got here more recently. She’s a bit younger than the rest of the band, and she dropped out of school after the band gained more momentum. “As I became less sure of whether school was what I wanted to do, I became surer the band was what I wanted to focus on.”

Moving here, she said, was a big shift for them. Guitarist Henry Stoehr said, “The goal was always to be working on music once we got here.” The rest of the band nods in agreement, “…that’s been the expectation, and there’ve been no surprises yet.”

Chicago readily welcomed the band, as they headlined a sold-out show at Schubas just after the band fully moved here at the beginning of the year. Earlier this winter, they supported Vundabar for a stretch of the tour across the upper Midwest, then they made the indie band pilgrimage to SXSW, and received several write-ups in national publications along the way.

And though they’ve since caught the attention of The Fader, NPR, and Stereogum, the band only expected to get a fraction of their current listeners. Now, their single from last fall, “Steel Birds,” has garnered more than one million streams on Spotify alone. The band became a focus for them about two years ago when the YouTube curator TheLazyLazyMe discovered their song “Preoccupied.”

“A lot of people reacted to it — a lot more than we had ever expected,” Massey said, “and this forced us to take this more seriously.”

Their upcoming EP, titled Big Day, begins with ambient textures built with guitar effects and a tinkling piano. Soon, static and fuzz welcome a staccato guitar to chop up the soundscape they so gently painted.

Their sound invites afternoon daydreams — which are aided by Massey’s airy vocals — but their crunchy guitars give their songs tension and structure. The recently released single “High” captures their dreamy aesthetic and anxiety-laden lyrics well. “Oh, my shirt sits on my body / like it’s not for me,” Massey sings, “and now I’m trying to find my way out / I wish I knew how.”

It’s no wonder the band has caught on with YouTube playlist tastemakers, as their psychedelic textures meld with reading, working, commuting, or traveling. Their songs feel cinematic, making a simple train ride across town play out like a scene.

The band recorded the new EP in a remote cabin in Paw Paw, Michigan, where Post Animal also records (including their record from last year, When I Think of You in a Castle). But it’s apparently haunted.

“We almost didn’t go, we thought it might ruin the energy of the band!” Massey said. “And all the haunting supposedly happens upstairs, so we all slept next to each other downstairs on sleeping mats in the living room, even though there were beds upstairs.”

The band collectively laughs. “We didn’t leave two rooms for five days because it was winter,” she added. Bassist Alex Leeds said, “We went to the grocery store just to hang out!”

They record, mix and master themselves, thanks to guitarist Henri Stoehr’s audio prowess. However, their songwriting process before the new EP was more solitary. Someone would craft an instrumental, then Massey would take it to her room to bounce off vocal ideas, saying, “it was really fragmented and really slow.”

Leeds said, “the new EP is the first thing that we all pretty much started from the beginning together.” Being together and working on music has been their constant over the past two years — not to mention being the only expectation.

Now that they live together, have found a community in Chicago, and garnered more listeners than they ever expected, they’ve made the band a bigger focus than ever. Their chemistry works so well for them because Slow Pulp is more than just a band. As Massey said, “we’re a family.”

// BY COLIN SMITH

// PORTRAITS BY JORDYN BELLI