7 minute read
Working From Home
Working From Home
SWEEPING PROMISES ARE LFK’S SUP POP SWEETIES
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By Nick Spacek
From the outside, the home of the postpunk duo Sweeping Promises is an unassuming mid-century modern structure located on a side street off Lawrence’s Ousdahl Road. The pair of Lira Mondal (bass and vocals) and Caufield Schnug (guitars, drums, and recording) greet me as I walk in the front door and ask if I want to see the studio they’ve put together.
Given the house’s overall look—wood paneling, beige carpet—I expect a bedroom converted into a cramped space loaded with equipment. What I’m not expecting is to walk into a 20-foot cube of a room with hardwood floors, massive windows on the north wall, and ceilings high enough to fit the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. I’m jaw-agape, staring at the drum set in the middle of the room, surrounded by pieces of a set for the music video Mondal and Schnug have spent the past week filming for the title track to their next album.
After a minute of gawping, we adjourn to the front room to sit down and chat about how the pair went from Arkansas to Boston to Austin to Lawrence and their journey from Cincinnati indie label Feel It to the alternative juggernaut that is Sub Pop.
“It seems like a far-flung factor, but it’s vector zero because I was born here and knew of the city growing up,” Schnug says about how the pair came to Lawrence. “I have family members near. So, when we were trying to figure out what to do with our awful finances and lack of career during the pandemic economy, we were throwing darts at a map and basically decided to move to Lawrence on a lark.”
Mondal explains that Schnug had told her about Lawrence when the pair was in Arkansas, and she admits that she totally underestimated the town.
“I just thought, ‘I grew up in a small town in Arkansas. I don’t want to live in Kansas,’” Mondal says.
Admittedly, the pair came very close to not moving here. In 2021, they found a church just north of Youngstown, Ohio, that they thought they could turn into a recording studio because of its beautiful sanctuary with scads of natural reverb. While they came close to buying that as their new domicile, they looked at all the work it would take to rehab it.
“We thought, ‘Okay, this is biting off more than we can chew’,” Mondal says.
“So, Caufield was like, ‘Well, maybe we should look at Lawrence,’” Mondal continues. “You know, I’ve been talking about it all these years. We visited, and it just took one look at Mass. Street and Love Garden and all the lovely shops—and then walking into this house and seeing that studio—I was sold.”
The house was procured thanks to Schnug’s aunt, who is a real estate agent and knew of the Sweeping Promises’ “niche demands,” as Mondal puts it. Thanks to a combination of familial assistance and just sheer luck, the pair nabbed the perfect recording space and home, thus allowing Schnug and Mondal to record other artists and make a living while taking care of their own production.
“You can either pay someone else to make your records and fulfill your contracts, or you can do it yourself and own the means of production,” Schnug says. “So, the choice is kind of obvious. The bank will never loan money to artists. There’s no access to credit.”
“Our mortgage acquisition process was tumultuous, at best,” says Mondal.
Now, even though Sweeping Promises’ new home-slash-studio is in a residential neighborhood, the issues one might expect with having bands playing in the home are less prevalent than anticipated. Mondal points out that they’re fortunate to be close to campus, meaning there’s lots of student housing in their neighborhood and not a lot of noise complaints.
“Our neighbors are also incredibly accommodating and understanding and actually into it, too,” says Mondal. “Our neighbor across the street, she’s come to a couple of our shows.”
Additionally, it’s well-insulated for sound, according to Mondal, so when they’re in the studio, if you step outside into the backyard, you can barely hear anything.
For the most part, Schnug is doing a lot of work for Feel It Records, the label that put out Sweeping Promises’ 2020 debut, Hunger for a Way Out, and continues to release all of their material stateside, with Sub Pop taking the pair’s music worldwide. Most of that is remote, but they’ve brought in what Mondal refers to as “a lot of unsigned-slash-up-andcoming friends and friends of friends”—such as Austin’s Wet Dip.
“There’s this weird lag where you make something and then it takes a year for anyone to realize it,” says Schnug, half-joking. One upcoming session is Natalie Hoffman of Nots’ dark minimal wave project, Optic Sink, which will record their second album at the house, meaning they’ll also spend a week living with Schnug and Mondal. Because the house is so spacious, artists recording with Sweeping Promises can stay where they work.
“We both feel very fortunate to be able to put up other bands so that they can just enjoy waking up and just going the 50 feet or whatever it takes to get to the studio and just have this immersive experience,” Mondal enthuses. “It gives them time to experience Lawrence, too.”
“I think it’s really, really hard to make albums in cities now—for obvious reasons— but Lawrence has some advantages because if you want to drive somewhere, it takes six to eight minutes,” says Schnug. “That is so important when making an album. It really is. When you’re in a city, lunch can take two hours, and it costs money, and no one can afford the rent, and people are overworked.”
While he points out that some of this could still apply in Lawrence and Kansas City, there’s a little more slack, so an artist can make a big project happen in a spontaneous and self-directed way. As Schnug puts it, the city of Lawrence is inspiring, not distracting.
“If you were to make an album in Chicago or LA, maybe you wanna play,” Schnug says. “You’re kind of pulled in a different direction, away from the task at hand, whereas here, everyone I’ve recorded talks about the sense of community. If you’re here for a week, you actually make friends and grow to love some spots in town, but you get to also work 12 to 14 hours a day, actually getting stuff done.”
Getting to “do stuff” in the house has actually been a rare feat for Mondal and Schnug. While they took ownership of the home in October 2021, it was right in the middle of their first coast-to-coast tour. Sweeping Promises went to Calgary, Portland, Philadelphia, and did a southern run down the Mississippi. The pair describes being home as sporadic and odd, one day painting the bookshelves, then on tour, then doing a little demo in the kitchen, and then back on tour. They’re currently putting the final touches on their next album, tentatively due out this summer.
“This is our first three-month period of stability, and we’re feeling like citizens,” Schnug says with no small amount of satisfaction.
“It now feels like home, where we feel like it’s been lived in,” Mondal says.
