Nightswimming #11: 08/22/24-08/29/24
A great interview! y2k! Pop puns! And MORE! QUIT F*CKING MARDING!
Highly Recommend! (best of the week)
Bestie - Chord Boy (Bestie Records)
Chord Boy has experienced quite an evolution since their first album, Night Bads, in 2021. Where Night Bads was a stripped-down acoustic folk album, their 2nd album, Bestie, is a big, upbeat Midwest Emo rocker. Chord Boy is Chicago’s Jordan Affeldt and Avery Black. Affeldt shares the instrumental duties with Black, and it’s Affeldt’s vocals, planted firmly on top of the instrumentation, that really shine. The band describes the sound as “sick riffs and delicate melodies”, and that balance speaks to both their influences and a growing trend in indie rock music.
Whether because there is usually a 20-year lag in nostalgia, or because each generation reinvents the wheel of the past with an updated perspective, indie rock (particularly those bands led by women) is having a major 90’s moment.
From Phoebe Bridgers to Blondshell to Annie DiRusso to Chord Boy, women in indie rock are blending the delicate with the explosive. Big guitar and drum-driven riff-heavy rock songs with a tenderness in the vocals and lyrics—it’s the trail that Alanis and Liz Phair and blazed, but through the lyrical lens of 21st century problems.
Chord Boy was gracious enough to take a dive in the Nightswimming pool with me and talk about Taylor Swift, Shrek, and feelings:
DOYLE: Chord Boy’s first album, Night Bads, is squarely an acoustic folk record. Bestie is comparatively heavier and much further in the indie rock/Midwest emo camp. What do you attribute the evolution of your sound to? Is classifying genre important?
JORDAN AFFELDT: Chord Boy has been hugely evolving since Night Bads came out. Night Bads was more experimental and had a “call and response” style of recording - where I recorded the bones of a song and then Avery took it and added an instrument, sent it back, and so on. We didn’t even play music in the same room until after the record came out. Once we started piecing together live sets and writing song parts together, it became pretty apparent that we actually really liked the indie rock genre more, and it married both of our strengths - Avery’s masterful and emotional guitar parts, and my poppy vocal melodies and sad girl lyrics. It just made sense to do Bestie as a full Indie Rock album. Thank you for mentioning Midwest Emo - you can take Avery out of his Midwest Emo band, but you can’t take the Midwest Emo riffs out of Avery. That man is gonna noodle on the guitar no matter where he’s at.
D: “Rewrite” and “Equivalent Exchange” are pretty riff-heavy. What role does melody play in your songwriting?
JA: This is another thing I love talking about, because Avery and I have a very distinct songwriting style for Chord Boy. I’m always focusing on lyrics and vocal melody, and Avery is focused on guitar riffs and overall production. We like to say that I sing, and Avery’s guitar sings, and in our best songs there’s a really solid emphasis on both of these elements.
D: You list Beach Bunny, Charly Bliss, and Taylor Swift as influences on the music. I find that some of our earliest influences lie dormant for years and become evident later. Did you grow up with music, and if so who were you listening to when you were 10? What about 15? 20?
JA: Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift! Music played a huge part in my upbringing - my dad is a musician and we’d always have a guitar out in the house. I started collecting CD’s when I was 6. I went to my first concert when I was 7 (Blink 182/Green Day). I grew up listening to emo and pop-punk music, but then Taylor Swift kind of changed the game and inspired me in a different way. I just felt really transported by her dreamy songwriting, and it led to me learning to play guitar (by learning “Tim McGraw”) and starting to write my own songs.
D: You say the goal of Bestie’s recording process was “to be perfectionists, to take our time, and to release something we were truly proud of”. What does it look like to take it slow, and how do you know when something is ready?
JA: Taking it slow is not sexy! What it really looks like is us showing up to our practice space after work, spending a few hours on one instrument for 1-2 songs, and then packing up, and doing that every week for 2 years. But with this album, we spent so much time listening to every note, doing it over if it didn’t sound right, and not settling on any mediocre takes. We went into the recording process with goals, strong demos, mixing inspirations, and a lot of patience.
Truly you’ll never know when it’s ready, but a good indicator is when you start making it worse.
D: Do you think Chicago and being a Chicagoan informs your sound?
AVERY BLACK: For me, I think the idea of Chicago/being a Chicagoan totally influences my sound. I was firstly drawn to this city because of the music that’s been made here and I’ve really fallen in love with the mathy/emo/punk rock scenes. But with Chord Boy I feel like I’m able to draw in more inspiration beyond a Midwest emo sound, which is freeing and fun.
D: “Shrek Karaoke Party” speaks to the feeling of shame that can come with publicly having emotions, and the silliness inside of sadness. Do you think humans, like ogres, are also like onions?
JA: Thank you for asking this. Absolutely. I think being a human is humiliating. We can have this whole outer persona of being cool/hip/fun and then feel like you’re one paper towel rip away from ejecting yourself into space on the inside. We’re complex beings, and are not designed to feel one singular thing, or experience one thing. Sometimes we’re a layer of hot girl enjoying herself at a party, another layer of crippling anxiety (are all of your friends having fun? Do they secretly hate you?), another layer of love (for Shrek), and deep down under there a layer of “will I ever find any of the things I’m looking for?”.
Highlights: Rewrite, Girlfriend, Equivalent Exchange
Imaginal Disk - Magdalena Bay (Mom + Pop)
Imaginal Disk is frenetic in a precise way. It’s expansive, but specific. It’s maximalist, but with very little waste. In the days since its release, it’s been called “prog-pop”, “psych with synths”, and everything in between. Aesthetically, like Charli XCX’s brat and Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us, it borrows from the y2k chromed-out neo-futurism look. And that aesthetic seeps into the music.
All of Imaginal Disk sounds like it takes place in a technologic liminal space—a rest stop on the Information Superhighway, or a node inside of a Blackberry’s keyboard. There are moments that sound like ABBA trapped inside of Windows Media Player. There are vice-versa moments where it sounds like Grimes doing guest vocals on a Chic record.
It hits a steady groove after the first two tracks, but even still there are moments that jar you out of the rhythm. A random synth stab or a sudden note flattening forever into the horizon take groovy synth-pop songs into someplace both sinister and sci-fi. Imaginal Disk lulls the listener into a false relaxation, only to fall into a portal to a different musical dimension.
A series of music videos on the duo’s Instagram make the Imaginal Disk itself literal, as a real CD is implanted in the protagonist’s forehead, giving them an “upgraded consciousness”. The test subject, True (played by Magdalena Bay’s Mica Tenenbaum) ultimately rejects the implant and goes on her own Odyssey to re-discover humanness and reality.
It’s powerpop, it’s House music, it’s prog-rock. It vacillates wildly between being a fun and challenging listen, but it pushes boundaries in that way. The entire project feels like Madonna’s “Ray of Light” video—you’re enjoying it while also getting whiplash.
Highlights: Image, Death & Romance, Watching TV
Worth a Listen! (good to very good)
Short n’ Sweet - Sabrina Carpenter (Island)
Sabrina Carpenter has revived a crucial pillar of Pop music that has seemed absent for too long: having fun. Anyone paying a shred of attention will agree that Pop music is majorly back in 2024 in a way it hasn’t been in years. Sure, it never really went away. But for the better part of a decade Pop music has been dominated by a revenge-obsessed Capitalist robber baron who prioritizes dunking on her exes in secret code instead of writing interesting hooks.
On Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter brings a stylistic variety and a true sense of humor to one of the most fun Pop albums of the year. At 12 tracks and 36 minutes, anchored in the 2 and 7 slot by the two radio-devouring singles (Please, Please, Please and Espresso, respectively) it’s a Pop album engineered in a lab to be perfect. But it doesn’t feel synthetic, and that’s a huge testament to Carpenter’s personality that shines throughout. She’s just funny! She’s funny in an irreverent and vulnerable way that borders on crass at times, and that’s what makes it fun! To name a few “what a surprise, your phone just died / Your car drove itself from LA to her thighs” on Coincidence, “Cum right on me—I mean, camaraderie…Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” from Bed Chem, and “Hold me and explore me, I’m so fuckin’ horny” from Juno carry all the hormones of a teenage sleepover, but there’s something to be said for an adult woman unafraid to be Scary Online Horny in public. She delivers it in a way that’s endearing and relatable.
Sonically, Carpenter casts a wide net—as wide as you can on a high-profile major label record. She does R&B (Good Graces, Lie to Girls), upbeat Pop funk (Espresso, Bed Chem), folky Americana (Slim Pickins), and downbeat ballads (Don’t Smile, Dumb & Poetic), and it’s all hooky, efficient, and fun!
Perfect Pop Album :)
Highlights: Espresso, Taste, Bed Chem
Hot Singles in Your Area!
Here are some great singles that dropped in the last week:
GREY RUBBLE GREEN SHOOTS - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (the Patron Saints of Post-Rock are back with a surprise single from their upcoming album, out Oct. 4th. Big movie score type GY!BE this time, could be a return to form. This album announcement dropped my jaw.)
Legs - Annie DiRusso (one of our current era’s greatest indie rockers with a hook-heavy ode to situationships)
The Diver - Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth’s progenitor with a droney, psychy Raga ahead of his new album, out Sept. 20th)
Take Me Back to the Party - Kate Pierson (1/3rd of the pillars that holds up The B-52’s, Kate Pierson delivers a cute and fun dancefloor anthem with classic vocals)
The River - Johnathon Cox (modern pop Country vibes with a 90’s Country flair)
Music Moment of the Week
SOOOOOOOOOOO SALLY CAN WAIT
SHE KNOWS IT’S TOO LATE AS WE’RE WALKIN’ ON BYYYYY
her SOUUUUUUUUUL SLIDES AWAY
DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER, I HEARD YA SAY
S/o to a UK Tour for the Ages that may or may not ever actually happen. Everyone knows Wonderwall and Champagne Supernova, but if you’re unfamiliar with the rest I beg you to go listen to all of Definitely Maybe and What’s the Story Morning Glory (hell, even Be Here Now is good). Oasis captured an extremely specific sound/vibe, and while I do not think it possible for me to see them in the UK, Liam and Noel just taught me to never say never.
Nightswimming 2024 Sp*tify Playlist
Here you go, you vondrukes