Premiere: Solo Solo get absolutely ‘No Sleep’

Greg and Jon Denn were gassed up on caffeine and little sleep. In the middle of a 20-song run, the duo known as Solo Solo scrawled out their debut single “No Sleep” with a feverish, fuzzy head and blurry eyes. Their emotional state drapes across the shoegaze sonic haze, almost bizarrely ethereal and filtered through indie-rock static. The melody pulses nearly as much as the bass that trembles and pops in short quick bursts. Mastered by Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound, the track premieres today on B-Sides & Badlands and anchors a forthcoming EP, slated for 2023.

“I never finish anything but I can’t stop starting,” sings Greg over a rising tide of foamy crackles. “Can’t stop, I can’t stop starting / It’s a little late for me, but not you darlin’.” On the hook, the duo spins their tires until vocals leave melted-rubber tread marks. “And there is no sleep, no sleep / This century, this century, this century,” Greg loops his words around the brain. “Only cold feet, cold feet / Perpetually, perpetually, perpetually.”

While recording “inside a storage unit at a facility on the East side of Austin, where a few bands practice all hours of the day, all hours of the night,” the sibling duo only found “enough silence to record” between six and eight a.m. So, they were required to tumble out of bed around 4:45 am each day if they had any hope of brandishing their creativity. “We set out to write, compose, record, and get a rough mix on one track per week,” Greg shares. With “No Sleep,” the title itself directly “reflects the state we were in at the time. 4:45 am every morning, no matter what.”

“There’s more than a little sleep deprivation baked into the price of this track. But we’ve always struggled with having snippets of songs, four or five lines written, a random chorus melody, a really exciting intro… and then we’d never finish the song,” he continues. “So the lyric ‘I never finish anything but I can’t stop starting’ is painfully autobiographical. We just buckled down, woke up early to get the vocals and drums recorded before the noise started, kept at it, and the answer to the chorus is that the song is finished.”

Even the song’s final measure is a “hard stop” to complete the “unfinished feeling” bred in their work. It’s such a cliff drop-off point that the listener is left unsatisfied — and can only squash the unease by putting the song on repeat. Make no mistake, though, the song is “finished,” says Greg. “Still catching up on the sleep part.”

Solo Solo will drop an accompanying music video tomorrow (September 23).

Listen to “No Sleep” below.

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