Interview: Sonic Blume have nothing to hide

Max Connery was a freshman in college when Covid hit. He’d just turned 19 and had the world at his feet. But admittedly, he had plenty of “maturing to do in both life and musically,” the Sonic Blume frontman says. During lockdown, he began writing songs, swapping out what he once thought was “cool” for something musically progressive. His songwriting, steeped in early 2000s sensibilities, blossomed in truly thrilling ways.

“There was no more filter of worrying whether or not other people would think it’s cool,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands, “or ‘this doesn’t sound like this band.’ I learned I could make music that just felt like me.”

While his songwriting took a healthy root, his personal journey was ongoing, particularly as the world opened up again. A naturally anxious person, re-entering the world post-lockdown came with unexpected hurdles. “I had a really tough time going back to in-person classes in college,” says Connery, “and I felt generally uncomfortable being around other people.”

He even took a gap semester to cope with it all. He eventually landed on his feet, even as he confesses that he feels he lost a few years off his life. In lockdown, he took Zoom classes for the next year, and it was unsurprisingly difficult to navigate higher learning. “Doing remote education in a music program is definitely not optimal,” he says, once again noting how his songwriting flourished. “The one thing that was a major bummer was that we, as a band, were getting ready to do our first tour away from NYC-Philly, and that of course had to get postponed. But so many people had it way worse than that so I can’t really complain.”

Across the band’s new album, All Your Favorite Songs, Sonic Blume zig-zags across the stratosphere and into the cosmos. Emotional underpinnings keep the 10-track setpiece chugging along, while musically they expand and contract, pinging from hypnotic bedroom pop to electrifying indie/rock. Nary a millisecond is wasted; each incremental creative decision contributes to the larger whole. From the sparkling crackle of “Daylily” to the echoing “Friends Forever,” the album makes a searing imprint on the eardrums.

It’s hard to imagine what the album may have looked like without the pandemic. Sonic Blume emerges as a band just hitting their stride, with creativity that pulses and vibrates on the skin. All Your Favorite Songs will easily become a favorite album of 2023, dear reader. That’s a guarantee.

Below,

In making the album, what were the “unorthodox and experimental recording techniques” you used? How did that open up the music for you?

There were a lot of different things we did, with varying degrees of “experimentation.” For instance, we liked the idea of presenting familiar sounds in ways that made them a little less recognizable. Sometimes, that meant recording an entire drum set by only using headphones as the microphones. To someone listening they can tell that it is still drums, but they don’t sound like drums usually sound. We used a similar headphone trick on the piano, too, taping them underneath. A more subtle example of this idea was achieved by running synthesizers through guitar amps and just plugging guitars in directly.

What ignited the writing for this album?

One of the goals for this album was for the writing to be truly song-oriented and to not worry about anything else, like types of sounds or parts initially. All of the demos we had going into the studio were just me singing and playing acoustic guitar, and we planned on figuring out any sort of band arrangement while recording. We wanted the songs to still be interesting if you took away all of the production. In the past, we would always have the songs essentially “produced” out for the most part, before we ever recorded them, because we would spend so much time rehearsing them as a band and figuring out the parts and effects we wanted then. For this record, all of the focus beforehand went strictly into the songwriting. That spawned some co-writing sessions, and more collaboration in the songwriting process than we ever had before.

Out of the pandemic, what have you come to appreciate more in your life?

Definitely the community of music I’m surrounded with in Asbury Park. There is so much talent in the Asbury Park scene. I’ve been super fortunate the past few years to get to play as a session musician on a lot of friends’ records and get to play live a lot in my friends’ bands, too. It’s something I love doing and love being a part of. Even though I don’t play keys live in Sonic Blume, it really is my primary instrument, and the secret is obviously out as that is what most of my friends’ band’s gigs and sessions require of me.

Aside from music, what things keep your life exciting and energized against the mundaneness of it all?

I’m a huge baseball fan, specifically the New York Yankees. Even now in the offseason, I listen to baseball podcasts in the car or will watch old playoff games for fun. I’m a huge fan of this company, Jomboy Media. Their roots are in making baseball content, and I’m an avid listener of their podcast “Talkin Yanks,” but they make a lot of really silly content too that I watch all the time, like them watching old game shows or old reality dating shows. I will say, the concept of watching someone else watch TV is so strange, but their commentary and banter is so amazing and really brightens my day.

How did Erik Kase Romero guide the production?

Working with Erik is honestly such a dream. We’ve been fortunate as a band to record everything we’ve ever done with him. I’ve also been lucky to have been able to collaborate with Erik on a lot of other projects that he has produced, especially in the months leading up to recording our album, as a keyboardist and as just another person in the room helping to come up with ideas. So it was cool, when making the album there were a lot of little “tricks” that we had discovered while working on other things together, that we were able to incorporate into these songs. He’s taught me so much along the way and I’m forever indebted to him for that.

In addition, something that Erik really pushed for on this album was to try and capture the feeling of a live band in the room. Before recording, we were all listening a lot to the Big Thief record that had just come out, ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You,’ and we loved how the sound and feeling of them playing together as a band is what really shaped that record. And for our album, which focuses so much on lush sounds and interesting production, Erik pushed for the feeling of a live band to be a grounding presence and foundation for the songs. This led to some of the songs not being recorded to a click which was something we had never done before and definitely added an imperfect and very human element to the recordings.

“Nothing Else to Try” is one of the most interesting of the bunch, especially as the song progresses and it almost comes unraveled. What led to these intricate and weird pieces?

With this song, we had probably the least amount of direction going into recording. We really had no idea how this song would end up sounding. The one thing that we all really liked about it was the rhythm of the vocal melody. So, with no real direction besides that, we just decided to try all of the weird ideas and tricks we had and see what stuck. This is one of the songs with the headphone microphones on the drum’s technique. And we also fell in love with the sort of R2-D2 sounding synth beeps and boops. They’re sprinkled all throughout the record in usually subtle ways, but they’re definitely the most abundant on this song. We just wanted to have fun and push our boundaries with this one and I think we achieved that!

Do you feel something shifts inside of you every time you make an album?

For sure. I listen to so many different kinds of music and get inspired by so many different artists and styles, and it’s always exciting when we start working on a new album or a new batch of songs because I love getting to try something new. On this album, I feel like we moved super far away from the more dream pop, post-punk thing that we sort of did on a lot of previous stuff, and that was a really exciting, and even somewhat scary undertaking. But I’m really excited for whatever the next thing we make is and how that will sound.

You pulled from certain alt-rock records for this – were there specific ways of doing things or sounds you were explicitly pulling on?

The record that was definitely the biggest influence was ‘Sometimes, Forever’ by Soccer Mommy, which had only come out a few months before we started recording. She has always been one of my favorite artists, but I loved this album especially because it felt so risk-taking to me. I also felt a parallel of late 90s/early 2000s songwriting influence, but paired with sounds coming from shoegaze, or Boards of Canada-esque synthesizers, which was very similar to our vision at the time.

But we were also heavily inspired by ‘The Bends’ by Radiohead, Third Eye Blind’s self-titled, ‘The Guest’ by Phantom Planet, and ‘Welcome Interstate Managers’ by Fountains of Wayne. (And by the way, if people only know “Stacy’s Mom,” you should definitely check out the rest of that album because it’s amazing and probably nothing at all what you would expect!) But anyway, we tried to incorporate certain tropes from the era of alt-rock/alt-pop. The Third Eye Blind record specifically informed some of the drum sounds and guitar tones we went for.

What do you take away from this album?

I think in making this album there was sort of a cool lesson to be learned, in truly just being yourself and making what you want to make. As a musician, there’s a certain fear about changing your sound and worrying if people will like something different. I think it’s important to remember that you’re allowed to grow and change as a person and an artist, and that people will still respond favorably to it as long as it’s honest. Making this record was definitely cathartic for me, too. A lot of songs were more personal and vulnerable for me than a lot of our previous stuff. I think as I’ve matured and gotten older that’s definitely something with which I’ve become more comfortable.

Follow Sonic Blume on their socials: Facebook | Instagram | Website