Slow Pulp to return with third album, Melodie

15 hours ago 3

Melodie follows 2023's Yard, and sees the Chicago band offer a collection of songs that reflect their lives and relationships over the past few years. "Better Man" arrives as the first taster of the new work, and is accompanied by a video directed by Ben Turok.

Speaking about the lyrical inspiration behind "Better Man", guitarist Henry Stoehr comments, “I realized that I had let go of the controls of my own life and instead was fully prioritizing what I thought people around me wanted from me. I reckon that I did this, at least in part, because I felt really chaotic and out of control of my emotions and actions as a kid and in my early twenties, in a way that I’ve always been very self conscious about.

"In my mid 20s, I entered a phase in my life that felt really stable. I had felt so turbulent emotionally up until that point and I desperately wanted to feel that I deserved to experience that. Naively, I thought that I could just extinguish that kid that fucked up all the time and couldn’t control himself. This song is me both letting go of control but taking control of myself in a new way, and accepting myself for who I am, and hoping that can be accepted by everyone else.”

For Melodie, singer-songwriter and guitarist Emily Massey shared songwriting duties with Stoehr, who wrote five songs on the album. “Emily and I were reconnecting with how we wrote together when we first met,” Stoehr says of the experience. The band worked with producer Elliot Kozel (Rosalía, Yves Tumor, Björk, SZA, Eartheater) on the tracks, which shift between power-pop and acoustic sounds.

As bassist Alex Leeds says, “There’s the sense of a full circle, tapping back into things and transforming through them,” with the songs being “not just a document of what you feel but also a vehicle for understanding how you feel.”