Three albums in, Slow Pulp are older and wiser. On ‘Melodie’, they’re using that to their advantage

It often seems to Henry Stoehr like he’s alone in a crowd. Slow Pulp’s guitarist likes being in Chicago, feeling the hum of the city and the buzz of lives being lived around him, but as he sits in his apartment poring over ideas for songs, he is also keenly aware of his own isolation. The Packers cap he wears throughout our interview is one thing, the tell of a Wisconsin boy in Illinois, but there’s more to it than that – being out of place isn’t only a matter of geography. “I’ve felt like that my whole life,” he tells NME over Zoom, framed at the kitchen table alongside guitarist and vocalist Emily Massey. “I’m trying to get further in understanding what makes me feel alienated, what part of me wants to connect, and what part of me is pushing that connection away.” The indie-rock quartet’s third album is driven by that reflective impulse. Throughout ‘Melodie’, Stoehr and Massey pick off scabs and trace scars – it is an exercise in reconnecting with the past and reframing it through the accrued knowledge of people who’ve been around the block a couple more times. Its elegiac final song ‘Slip Away’ is its lodestar, recounting an incident from Stoehr’s directionless early twenties wh...