Eternal Summers with Jumpship Astronaut, Space4Lease, and Zoot Suit
Tuesday, July 21
Farmers Public Market | Oklahoma City
The late 2000s was a wonderfully lazy time in music journalism, a time when bands came along in groups of threes and fours … no matter what made them different from one another. Just as Neon Indian, Toro y Moi and Washed Out found themselves lumped together, so, too, were Eternal Summers with Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast and The Pains of Being at Heart, for what seems like little more than being female-driven indie rock bands without emphasizing what made all of them distinct. All four spiraled in such vastly different directions in the years to follow that you’d never guess those early connections if asked to do so in reverse. In fact, Eternal Summers’ evolution might be the most drastic of them all.
The band’s 2010 debut, Silver, was a minimalist take on coiled beach pop whose jagged, wired structure recalled post-punk acolytes Television and Gang of Four in electrified throbs. That thread has continued to burn through the band’s narrative, but a rush of other influences have exploded into the frame along the way. 2012’s Correct Behavior coated the formula in a ’90s college-rock fuzz while 2014’s The Drop Beneath elevated the compositions with soaring shoegaze impulses that unfurled in a darker and heavier way than anything they’d done before. Now comes Gold & Stone. Just a year removed from The Drop Beneath, the trio’s latest LP (released in June) collects all the experimenting, growth and skill they’ve perfected over the past half-decade, tosses it into a paint can shaker, and finds the most even version of itself to date.
Singer/guitarist Nicole Yun talked to Oxford Karma about coming to age off the beaten path, not saying “ew” and finding the balance between pretty and edgy.
On their home in Roanoke, Virginia:
“You can have your own identity and roots. It’s cool, these bands heading up to New York or L.A., but in a way, it’s nice to have some isolation from what’s going on, trend-wise. It gives us a lot less pressure to try and be something that we’re not. We feel a lot of freedom because there is no clear cut scene or sound. It’s just a lot of room to explore. That openness is something to appreciate; even just physically, it’s a beautiful area — lots of mountains, lots of green and blue. I’m the type of person who takes a lot from their environment, at least for creating and writing, and so that’s Roanoke you hear.”
On deciding to record an album because of a concert:
“We had a festival date in Austin set for November of 2014, and our engineer was in Austin. We figured, if we are only going on the road for one thing, might as well record an album while we are there. We definitely had [The Drop Beneath] finished in mid-2013. So we’d kind of had other ideas for a next album, so there were somethings brewing. But at the same time, we worked all summer, pretty steadily, to make that possible. We thrive on deadlines, because it’s easy to drift away otherwise. It was a pretty quick turnaround, yeah, but it wasn’t too hard for us to resolve to do it.”
On the evolution of the band from Silver to now:
“I really love this album because I do think a lot of it has to do with every release we’ve done to this point. When we first started out, the songs were short little pop songs that didn’t have a lot of effects. It was very straightforward. When we got to The Drop Beneath, it was definitely our heaviest, darkest album. The songs were still pop underneath that, but there were a lot of new things there — less obvious structures and such. This new album, it was us going back to the more immediate pop stuff we used to do, but writing them with the benefit of a lot of practice and training with our instruments. It’s the most fully realized group album we’ve done yet. We come from minimal roots. We used to be a duo, and we banked on that minimalism, but I think that this one we allowed ourselves to explore new things and trust each other as a band. I don’t think I’ve ever been like, ‘Ew,’ to one of my bandmates. We definitely seem to know what the others are going to like.”
On what the title, Gold & Stone, means to them:
“We had a lot of different working titles that we debated between, but Gold & Stone … our first full-length was called Silver, and there’s something a little subconscious about how that played into it. A lot of people say that about the band, that we are shimmery and pretty, but that there’s this harder edge to us. I think that’s a good description, too.”
