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Sylvan Esso on impressing each other, new album 'No Rules Sandy' and their experimental new era
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Feb 9, 2025
Four albums in, Sylvan Esso are just getting started. Unbound by the creative freedom they discovered while locked down in Echo Park, Los Angeles, new album, 'No Rules Sandy' is their most free and frenetic album to date. Tyler Kelly meets husband and wife pair, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, to find out more about the making of the record and why they're excited about the future.
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foreign ER and I'm here for the 45 I'm here with
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Sylvan Esso um how are you guys doing you're in the middle of a tour at the moment and
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you've just released your fourth studio album no rules Sandy um I've seen on Instagram that you've
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been doing cookouts and water gun fights and you threw the first pitch at the Brewers game in Milwaukee so it looks
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like you're having the best time but how has it been for you we're thrilled but exhausted if I'm
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being totally honest yeah we're pretty much running on fumes at the moment but we are having a lot of fun
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and how is the reaction to the songs been so far
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it's been great you know we're in this weird situation because we're on the first opening tour we've been on in like
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seven or eight years so it's the double weirdness of it's not totally our crowd
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um but it's been awesome yeah it's been feeling really really good and it's also
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just so nice to put on a new record and be in front of a bunch of people who haven't heard of us yet because it means
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that we have to like stretch a muscle that we haven't stretched in a long time and and get to play in front of new
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people which is just more it's more challenging and fun than playing in front of people who uh like
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you even though there's a that's a lot more supportive well it's more challenging yeah it's more challenging yeah yeah kind of wanting to win people
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over but also like not take too much of the Limelight from the headliners and play better than them that kind of vibe
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I mean whatever I mean that's okay
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I'm never going into a situation of Performing being like chill out
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tone it down Randy yeah no no toning it down and what's the kind of proportion in the
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set that you're doing at the moment between like songs from the older album and songs from the one that you've just released
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and split um yeah it's like it's like uh it's like even I'm kind of
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amongst all of them yeah I think we're playing like three songs each yeah yeah maybe like one
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bonus song from no rules Sandy yeah but also we want to cover the breath the real tour for an overall Sandy will be
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in 2020 yeah next year and we're just starting to plan that right now which is
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fun are there any kind of like sneaky bits you can give away or is it in the kind of like infantile stages where you're
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not really sure how it's all going to go just yet oh it's a little baby right yeah it's this tiny little fledgling who's a
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little baby little stem cell yeah yeah so [Laughter]
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talking of no no Sandy I want to kind of get the backstory behind the whole album
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so like what was the kind of catalyst for packing up the studio and I read
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that you like threw everything into the back of a Prius and you set up shop
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um in like a little home studio in Echo Park LA so what was the Catalyst for that and why that area specifically
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um when the pandemic hit I realized that once once we were a year in I realized
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that if we didn't cross the country it was going to be the first time that I hadn't crossed America in my adult life
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um so I was like well we can't let that happen um so on January 1st 2021 we drove
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across so naturally in 2042 we were like well let's do that this is a tradition now yeah we must do it
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um which is really fun yeah it's great so it was really also like the Grammys
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were going to be at the end of the month and we had a bunch of sessions booked where we were going to write music with other folks but then of
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course the pandemic still hasn't disappeared surprise uh and
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then so everything got canceled and Sandy and I just decided to start trying to make music together
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yeah yeah we brought it just for fun but then it became the only thing to do yeah
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and it was great it was really fun what do you think it was about the whole experience that allowed you to write
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more freely like with no rules or limitations was it because there was nothing to do and there wasn't
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necessarily like a goal Insight or was it just the product of your environment
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I think it was both of those you know I I think uh the last two records
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um you know we we kind of couldn't make them in a vacuum you know we were like the you know we're still getting bigger
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even now but it's like back then we were really feeling the weight of the responsibility of of
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that and trying to make the band bigger and trying to you know uh please people who already liked us and all this stuff
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and so we knew when we were working on those records we knew where they were going to go you know we were thinking
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about yo how's this going to play at a festival and like how is this going to work at radio and how's the label going
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to feel about this and all that stuff and this time we didn't think about any of that stuff we were we were there in
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the whole we were just having fun I mean we were literally just having fun with each other without
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thinking at all about it being a record like it was the point was literally just to have fun while we had nothing else to
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do and it wasn't until after we got done that we realized that we really liked it all and it probably was a record and so
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we got kind of got to like skip the anxiety phase you know and I think it showed us a new
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way that we could like free ourselves from all these things that we thought we had
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to do which I I feel like has kind of been a big kind of macro lesson of the pandemic anyway I feel like everybody I
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know is talking about rethinking what they thought they had to
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be doing yeah and I just think we had a an acute version of that
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where do you think that pressure comes from because it's also like I guess you're trying to fit into a mold whether
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that's like the pressure from fans or the expectation from labels and stuff like that where do you feel like that
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pressure comes from and what kind of steps did you take to try and break that mode
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I think it comes from capitalism 100 uh and
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in almost everything that we're doing with this band we're generally trying to reach towards
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the future in a creative an open way that can potentially lead to
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a path outside of capitalism which of course only works because we've already won
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capitalism with this band at this moment um
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but I think with this with this record in general we were able to kind of return to the idea that we just get to
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make things yeah I mean I think it's a natural I
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think it's a natural pressure I think once something goes well everybody has an idea about what they
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think it is and what it's supposed to be and how it should actually be something else that it isn't already
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or that it needs to then it needs to continually be getting bigger and better yeah the whole idea that everything
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needs to constantly be getting larger I think I think when you get uh when you're
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lucky enough to have the kind of Arc that we've had over the last several years um
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it's kind of an inescapable feeling I think because you're there's a part of your mind that's always worried that
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you're going to ruin it you know like for the this is our Dream you know like having this job in this moment is like
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something we both dreamed about for our whole lives so I think there's always a part of you that's that
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sees it with a scarcity mindset and thinks that it could go away you know
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yeah I guess there's an element of like internal pressure when you've kind of I guess you've literally just said it when
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you feel like you're at the cusp of the thing that you really want to do it's almost like trying your hardest not to let it slip away but having that control
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over it can kind of you know push it in that direction if you don't control it enough and especially like the thing
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that get that gets anyone to this point is not worrying about any of that stuff and just making the thing they want to
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make and I think we all know plenty of bands who like make the thing they want to make
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and then you hear the external pressures on the next couple things that they make you know it's just an it's kind of
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unavoidable yeah exactly yeah and to not get
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yeah to be able to instead of being like I'm to be able to appreciate where you
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are because that's the wildest part is like not even it always feels like you're on the cusp of something that you
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want if you're continually are Reaching Forward just it's hard to chill out and just
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appreciate what you have I don't know how anyone does it I've never been able to do it but
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by doing that one day it's always a learning curve isn't it it's a process that you go through
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you're always you're never at the end it's always just the journey and so in terms of like with that in
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mind actually in terms of like the days of writing the album did you give
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yourself any structure in the days or would it be like wake up have a coffee and if you gravitate towards the tools
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that you feel like in that moment then create something or did you give yourselves like structure towards making
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the music I mean with we definitely would wake up and have separate time and get coffee
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and fart around for a little while but uh I think that the biggest thing that
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we did for this one was we just pushed ourselves every day to try to make something no matter if we were feeling
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like it or not um and um when you I think I think a lot of times
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for me at least when I push through that initial moment of kind of like oh I'm not feeling inspired
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quote-unquote or whatever uh there's always something interesting on the other side of that like laziness
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hurdle for me um and I think part of it is just craft and
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I think part of it is kind of dispelling your own internal myths about like you know the Muse or inspiration or
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anything like that like like we're both artists like I think any artist you're always
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tuned in to a certain frequency of your existence no matter what I mean that's kind of the
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job is like staying inspired and and and feeling the world in an emotional way uh
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and translating that and so wait wait I feel like that's the biggest thing is just not waiting to for have to
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have something lightning bolt moment is is realizing that like oh no the actual work of this is living my life in the
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correct way and then sitting down and just doing the work it feels like that I can kind of get a
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sense of that because there's such a a Carefree ease that runs throughout the album and it is a lot more frenetic than
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the previous work that you've done and in terms of like production a lot of it it's almost like hyper pop and let
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there's like less rigid song structures um and it's quite quite a departure from
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the stuff that you've done previously and I was wondering like in that world of being in the making of the album what
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kind of things were you listening to or what were you finding like inspiration um from we're really listening to that
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much music no I was listening to an audiobook called gray sling
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about a girl that's gifted with the ability to kill people
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um and we were watching station 11. we were watching station 11 which really that really changed it I feel like I
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mean have you watched that show yet no I've not heard of it oh it's amazing it's great absolutely beautiful
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um yeah I think I think it played into a lot of the like pandemic feelings Los Angeles in Los Angeles yeah in a new
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environment so we were able to just be with ourselves in the way that you are when you take yourself out of your
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normal environment and I think that that environment yeah it's early here that's
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all fancy work I got words I write the lyrics
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um yeah like I hear all that when I listen to it though you know I think the freneticism to me is like freneticism
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that's a good one
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um I think that to me like that's how this last little bit of my life has felt you know I think everything feels
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like it's barreling towards something right now and I'm just trying to grasp
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on to any emotional moment as it as it shoots past me and that's I think
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especially like that song Moving that starts the record to me really speaks to that and all of the other kind of
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intense quick edit stuff I think it's a natural byproduct of just
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feeling that way you know I think um the last record was a lot more
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contemplative and I think this one is maybe more emotional but just in a in a
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it's coming at it from a different angle and I think that's because that because of where we are at you know
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I think the Doom is more present now yeah it's more tangible I think in the
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climate you can really just Reach Out And Touch It
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[Music] [Laughter] um I wanted to specific this kind of
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touches on what you just said I really wanted to talk about um your reality and Cloud water
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um because those two songs really stuck out to me but then also the post that you have pinned on um Instagram that was
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saying they were kind of born from the same day that was like a really stressful day and I think what the songs
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kind of spoke to me about is taking a leap of faith and allowing yourself to fall into something where you're kind of
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you're capable of doing it you've subconsciously been doing it but then it's like having the actual realization of doing that
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um so I was wondering like in the making of no raw Sandy was that like a big growth period for the both of you
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yes couldn't have said it better myself
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[Laughter] yeah I think we were really I think really what it was is that we were
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rediscovering uh the elements of play that are in music making that that have
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always been present in the work that we've done but we've been really wanting to play in a very specific way
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instead of instead of exploring so I think I think
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like particularly in those songs I can't
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it's so embarrassing but whenever like almost every record most of the songs are just about writing songs because
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that's what I'm doing and I can't help but write about what I'm doing um
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and in them yeah and and in them it's so much of it
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as you picked up on is about giving yourself permission to just play and have fun and explore but I think
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that that's too I mean both those songs to me really speak to that kind of bigger
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thing that we were talking about earlier like so much of the last two years I think
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for me has been being forced to see what I've been
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prioritizing in the wrong way you know and I think we've all kind of been broken
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down to our basic parts in that way in the
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last little while and that that whole feeling is a feeling I
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I associate with this record and to me your reality especially is kind of the
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Cornerstone of that to me um that that to me it's kind of the of all
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the things that I feel like the record talks about which is really just all the things that we have been feeling and living in for the last two years that's
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what all our records ever are is just kind of like pins in the map you know just like diary entries of this moment
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that to me feels like the overarching like life lesson that this last two
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years has taught us is is learning how
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to reevaluate those things and learning how to let yourself let go of something that
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isn't helping you um yeah I think that's a really good point and especially like as a creative person
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knowing that you know the struggle days are just as important as the highly productive ones it's all about what you
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do in that time frame and so on so it's all one song
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yeah or like how yeah I like to believe that the songs that come out in 10 minutes I've actually been working on
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them for years but but they you know weren't ready I mean that's the whole
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it's like that thing about remaining inspired you know it's just I think part of the job is just knowing
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where to put your brain on any given day and if that's walking or talking to your family or
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working or leaning into some emotionally uncomfortable experience
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all the none of those things are writing songs but all of them are the only way
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to get to a song that's good yeah see the thing
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that moment you know um I guess that kind of so I wanted to talk about like the sound bites in
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between the songs because I feel like that offers quite an incredibly raw and vulnerable insight
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into your lives um what was the kind of idea of slipping those in between the songs
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I didn't want there to be any silence on the record just because it came out it was coming out so fast and it felt like
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it was a product of everything all around us and I wanted to keep I wanted
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to make the record instead of feeling like a collection of songs that were meticulously
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organized I wanted it to feel like you know the PO someone's Pockets being turned inside out
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um and so we it was actually really a
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really fun exercise in uh self-documentation and that we just
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like dug through all of our voice memos and our like all of the various sounds
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that we record all the time um and they all came together
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they came together so fast yeah like I think we made them I had known that I
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wanted like we'd been talking about how wait a second was this your idea well the thing
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that lead do with the better idea was my idea but yeah yeah because we were well it was we were we were in the studio and
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so it was so processy you know we were like iterating and iterating and like by the time we'd get to it was
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so I'm going to always start with one idea and by the time we were like actually writing it as a song would have
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gone through like three different things it was very processy and I the initial thing was just like oh
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wouldn't it be cool if we like opened up the process a little bit more on the record so you heard where something
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started and then you heard it move into the thing that the song became so like leading into Echo party there's that
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that vocal Loop that speeds up and gets chopped and becomes the backbone of echo
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party which is like I don't know if anybody maybe would have noticed that that's where that sound came from yeah I
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love it I don't think anyone knows but I mean whatever it doesn't matter it's like the point is like
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showing somebody that whether or not they see it I think give somebody that
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doorway into that intimacy yeah and when we're trying to follow that feeling the
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feeling of like letting someone in the Amelia started having this idea to
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just put all these voicemails and stuff in there because that's just another everything felt like time stamped I mean
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we literally time stamped that one interlude like May 4th 2022 or whatever
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um because we want it to feel like it was this one instant you know
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um and every time we added one of those things it felt more open and more like
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welcoming each one of them felt like another doorway into the record for somebody like we wanted you to have that
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feeling we wanted you to feel like you were there and like it was yours
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I really like the idea and I think like it adds to like the playful funness of
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you know we're in this space for three weeks we're gonna create something We're Not Gonna care too much
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about it and you know it's it's a more honest way of putting out music and little Snippets of yourself as opposed
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to a really kind of thought out concise thing as you were saying before that takes the fun away from you know the
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kind of creativity and the art side of it you know well and I think as a quote unquote pop
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band which is an inherently like it's usually a pretty polished format
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you know I think we've leaned into polish at times in ways that have felt like very purposeful and I think this
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one just inherently felt so unpolished as an album that the more we led into it
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feeling like kind of stitched together the more we liked it yeah the more it felt like itself
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yeah we wanted to make something that only we could make yeah and of course I'm sure you had a lot of
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fun doing it and you can tell by making by listening sorry to to the album
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um I did want to ask because I picked something up in one of those little Snippets
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um do you think that people who are astrologically compatible can succeed at relationships because
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[Laughter] yeah
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Alexandra yeah um yeah she's obsessed with the birthday book I
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know and do you all have the birthday book in the UK I've not heard of it no it's one where you can like look up
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everybody's crisscross on like so like you're like find out their sign in
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you're assigned and then there's a page that's about like what your relationship would be like I I'll say this
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I think if you're asking the question you already know it's not gonna work
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here's the thing if you just like somebody you're just like awesome let's go on 18 million dates and if you if
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you're like ah then you're asking questions like if
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we're not an astrological bill can this actually like no like you already know
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I think the true point of all of this stuff is to show you the thing that you already know to be true it just reveals
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you the thing that you want within yourself yeah if you're asking you already know
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so I wanted to ask after so I read that you've kind of described your Dynamic
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and the dynamic of your sound actually as an argument and that in the making of
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noble Sandy you kind of went back to the classic formula of trying to impress each other and I mean you've been
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together for almost 10 years now so what does that look like trying to impress each other after 10 years of working
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together oh it looks the same it really is just both of us being like
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do you like this what about this one I understand uh look look what I could do
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um yeah yeah it is interesting it's so it was
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such an honest thing to say that we're trying to impress each other and people
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a lot of people then ask like what does that look like and really it is as dorky
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as it sounds like yeah like it isn't it isn't very impressive
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I don't think it would be impressive to watch for anybody else it's a lot of like like on my end it's me being like
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and then putting on headphones so she doesn't hear what I'm doing for five minutes and then take him out be like
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hell how about this yeah and this is a lot of that kind of thing me of like writing a melody in my head and then
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performing it at Nick yeah yeah it's all it's all just trying to um
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I think when there's only two of you in the band it's it's everybody's job to keep the
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air in the balloon you know what I mean and like like neither of us gets to take
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a break of being the person with the best idea at any given moment yeah and so I think that's the there's kind of
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this nut this like fun version of competition where we're always trying to be the one who's like making the thing
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better um and that's just I mean it's maybe better
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now than it used to be because it's so much harder like she knows me so much better yeah and she knows all my
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[ __ ] so like I can't I can't feel my usual nonsense it's the same yeah where
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there's like there's just a general we both know each other's breadth of work so well that we can tell when one of us
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just recycling an old idea yeah it's like there's no space to be lazy
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it's like come on now I know what you can do you can do better which is the best yeah yeah which is great
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it looks too much better work honestly actually you went we both end up pushing ourselves in a different way you know
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and so like looking back on the last 10 years where do you feel like um the band now fits in the current musical
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landscape and what do you want no real Sandy to say about you now
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oh my God if anything I feel like were
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just now like this feels like a jumping off point to like the rest of our career to me
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you know what I mean like like I think up until now I felt so much more
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hesitant about I don't know taking weird chances or or
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anything maybe not Taking Chances but I think I was so much more concerned about breaking the thing and now
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I just feel like extremely lucky to have the fan base that we do who wants to
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hear whatever we come up with and I feel that responsibility to them to not like
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you know phone it in yeah uh but that means not phoning it in on myself you
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know it's like it's like an agreement within ourselves yeah to me it just generally feels
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really fresh like there I don't know what's next which is exciting yeah like kind of the
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first time we could say that in a few years yeah like who knows so nice we're working on this label now and like we
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have the studio and it just feels like Everything feels full of possibility in
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a different way yeah yeah we're not on a record level anymore say that again
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we're not on our record label anymore so this was our last record with them well that's what I was gonna ask you so
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you started psychic hotline last year um I was gonna ask what prompted you to do that and will you think of self-releasing Music
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um going forward yeah I mean I'm not sure well we started just because we were getting our first
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uh the first silver record in the first Mountain Man record the rights back to those uh albums so we needed a place to
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put them and the more we looked around the more we realized that like nobody really had the thing that was kind of
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our dream of a place to put them and we could just start that so we just did and then it was like well
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what else could this be Beyond a warehouse and and uh
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it all sorts of fun ideas started popping up because it's like not our main business like touring is our
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business like that's what makes money for us so all the other stuff we do doesn't need to operate in a in a super
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you know profit hungry structure that you know if a label is your main thing like that's obviously more of a concern
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but the minute you take that out of the equation it all these fun possibilities popped up you know and uh that's just
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been like so rewarding to see like how can we help artists make things you know
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how can we be the thing that enables something to happen that's even outside of us and
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it's just been so enriching even on like a selfish level like it's been
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it just feels like our our musical family has really grown in a different way
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and what are you working on on the label at the moment are there any releases that you can talk about that you're excited for
29:42
there's really exciting stuff there's extremely cool stuff happening that we can't talk about yeah but
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you'll know it when you see it and it's so sick we're working on uh this we've been
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doing this single series which is all like you know one-off collaborative singles from artists which has been
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maybe the most rewarding part of it uh the main artist that we're working right now with right now is this guy from Sao
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Paulo uh named Tim bernardis um who that's that's been extremely rewarding to help him come to the states
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and uh try to get him off the ground here uh he's unbelievable and his album
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is truly beautiful I'll be sure to check it out when it
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comes I'll be keeping an eye on it oh yeah he just oh that's that just came out dude that you can find now yeah oh
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okay and it's it's uh it's insane it's great you just sold out all of his UK shows
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yeah like seconds we're so hyped it's great he's crushing it cool well thank you so much for taking
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the time to talk to us and I hope you enjoy the rest of the tour and that the tonight goes really smoothly thanks so
30:52
much thanks for talking to us
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