Alexa Viscius
The band Slow Pulp in the backyard.
All the members of Slow Pulp, now based in Chicago, grew up in Madison.
Blending fuzzy guitar riffs with dreamy melodies and wistful lyricism, Slow Pulp has crafted a sound that’s all their own. The Chicago-based, Madison-bred quartet taps into nostalgic shoegaze vibes reminiscent of ‘90s indie rock, enveloping listeners in warm tones and introspective lyricism.
With the recent release of their critically acclaimed sophomore album, Yard, Slow Pulp is touring North America and Europe, including a sold-out hometown show at the Majestic on Nov. 10.
“It’s been great, the shows have been really fun,” singer and guitarist Emily Massey says. “It’s been mind-blowing that people are singing along every night.”
Formed while the members were attending college in 2015, Slow Pulp thrives on the decades-plus friendships among its band mates. The four members of the group — Massey (vocals/guitar), Alex Leeds (bass/vocals), Teddy Mathews (drums), and Henry Stoehr (guitar) — all grew up in Madison. Longtime friends Stoehr and Mathews met in a McDonald’s ball pit when they were 5. While taking music lessons at the now-defunct Good ‘N Loud Music on Madison’s west side, they bonded over music with Leeds. Massey, coincidentally, took classes at the east-side Good ‘N Loud location, but their paths wouldn’t cross until she connected with Stoehr and Mathews at UW-Madison.
“We were playing music for fun, but there was this connection between the four of us that I wanted to be a part of,” Massey says.
Although she originally joined the band as a rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, Massey eventually started writing more of the songs, becoming the band’s front person. While they had discussed modeling themselves after artists like Pavement, Slowdive, and fellow Madison act Garbage early on, “It’s fun for us to not have anything tie us down too deeply in terms of influences,” Massey says. “It allows us to always have this exploratory sense of music.”
After releasing two EPs, Slow Pulp released their debut album Moveys amid the COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020. Forced to complete the record remotely, Massey collaborated with her father, Michael Massey, a musician himself, to record the vocals. “I love working with him, it’s so fun,” Massey says. “He and I are very close, so he has context for the songs that are much deeper than anybody else. One important thing he does is he tells me when to stop, which I don’t have a ceiling for when things need to be done.” The two enjoyed the collaboration so much that they recorded together again while creating Yard.
The group began working on Yard in 2022. After a COVID case shut down the ballet class she was teaching, Massey asked to stay at a friend’s house in northern Wisconsin. To her surprise, isolation offered an emotional and lyrical breakthrough that became fundamental to the album’s creation.
“I feel like I went through this emotional purge that I didn’t expect to happen. I was just open and vulnerable with myself without being too critical,” Massey says. “I think I needed this album and this isolation to learn how to trust myself.”
Across the 10-track Yard, Slow Pulp opts for a sparer soundscape that balances fuzzy guitar-driven rock songs with downtempo, slower tracks. A last-minute re-recording session for the original opening track, “Gone,” the day before the album was due resulted in replacing it with “Gone 2,”— a sparse version that felt more fitting to them than the electric sheen on the original. “Doubt” shows off the band’s ability to rock out, capturing a carefree and infectious energy that they liken to “wakeboarding on a summer day.” Visualizing the feeling they want a song to evoke helps inform the energy on songs like “Doubt.”
“Defining that energy is a fun way for us to find some connection to the music in a way that takes it further in a production sense,” Massey says.
Whether it’s an upbeat track like “Doubt” or the title track, a ballad stripped down to only Massey and a piano, she delivers introspective, often moody lyrics with a disarming sincerity.
Their ability to capture vulnerable, often delicate moments is part of why Slow Pulp’s melodic hooks and introspective lyricism resonates with their growing fanbase — and it shows when they take the stage every night.
“Finding joy in either accepting those harder feelings, or maybe reflecting on being on the other side of them, is not something I expected to happen,” Massey says. “It feels amazing that people are having that type of reaction.”
