Alec Basse
Left to right: Slow Pulp is Emily Massey, Henry Stoehr, Teddy Mathews and Alex Leeds. The band returns to Madison as headliners after opening for Phoebe Bridgers last month.
Call it a case of delayed gratification, or another trajectory temporarily skewed by the pandemic. In October 2020, Slow Pulp, the Madison-born/Chicago-based indie-rock band fronted by vocalist Emily Massey, released their first full-length album, Moveys. The critical acclaim rained down like one of those massive fall thunderstorms that traps you inside the house, giving you the perfect opportunity to crank up Slow Pulp’s hazy, introspective sound and get into the headspace the group was inhabiting when they composed it. But with clubs and venues mostly shuttered as COVID-19 was accelerating, the possibility of touring and performing the songs for fans was a non-starter.
That changes in just a few weeks, when Massey, guitarist Henry Stoehr, bassist Alex Leeds and drummer Teddy Mathews launch Slow Pulp’s first national tour as a headliner, Nov. 4 at the Majestic Theatre.
“The prospect of a tour still hasn’t hit me yet, as a real option,” says Massey, speaking by Zoom from her bedroom in Chicago. “It will feel so special, to see how people interact with it in a personal way for the first time, because I think every observation that we’ve seen with the record has been on the internet.”
The pandemic wasn’t all bad news for Slow Pulp. Months of stay at home orders may have separated them physically, but it also gave the quartet time — lots of time — to focus on songwriting and recording the songs for Moveys, instead of squeezing the work in between their day jobs.
“Without the pandemic I think this probably would have been a different album altogether,” says Stoehr, who handles all the production and mixing duties for the group. “It definitely put us in a position where I think we needed to just be immune, to use our time based on our environment.”
Events beyond the pandemic also influenced the songwriting process. Case in point: the song “Falling Apart.” Right before COVID hit, Massey’s parents, legendary Madison pianist Michael Massey and his wife, Robin Valley-Massey, were involved in a serious car accident, prompting Emily to move back to Madison for several months to help care for them.
“It was just such a surreal time where it felt like everything was so going wrong, to the degree that I had this numbness to kind of get through it,” Massey explains. The song’s chorus and lyrics were still a work in progress, and Stoehr turned to Massey and asked her to unleash.
“That brought out an emotional quality that I didn’t necessarily seek to create,” she says. “The album really helped all of us, in our own ways, to get through that period of time in the pandemic.”
Back in June, Slow Pulp released “Deleted Scenes,” a digital EP featuring remixes of a couple of songs off Moveys. One of them, “Idaho” — which Stoehr actually began writing while he was in Colorado — has been slowed down, fuzzed out and renamed “Iowa.”
Given that there’s another song on Moveys named “Montana,” does the band have a not-so-secret thing for songs named for plains states? The answer’s much more amusing.
“The boys always make fun of me because of the chorus, where I say, ‘I’m losing all the while,’” explains Massey. “They thought that I was saying ‘I’m losing Iowa.’”
“That song was pretty great for the Democratic primaries in the Iowa Democratic National Caucus,” jokes Stoehr.
Massey and company are currently focused on writing new songs and figuring out how to best treat the ones from Moveys, which they’ve only recently begun to play live. Determining how to highlight the keyboard line in a song like “Trade It,” a guitar-fueled ballad that showcases Massey’s dreamy vocals, is tricky.
“There’s definitely one synth melody line in that song that communicates the greater picture of the song, that we have to figure out,” says Stoehr. “We don’t know how we’re going to say that yet.”
The band got an unexpected warm-up opportunity in September, when they were asked to open for the Phoebe Bridgers show after it was moved from The Sylvee to Breese Stevens Field. They also just released a bangin’ cover of the Sum 41 classic “In Too Deep.”
Massey’s psyched to kick the tour off at the Majestic, one of the few places in Madison she was able to see all-ages shows growing up.
“It feels like a teenage dream come true to be able to play the Majestic,” she says. “I wouldn’t have wanted to start our musical journey together anywhere else. I feel like it was the perfect kind of beginning for us. And we’re excited to be out in the world again.”
