Slow Pulp Look Back to Move Forward on New Album 'Melodie'
Chicago indie rock quartet Slow Pulp have released their third album, Melodie, and sat down with NME to talk through it. Guitarist Henry Stoehr and guitarist/vocalist Emily Massey described a record that looks backward to work through themes of isolation, health and friendship — and revealed the band wrote around 30 candidate songs before recording. The album's closing track, "Slip Away," sits at the center of the whole project.
Where 'Melodie' started
Stoehr told NME he's long carried a feeling of being alone even in a crowd, and that making this record was partly an effort to understand what causes that sense of distance — and which part of himself keeps pushing connection away. He's originally from Madison, Wisconsin, and now lives in Chicago, Illinois; he did the interview wearing a Packers hat.
"Slip Away" draws on a period in his early twenties when he felt directionless: outside a hardware store in Madison, a group of friends looked right through him, and the sting of that rejection felt like confirmation of his worst assumptions about himself. He said what had felt like a vague, "ambient anxiety" only became a concrete, nameable feeling once he turned it into a song.
Notably, it's Massey who ends up singing Stoehr's words. The line about shouting everything out through a megaphone until it finally makes sense is delivered by her, on his behalf.
From 'Moveys' to 'Yard'
Massey and Stoehr first got close by trading song ideas with old friends Alex Leeds (bass) and Teddy Mathews (drums). She said that a decade ago, when they started swapping material like this, they barely knew each other — it was simply how they became friends.
That back-and-forth shaped their early EPs and their 2020 debut album, Moveys, which earned critical praise and led to tours alongside Lucy Dacus and Death Cab For Cutie. But the road wasn't straightforward: Massey made several trips back to Wisconsin from Chicago for health reasons, first to care for her parents after a car accident, and later relocating to the woods during the pandemic, where she wrote the lyrics for 2023's Yard. She said the solitude quieted her inner self-criticism.
By the time of Melodie, the pair decided to apply the same scrutiny to their creative habits that they'd applied to their personal lives, returning to a rhythm of trading material every two or three days. That process produced around 30 songs in contention for the album. Massey said the experience felt, in some ways, like getting to know each other again — and that their communication and friendship are in a better place now than they've been in a while.
What we don't know yet
The source interview doesn't specify a release date, label, tracklist, or any upcoming tour dates for Melodie — those details have not been announced as of this report.