New York based The Formalist talk us through how much the music industry has changed since they started in 2006, their new record, and more
Based out of Brooklyn, NY is the ever evolving sounds of The Formalist, who recently shared their latest album ‘A Trace Of Yourself’. The LP is a hypnotic and experimental journey into electronica, ambient, and borders on the avant garde.
We linked up with the duo to chat about their new record, how the industry has changed since they started back in 2006, and a LOT more.
Kieran: Hey, thank you for taking the time to chat with us! How have you been?
Stephen: Thanks for having us! I’m excited to talk about the new record.
Kieran: You guys formed back in 2006 and I think it is safe to say the music industry has changed a lot since then, what have you noticed and how has it affected you as artists?
Stephen: Yeah, it’s been a minute since we recorded our first record together back in the 2006-2008 era, that’s for sure. We finally released that album officially on Mother West in 2019, which is kind of what kickstarted us working on the new Formalist album that has just come out. I do sort of miss designing CD album art and liner notes and having the physical object to distribute — we even kind of touch on the loss of physical objects having any usefulness in some of the lyrics in our recent single, “Happenstance.” But being able to distribute the album globally on streaming services definitely makes access to it so much easier.
One thing I’ve noticed now though is how genre-specific most stations, playlists, blogs, etc have become. Lots of places don’t know quite what to do with the Formalist because we don’t fit neatly into one genre — each song goes where we felt it needed to go to tell the story, create the emotional mood. I’ve seen our songs described as electro-pop, dream pop, shoegaze, but with elements of downtempo, chillout, ambient, glitch, leftfield, alternative, and indie rock…so I think it is best for people who aren’t only into one thing.
Kieran: Do you think it is better now than it was?
Stephen: I think the ease with which people can access and stream music is incredibly positive. Though we’ve also realized our songs take their time — most of them are 4 or 5 minutes long — which feels like an eternity now! My hope is they reward close listening but not sure if everyone has the attention span for it…
Kieran: What artists inspired you to start the project?
Stephen: Lots of classic influences from the shoegaze era — Slowdive, MBV — and trip hop artists like Portishead, and of course Radiohead will always be inspirational influences. But more than any one artist I think trying to capture a certain nostalgic, emotional mood is what we were going for. Someone told me the lyrics remind her of Rush songs, so maybe there’s some progressive rock conceptual inspiration in there somewhere!
Kieran: Are there any artists today that are keeping you motivated/influencing your sound?
Stephen: I often say James Blake, not because our record sounds anything like him but just because he uses voice and sound and elegant instrumentation in such a modern way. I think the Broken Bells collaboration is another great example of something that sounds really nostalgic and current at the same time.
Kieran: You just released your latest album ‘A Trace Of Yourself’, can you talk us through the album and what it means to you?
Stephen: I think early-Covid times in New York really moved us to create this record. It was a really tense, emotional, uncertain, and kind of a lonely time with all the isolation and shuttered activities. So we would get together once a week at his Glass Box studio and gradually build and develop and write the songs; creating this Formalist album really got us through that period of time.
Listen to ‘A Trace Of Yourself’ here:
“Happenstance” was the first single off of the album. It’s essentially about facing the idea that all the things we spend time and effort fighting over are probably not the most important things. The lyrics are a little sarcastic about it. We keep and hold things dear that lose their meaning, we fight over the small stuff because that’s all we let ourselves see… And what we actually leave behind, well, may not have been the most important things, what we ought to have been fighting for. Sounds a little bleak, but we wrapped this up into probably the biggest pop chorus we’ve written, and it’s got a nice groove to it, so it’s a good way for someone to first hear what The Formalist is about.
A lot of the songs explore ideas of identity and what we leave behind. “A = N” is a song about amnesia and nostalgia, and how both remembering and forgetting are the ways that we create the story of our lives. It’s kind of a wistful track – someone recently described it as a romantic breakup ballad – but I think of it more as being about how we lose or forget who we once were, and find ourselves all over again.
Anyway, it took a really long time to complete the whole record but I’m glad we were moved to do it. It’s kind of a document of our journey through pandemic times. So my hope is that now that it’s coming out, people will find some resonance in that, and that these songs might help them to look backwards or look forward, and also transport them a little bit.
Kieran: What was the writing and recording process like?
Stephen: There’s a really blurry line between what each of us contributes on every song. I do most of my production work on an MPC where I do the sampling, beat making, and a lot of the initial track design. Erik plays guitar, bass, percussion, and of course sings every word on the record, and we tracked the vocals at his Glass Box studio. There’s a pretty seamless blending of the two styles of creating and songwriting that come together on each one of the songs. Often, I would then take guitar parts or vocals by Erik and manipulate them back in the samplers to make additional textures and layers which blends the foreground and background of the songs in hopefully an evocative way.
For example, one of the singles — “Finite” — I wrote the chorus as one word and one droning electronic chord, and then Erik wrote this beautiful guitar chord sequence around it which took it to another level. It kind of evoked shoegaze to me, so we then re-sampled his guitars through a series of pedals and back into the MPC and transformed it into this big atmospheric texture to bring that feel to life. Same things with his acoustic guitars on that song, which I then resampled, hand-played in the MPC to give it a glitchy jitteriness, and then layered back into the track.
I think the great part about The Formalist is that these songs are not something that either one of us could’ve created ourselves. Certainly without Erik’s guitar, songwriting gift, and talent as a singer these songs couldn’t possibly exist. And in his own musical work, Erik is more of a traditional, singer/songwriter, and multi instrumentalist, and there’s much less of an electronic or experimental quality to his other work. So I think that’s what we bring to each other and these songs – the ability to push both of us outside of our talent and our comfort zones.
Kieran: Lastly, if you could collab with any artist who would it be?
Stephen: Ok, I’ll go old school for this one. When I was growing up and poring over the liner notes of all my favorite records at the time — Nine Inch Nails, New Order, Depeche Mode, U2, etc — one name just kept coming up, over and over: Flood. This was long before Wikipedia, so I was like: who is Flood? So if I could get in the studio with anyone, all these years later, it would probably be him.
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