by Will Floyd (@Wilf_Lloyd)
We’ve been smitten with Gentle Heat’s sophisticated, hyper-melodic shoegaze stylings since we reviewed their full length debut, Dissolve back in 2018. Two EPs and some line-up shifts later, they’re back with their second LP, Sheer. I caught up with singer and guitar player, David Algrim over Zoom to discuss writing and performing in the “post-COVID” landscape, underrated music cities, how the band manages to straddle ambient and rock, and not trusting kids who have good taste in music, among other things.
photo credit: Vanessa Valadez
Will Floyd: What were your musical ambitions like as a kid, and how do they compare to the path you’ve taken? Do you find that there are groups you liked as a kid that are still informing your music?
David Algrim: My dad and his dad both played music—not professionally, just as people who lived in small towns and just played around. So there was always music around the house, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I woke up at five years old and said “this is my destiny”. It was always around from the time I was young. In terms of music from when I was young that I still listen to, I do remember when I was six years old my sister getting “The Blue Album”. That’s probably one of the few from early life. I mean realistically as a child you’re just getting so many different things, stylistically, that probably have some sort of impact on what you like and don’t like. I remember listening to Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray when I was a young young kid, whenever Now That’s What I Call Music was popular. So there are some that would obviously relate [to the band] more so than most. We play a sort of niche style of music that’s somewhere in the line of pop music—it’s supposed to be more dense and textured to the point where it’s not as widely consumable. Like I didn’t get into My Bloody Valentine till I was 20-something, which is the touchstone for the genre and what we generally do. So yes in terms of Weezer, no in terms of literally everything else.
WF: We might be a similar age—I’m 27—but I just feel like I had such bad taste in music till I was like 22.
DA: Who had a glowing childhood in terms of their [musical] repertoire? I think it’s nicer when people are messy in terms of what they listen to, because it means you listen to a lot of different styles of music. I think it’s really boring the idea of somebody going from A to B and essentially just building on the same concept. Some people really have that drive and determination where they can put the blinders on and say at 18 I wanna do this and ride it out—I don’t think that’s very exciting for most people.
WF: I like that line of thinking. I don’t trust anyone who didn’t have bad taste in music as an 11-year old.
DA: No, I wouldn’t want them anywhere near me. Seriously, even now I listen to a lot of different kinds of music depending on the day, what the mood is. I wouldn’t say I listen to anywhere near exclusively guitar-oriented rock music, and I think consciously or not that affects how I think about music in general. You’re not just going cleanly through “I want this to sound like this” because it would just be a carbon copy if that were the case—you’d just be recreating what you know.
WF: Well that leads me into my second question, which is: What artists and groups are really inspiring you right now? Are you someone that listens to a lot of music during the writing and recording process, or do you need more space and quiet?
DA: I definitely ebb and flow in terms of the amount of music I’m taking in. I saw JRCG last night. They're a band from the Seattle-Tacoma area. Their main project is Dreamdecay but this is like a second iteration of the project. I saw them play at The Bottle (Chicago music venue, The Empty Bottle)—two drummers, two people going back and forth between saxophones, keyboard and synths, what have you. Just because that was literally last night it was the most inspiring in terms of the live setting, and what live music can be. It was really cool to see specifically what they were doing outside the “two guitars, bass, drums, somebody singing, somebody else singing, maybe someone plays keys.” They really spread out what fits under the umbrella of this style of music.
I don’t think there’s a lot you can add to the canon of two guitars, bass drums—play song, stop, play song, stop. Which is partially why I’m in this project in particular; I like to add a lot of sound elements. We have somebody new playing who has a jazz background so she does a lot of improv. Same with our guitar player, Joe [Suihkonen] who played trumpet for his formal education and plays a lot of jazz sets as well and I think it’s interesting to pull from other musical backgrounds so that it’s not as explicitly informed by one canon of music.
WF: So it sounds like you’re able to go out and see live shows these days?
DA: Yeah, there’s a lot that’s coming up, I’m going to see Juliana Barwick in a few weeks. She does really spooky, choral music [on “Nepenthe”] without it being explicitly beautiful as the end goal. I listen to a lot of ambient music.
WF: You had your own foray into ambient music in 2019, on Phase, right?
DA: Yeah, so the idea with Phase was that it was the first record with Joe playing guitar and I wanted to walk in with the idea of it being one cohesive piece, as opposed to “one song starts, then the next song.” We really wanted to have both of them blend into each other. We have a middle section that is more than an interlude, and it feels more like it’s meant to sew those two pieces together. I don’t know if that’s overly ambitious in terms of what the role of that piece of music is—it still is an interlude technically. The idea is that it’s all one piece, which is an idea we tried to adapt and bring along on the new record as well. I love records like Doolittle where it’s just like a pile of singles and they’re all like “hit, hit, hit, hit”—and not that we’re not trying to make pop-oriented music, but i think the goal is to make it a single piece, and the whole thing is tonally tied together. There’s a theme that ties the first song to the last song to the middle section.
WF: Are you a Squid fan?
DA: I’ve not seen them but I listened to the last record they put out on Warp. That label has a long history of cool very weird experimental stuff. It’s cool to see a band that comes from the post-punk background expanding what fits in that style too.
WF: What you were saying about being tired of live shows where the difference between one song and the next is very clearly delineated made me think of Squid. I was into their debut, but seeing it live, they do what you were talking about where there's a lot of noisy ambient stuff in between songs but they can’t really be categorized as interludes. It’s really just one big experience, and it brings out something that’s not there on the album.
DA: Yeah, a friend told me the same thing about their live set, that it kind of just makes sense. Like the record is cool but it’s all built for that live performance setting which I like.
WF: Speaking of post-punk, I don’t know how on Twitter you are, but if you are a music writer you have to be in the churn of the discourse, for better or worse. You guys have been described as post-punk a handful of times, and I’m sensing this critical backlash on the horizon against post-punk. Obviously there’s the huge wave in the UK, and a lot of critics’ attitudes these days seems to be along the lines of “oh great, another one”. Are you someone that cares about being part of a genre or scene, or do you identify with the post-punk scene?
DA: I play in another band that’s more of a straightforward post-punk band that’s called Stuck. With this band there are certain things informed by that style of music, but I don’t think if anyone listened to this they would come away thinking “man, that’s a post-punk band!” I don’t think it would be wrong to put us under that umbrella necessarily. I’ve seen a little bit of the discourse on Twitter. I saw a music writer here talking about the difference between American and UK post-punk, and what those scenes are currently doing at this point. But very honestly I think we started off when I was much more interested in the interplay of guitar in bands like Women, and that lane of post punk—the guitar and stereo ping-ponging kind of thing was a bit more interesting to me. Not to say it isn’t interesting now but this project has moved away from that kind of music. Our first record, Dissolve, is much more informed by that kind of post-punk. There’s also a ton of people doing shoegaze music now. I would say we’re more of a rock-style shoegaze band compared to Astrobride or Sweet Trip. There are maybe some elements of post-punk that we pull from, but I’m waiting for the shoegaze backlash more than I’m waiting for the post-punk one, since it’s kind of having a moment right now.
WF: I could see that. It’s interesting what you said about in a lot of ways considering yourself a pop band—well maybe not a pop band, but there are pop elements—
DA: That’s fine, I don’t find that to be a taboo take.
WF: Oh good, I mean I love pop music. Hardcore shoegaze sounds like an oxymoron, but really shoegazey-shoegaze teeters on ambient in my opinion, and your music definitely doesn’t.
DA: We try and weave it together but I wouldn’t say it goes outside the parameters of what a rock band is. We have a bit of that genre (ambient) and I like a lot of that music. I think I try to incorporate it, but maybe the best way to put it is I don’t know if I have the attention span to make strictly ambient music. There are people who are doing really great versions of that. I listen to a lot of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Peckler. It’s one of those things where I appreciate being an audience member, being able to pick out parts that I enjoy from it without really wanting to make that style of thing. I listen to a lot of hip-hop as well and there’s not a damn chance I’m gonna try and make that style of music. However, what people are doing with production and arrangement and the sounds in general in that genre is really interesting to me.
WF: I read that a lot of the writing of Sheer was done separately, with the band only coming together once those separate parts were written. Do you think this impacted the sound of the record? Is it something you’d be willing to try again, or do you prefer to all be in the same room for the initial writing process?
DA: It was nice for me because I got to have a bigger picture of what the record was going to sound like, where things fit in general. I would say the way that our writing process works anyway is that we don’t really do the thing where everyone comes in and five people write their own different parts. It’s usually that I come in with an idea and work off of Joe—our keyboard player joined when the record was essentially done. She sings on the record a lot and does a lot of synth stuff and sound work. We did a lot of the keys before hand, and then I had my friend who now lives in California playing bass. What that allowed me to do was to walk in with much more of a developed idea, which I think is nice in certain ways because if i have more of a concrete idea it’s harder to explain out loud without having a recording of what exactly you’re talking about in terms of either notes or drum parts; but we’ve always worked in general by me meeting up with everyone individually and then later meeting up as a unit. So it’s not really that different, but having the time with us not being in the same space forced me to come in with more developed versions of all these songs. Which I think was helpful in the songwriting process for me. I don’t really know how much we will or won’t do that going forward just because we are only just starting to work on new material now. So that’s yet to be seen.
WF: You mentioned your bassist living in Los Angeles. For all intents and purposes you’re a Chicago band, but I know the band has gone through a few different iterations with different members, and that not all the current members are originally from there. What do you think has defined your sound more: being based in Chicago, or the states you all grew up in? Or it could be neither one.
DA: That’s a good question. I grew up in Wisconsin playing more DIY shows and playing in punk and hardcore bands when I was younger. That definitely influenced the volume and the aesthetic of this project; we are a somewhat loud project. If you go back and look at any of our older reviews most of them say “it’s really loud”, before they touch on anything else. I think we’re growing into being a Chicago band. This project technically started when I lived in Milwaukee with a different guitar player and my friends Corey [Wichlin] and Tim [Mack] who lived in Chicago—Corey moved out to Philadelphia and we regrouped with this group of people. So this band has been through a couple of phases, where it feels like this version of the band in particular is an extension of going from Phase [onward], building on that sound in general.
One of the good things with this band having so many people in it is I don’t really like the idea of telling people explicitly what to play. I come in with an idea and part of why I like to meet up with people individually before the whole group meets is that we kind of get to meet in the middle. So everyone who plays with us has a little bit of their take on what the songs are. It’s not gonna be a carbon copy of the record or what we’d done last time on the previous record—it’s always going to be a growing and changing thing which I kinda like. This project has always been a little messy. Like sonically—we were talking about post-punk—where everything has its frequency: the guitars sit here, the drums sit here, the bass sits here, the vocals sit here. As a band, our sound is always going to be a little bit messier, because we don’t really have our frequencies where everyone is separated. It’s all kind of congealed, and that’s by design. It’s not like an accident, that’s what we’re going for.
WF: I like that description. Almost like a wall of sound?
DA: Yeah sort of, but I think a wall of sound is like bands who have 8–12-inch speakers and are pummeling the audience with sound. We’re trying to have different types of sound and I think really where this band has grown is that it’s loud but we’re trying to control the sound we’re putting out a bit more at this point, more closely than we have in the past—what types of sound, where is it coming from, who is making that sound, etc. If you watch our live set, we try and weave together [the songs] so that there’s never a quiet moment. I really don’t enjoy going to watch a band I really like, and it’s just “play song, finish song, now here’s someone’s comedy routine.”
It’s annoying to me 100% of the time. When you’re watching music you’re supposed to be absorbed in their performance or space, and it’s a very easy and real way to take you out of it. There are some people who are really good at that—it’s just not my thing. I think what this music requires or leans into is the fact that the atmosphere of the project or the record is meant to be one thing. You can’t just play a song, leave that space, then come back to it. That’s not really the way it’s meant to be received.
WF: Like you shouldn’t play a song the same way twice?
DA: Yes and no. It’s a pop band so the songs are structured the same, but we have a lot of space for sound in between. I said we’re not really an ambient project, and we aren’t, but I think the sets are woven together so the sound has more of a prominent role to play, than just a thing between songs.
WF: How are you feeling about touring right now? I know there was so much excitement when the country was opening back up and now artists seem to be getting really burnt by it. Where are you on that spectrum?
DA: Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. I know Dummy had to miss like five days pretty recently. Then I had a couple of friends who went down to SXSW had to leave shortly or immediately thereafter because they tested positive. It’s really exciting and part of why there are so many good shows going on right now is because to an extent the floodgates have opened. So it’s really exciting to see so many of these projects that I’ve wanted to see live, especially because we were talking about what specifically is added in the live performance of music that you can’t really get from just listening to the record. There are a lot of things I’m personally really excited to see but haven’t been able to for obvious reasons. It’s a hard thing to navigate. Like do people want to come to shows now and wear masks? It seems like the smartest thing, but it’s a hard thing to enforce.
WF: What would you say are your fondest memories of touring? Or one moment or show that sticks out?
DA: I think of the places and the people more so than one wild time. I really love the city of St Louis any time I get to go there. I have a bunch of really good friends there. We stayed in a really cool warehouse space in Philly which was really fun.
WF: Those are both great music cities right now.
DA: Yeah, St Louis not being a major metropolitan area is a really cool city with a lot of very cool both DIY and slightly more venue-based settings for people to tour and play. One of the problems with Milwaukee for a long time was that they didn’t really have a space that could accommodate people who would fill like a 250–350-cap room. So you could play a 150-cap room like Cactus, or you could play a 750-cap space like Turner Hall; there wasn’t really a space between, so a lot of bands would skip over [Milwaukee] and play Madison. St Louis doesn't have that problem and has a lot of cool, weird music that’s been coming out of there for a long time. Our drummer on this tour lives in St Louis as well.
WF: It does seem like the DIY thing is more difficult in the coastal cities where the space isn’t as affordable, but do you think Chicago is the best of both worlds in that respect?
DA: Kind of. We’re moving a little bit away from DIY in general just because I’ve done that for a long time. Chicago does have both DIY and more institutional venues. I had a little more of a connection to the DIY world when I lived in Milwaukee, but there definitely is DIY out here especially in the south side. But a lot of the shows I’ve been going to recently are at the Empty Bottle or The Hideout or Sleeping Village.
WF: So your release show is in May, and then you guys are hitting the road?
DA: Yeah we’re going to be gone from May 20th to June 3rd. May 19th is the show at The Hideout here, then we’re going from St Louis to Atlanta, out toward the east coast, then cutting back.
WF: I’ll end on kind of a silly one. All your album titles have been one word long. Is there significance to that, and do you see the trend continuing?
DA: I feel like in general I try and be concise. Long winded titles aren’t really my vibe. It’s intentional insofar as it’s me putting the titles together. I love record’s like Misery is a Butterfly but there’s a zero percent chance I would name a record something that long. I try and capture a pretty concise feeling with each one. What we might do is build on a theme—like we did Phase for a shorter EP and we might do a series of those or something like that. I don’t imagine you’re going to be getting my novel or short story put into the album title any time soon.
WF: You know what, I appreciate that, because I don’t know how to confidently recommend my friends listen to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.
DA: There was a hardcore band from either Milwaukee or Illinois and their album title is the last paragraph of “The Stranger” by Camus. I like that record a lot and I don’t mean to throw shade on them, but the long winded title thing is not my vibe.
TOUR DATES:
05/19 - Chicago, IL @ The Hideout w/ Discus & Smut
05/20 - St. Louis, MO @ The Platypus w/ Home Office & Choir Vandals
05/21 - Atlanta, GA @ Eyedrum w/ Truth Club
05/22 - Asheville, NC @ Static Age w/ Gummy & Truth Club
05/23 - Triangle, NC w/ Truth Club
05/25 - Baltimore, MD @ Joe Squared w/ Got Close
05/27 - Philadelphia, PA @ Khyber Pass w/ Pet Fox & Bleary Eyed
05/28 - Brooklyn, NY @ East Williamsburg Econolodge w/ Pet Fox & Ben Special
05/29 - Portland, ME @ Sun Tiki Studios w/ Rick Rude & Pet Fox
05/30 - Boston, MA @ The Sinclair w/ Pile & Bathouse
05/31 - Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s
06/02 - Toronto, ON @ Orwell w/ Chris & Motorists
06/03 - Port Huron, MI @ The Schwonk