Bre Morell and Shaun Durkan make music together as crushed, and quickly conjured a devoted following on the heels of their 2023 EP extra life. The project earned them a sweet record deal with Ghostly International, who have reissued the EP today with a pair of remixes from DJ Python and Real Lies. While the music itself is fascinating, the story of how Morell and Durkan met and began collaborating is even more interesting.
Going way back to the early 2010s when Morell (who also fronts the ethereal-wave outfit Temple of Angels) DJ’d a graveyard shift for a college radio show. She would play music from Durkan’s former band Weekend, a shoegaze favorite signed to Slumberland Records that real heads among us still remember. Years later, Durkan, who began a successful career as a producer following his run in Weekend, hosted a community radio station program in San Francisco that also aired late at night. After hearing a Temple of Angels song, he added it to a playlist. Morell saw the shoutout and said thanks. Then they began making music together! Serendipity is alive and well.
To celebrate the re-release of their debut project, we invited the dream-pop duo to take us behind the scenes of extra life’s original track list. Check that out, along with the new remixes, below.
1. “waterlily”
This is the first song we wrote and finished for the project. It’s a daydream about desperation for a better life, and giving things one more chance. The intro/outro is inspired by Take Care–era Drake, and features a recording of Shaun’s grandmother. The verse guitars were inspired by U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” No guitar amps or hardware synths were used on any of these songs. Every synth you hear is either a stock Pro Tools softsynth or a sample. Every guitar you hear is either recorded directly or a sample. Nick Bassett mixed the EP and added the swelling guitar chords on top of the chorus.
2. “coil”
“coil” focuses on having second thoughts about leaving an old life behind, though you know you need to. Every crushed song begins on a cheap acoustic guitar Shaun’s had since eighth grade. It’s important that the songs can be played with just one instrument and a voice, and still stand up on their own—flashy production can’t make up for a bad song, no matter how many tricks you pack into it. The outro is a sample from a cassette tape Bre made years ago of her playing the piano quite badly.
3. “milksugar”
Just another sappy little love song. This features a clip of Bre’s dog sniffing the microphone at the very beginning. “RIP Baxter Bear, my best friend forever.” The sound of a scrambled FM radio signal runs throughout its entirety, and it ends with Shaun walking through “the most beautiful parking garage in The Hague.”
4. “bedside”
This song opens with the sound of the spirit calling bell. Shaun recycles sounds from his old recordings a lot, in order to add something unexpected that he might not typically write now. Some of the samples pulled date back as far as 15 years—it’s like crate-digging his own personal recording archives. Don’t ever delete anything. We had written a couple of demos before this one that didn’t make the cut, but this is the first song that really stuck and paved the way for the rest of the EP. It’s a song about making peace with letting go.
5. “respawn”
Knd of in response to “waterlily,” this one’s about making it to the other side and questioning if it’s even real or not—and if it is real, if you are worthy. We pulled lots of small video game samples for this one, nighttime cricket ambience and ghost howls are scattered throughout it. We had a version of this song that had a minimal house type bridge instead, but once we tried the big guitar moment we knew that had to make the cut. We told Nick to go full Third Eye Blind with the mix for that moment.
6. “lorica”
A “lorica” is a prayer of protection, and can also refer to an armored breastplate. The guitar in this song is a reversed version of the same guitar part that ends “milksugar.” We like to think of this as a mission statement of some kind, our own prayer of protection.
