Los Angeles six-piece The Sophs just released their phenomenal debut full-length, Goldstar, a thrilling, anachronistic piece of art that defies both time and genre. Its unhinged, folk-tinged rock ’n’ roll hedonism exists in both the past and the present, and is both self-aware and sincere. A wide-ranging existential crisis put to tape, it sees the band—frontman Ethan Ramon, keyboard player Sam Yuh, electric guitarist Austin Parker Jones, acoustic guitarist Seth Smades, drummer Devin Russ, and bassist Cole Bobbitt—immerse themselves wholeheartedly in the world their music creates in a way that’s very rare.
Incredibly, the band got signed to the prestigious and trailblazing record label Rough Trade after Ramon emailed the band’s demos to label head Geoff Travis. They’re surely not the first band to do so, but they may well be one of the first to do so successfully. But then, Travis surely heard the ineffably special quality that weaves its way through the bones of the record’s 10 songs. Each one sounds like something you already recognize, yet which also feels completely new. The result is a cohesive album that sounds like a favorite record of your youth that you never listened to until now.
We caught up with Ramon to get the lowdown on Goldstar, the band’s signing, and a particularly provocative lyric in one of the record’s songs.
The backstory of The Sophs getting signed to Rough Trade is both very simple and brazen—you randomly emailed Geoff a demo and inked a deal soon after, right?
Yeah! At the time, I was working for a PA company that allowed me to get this subscription for this email finder app where you basically cut through the fat and get right to the CEO. We were amassing this discography that I thought was just too good to ignore, and I used that app to contact 20 to 30 indie label heads from a band email I’d created that day. I heard back from Geoff the next morning, and he said, “This is amazing, can I call you right now?” I had just woken up, and I was like, “Holy shit!” He called me and he said that by pure kismet, Jeanette [Lee, Rough Trade’s co-owner] was going to be in town maybe 10 days after and she wanted to see a show. The six of us had only really practiced live a couple of times, so we locked ourselves in a rehearsal studio, and our bassist pulled a favor with a bouncer at a small bar in Pasadena and let us go on before a lineup, and Jeanette came and saw us. She said she loved it. I was out in London a few weeks afterward, and then we signed before the end of last year.
How long had you been a band at that point?
We’d been creating Sophs music, but under different names in different iterations. Austin and I started in 2020 making Elliott Smith–style folk music with just vocals and guitar. And then, I believe in 2022, we expanded and added Sam, and that’s when we got the name The Sophs—and then a few months after that, Seth, a few months after that, Cole, a few months after that, Devin. So I’d say The Sophs officially began creating music in 2022, but we were very intent on not releasing any music to deaf ears. We wanted to get some sort of representation because we knew the music was good enough to. It seemed like a kind of lofty notion at the time because we didn’t have any music out and no Instagram, but we made it happen.
Where did these songs come from, thematically? Are they a reflection of your own personal life, or is it more fiction?
I think the album is really about playing almost a caricature of yourself in that you’re wearing so many hats and you’re exploring so many genres, almost in a tongue-in-cheek way—I don’t mean the following in a regressive way at all, but almost as a parody of how seriously and how intently people try to play off their music, which amounts to nothing more than an aesthetic grab at something that was cool 20 years ago. This is a bit of a nod to that, and it’s like, “Well, if we’re all going to steal something and pretend that it’s our own, I might as well lay my cards out on the table, because nobody’s going to buy it anyway.” So it’s a bit of a cheeky appropriation of a multitude of genres.
There’s a [thematic] throughline which is basically writing from the perspective of the worst version of yourself. I mean, Paul Schrader wrote [Taxi Driver main character] Travis Bickle because he was afraid of becoming him, and that’s kind of the thought process that I try to inhabit throughout this album. It shows me singing from the perspective of somebody who wants to enact harm on small animals. It shows me writing from the perspective of somebody drunk at 4 a.m. outside a lover or fling’s house. It shows me writing from the perspective of somebody cursing the heavens that they aren’t validated in more tangible ways for the quote-unquote endless good that they’ve done their community and the world. Stuff like that.
And these are all not only people that I observe every day walking down the street in a city such as Los Angeles, but they’re also the type of people I see in myself. Usually, those kinds of intrusive thoughts and intrusive personalities are something that are a source of shame, but I believe that you can only really atone for them if you come to terms with them. And I believe that’s what the album is: it’s making peace with the worst versions of yourself in a frantic, static, multi-genre black hole collapsing.
Was there any danger in opening yourself up to those sides of you when you were writing this record?
I think when I write it’s such word-vomit. And we made the album—at least the majority of the tracks—in just a couple months. So, speaking honestly, I feel like there was actually more danger in letting the thoughts and the ideas sit, rather than putting them on paper. It really felt like a catharsis.
There’s a line in “They Told Me to Jump, I Said How High” where you proclaim, “We’ve really got to kill Netanyahu,” but you kind of just slip it in very subtly…
The song is pretty provocative in the way that a little brother trying to get your attention is—and intentionally so. But it has this hook that comes around where I say “Israela” right before the song drops into each respective solo section. And I thought it was important, even with the tongue-in-cheek nature of the song, that if you’re going to include a line like “Israela” in it, the listener is owed at least the tiniest bit of clarity. I’m not just going to talk about Israel as something inflammatory—I should at least clarify what side of the fence I’m on, and I thought, “What better way to do it than getting a little drunk while I do it?” So I was drinking while I was writing the song, I was drinking while I was recording it. I wrote the song on the spot—the other guys in the band hadn’t even heard it until I recorded it. But I was just thinking that if the listener has made it this far, they deserve a little clarity.
