It’s a blazing hot day in Los Angeles. Ducking into the HMS Bounty bar and restaurant at street level of the historic Gaylord Apartments near DTLA feels like entering a dark underworld. Here, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn sit wilting in a circular booth. Meath’s fair skin has a decided red tint from the sun, a striking contrast to her green-dyed hair. When she goes to the bar, she gets stopped twice—not by fans, but by random guys. Sanborn says that’s par for the course. The two wear matching, understated gold rings. They’ve been married for a decade now, having wed a few years after forming Sylvan Esso in 2013.
They’ve been moving at warp speed since their first two well-received singles, “Hey Mami” and “Coffee.” They released their self-titled debut album and performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza in 2014, garnering a GRAMMY nomination a couple of years later for their second album, What Now, and another for their third, Free Love. Albums and tours followed each other quickly. Their newly released fifth album Ow ∞ is the only one where, according to the duo, “the clock wasn’t ticking,” and its gestation was a welcome reprieve. “We needed a break—really bad,” says Meath. “We accidentally did three tours in three years or something.”
“More than that,” says Sanborn. “We were out twice a year. It felt like we were out too much. We thought, ‘We need a break, why don’t we give the audience a moment of not having us around, and see how that feels?’ We really took our time, and it was fucking awesome. I want to do it that way every time now: not putting pressure on the creative act. We’re already both workaholics.”
“I don’t think I am,” says Meath, to which Sanborn responds: “Look at our Google Calendar.”
Many things have changed in the last four years, not least of which is an increasingly unstable music industry that leaves many artists abandoned by the wayside. “It feels like the music industry is hanging on by an invisible thread that’s kept together by spit,” says Meath. “What’s it like to put out a record right now? Why are we doing it? No one’s making any money. Everybody just does it because they love it. The amount of weird stuff we’ve been doing for this record—I cooked food in a 20-year-old’s apartment, and we’re going to sing karaoke on a tricycle—is just to make more people aware of our name. I don’t know if they’ll even listen to the record.”
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Despite everything Sylvan Esso are doing to cultivate ears to listen to their album, Ow ∞ is ultimately about bringing a sense of familiarity to the present moment. The very fact that they’re working so hard to get their music heard proves the need for it. Real music still taps into humanity and is a necessary part of the human experience. “[The title] sums up so much of the music,” says Meath. “It’s a little silly. It’s edging on nihilism, but trying to not. One of the things I’ve always loved about our band is that it’s a really silly band. Even when we’ve gone into the hard, spiky satirical world, there’s a lot of giggling that we’ve done.” Adds Sanborn, “We try and hold the pain and the silliness at the same time.”
Last year, they removed their music (other than songs they’d done with other artists) from Spotify in protest of the platform’s former CEO Daniel Ek’s investments. It’s a bold move, especially since the DSP commands a significant share of the music streaming market, and the duo says they earned substantial money from the platform through hundreds of millions of streams. While their convictions about the reasons for their decision remain firm, as the release date for Ow ∞ approaches, they’re wavering over whether to stick with that decision. They’ve discovered that Spotify is where they get the most exposure, even if it’s just a few remixes and a cover of Phish’s “Farmhouse” at the moment. “We’ve accidentally highlighted this really strange part of our catalog,” says Meath. “And it’s ruining my plane game. When I’m on the plane, people weasel out what we do and it’s very impressive to be like, ’Yeah, we’re on Spotify.’ Now I’m like, ‘We’re not on Spotify.’”
“We really took our time, and it was fucking awesome. I want to do it that way every time now: not putting pressure on the creative act. We’re already both workaholics.” — Nick Sanborn
It’s possible to purchase music from iTunes and upload the audio files to your device and listen to them through Spotify. Meath has even toyed with making a video demonstrating how to do that, but she says, “I can’t fucking do that. I don’t want to be the person that’s like, ‘OK guys, here’s a tutorial about how you can circumnavigate a political decision I made and still listen to my fucking art.’ I’m so upset. It’s not my job. And I don’t want to spend more time talking about Spotify. People don’t care.”
“I would rephrase that,” says Sanborn. “I think we’ve maybe reached all the people that care. That’s been the lesson, that there’s a huge chunk of the population that just doesn’t give a shit. I don’t even blame them. I get it. I’ve always known there’s a subset of the population that are serious music fans, like the three of us. We go to shows. We’re listening to what’s happening. We’re hearing things as they come out. We’re talking about these things with our friends. We buy records. That might be 4 percent of people. There’s 96 percent of people who—totally understandably—music is not in the top five focal points of their life. That is so reasonable. For them, however it shows up, it’s great.”
“It feels like the music industry is hanging on by an invisible thread that’s kept together by spit... No one’s making any money. Everybody just does it because they love it.” — Amelia Meath
“The Spotify thing was an exercise in doing something that felt morally right,” says Meath. “And I still feel like it’s morally right, but it’s just hurting us, and we really, really want people to hear this record.”
For now, they’re not sure if they will put their music back on Spotify, but the decision is taking up a lot of their time and they’re a little fed up with talking about it. If nothing else, the radical move has made them feel like they took a stand for what they believe in. “There’s a real feeling of impotence around action,” says Sanborn. “The inevitability of climate change or the inevitability that the fascists will win. There’s this infectious feeling of nihilism that I can’t bring myself to participate in. This exercise, as complicated as it’s been and as frustrating as it’s been, it’s also been very therapeutic to remember that you can do shit. You can make simple choices to get out of this feeling of impotence. They want you to think that you can’t, but you really can.”
“You can, it just fucks you,” interjects Meath.
“This exercise was never about other artists getting off Spotify,” Sanborn continues. “That’s an incredibly difficult and expensive thing to do. People can’t even logistically do it, because they don’t own their fucking masters. But it is really easy for the average person to do. Once or twice a week I run into somebody on the street who wants to take a picture, and they’re like, ‘It’s so cool that you did that. I got off of [Spotify], too.’ That’s worth it.”
Sylvan Esso are taking control of other aspects of their professional life, as well. Ow ∞ marks their first wholly self-released album on their Psychic Hotline label. Betty’s, their studio in their current hometown of Durham, went through final renovations in 2020 and is an enticing place to work. Having this studio space allowed the songs on Ow ∞ to percolate, but swerved the album away from becoming overproduced. This isn’t something with which they’re concerned. “I feel like if we’re overcooking something, it’s because it’s just not very good,” says Sanborn. “So much of our music is about the process of making it, about following what seems the most natural for the moment in the song. Anytime we’re belaboring something, we’re not following the sauce. It’s a sign to either scrap it and start over, or get rid of all the stuff you did and try again. The time [between albums] allowed a bunch of songs that otherwise we might not have heard in the right way on the right day.”
Meath’s focus is lyrics and melody, while Sanborn works on the music. She says he’s always tinkering while she collects experiences and talks to people to inform her writing. She’s been known to sing outdoors until she lands on something she likes, at which point she takes it in to Sanborn and sings it at him—which, if he doesn’t like it, can feel embarrassing for her. About a third of the songs on Ow ∞ came together in this fashion, while with the remaining songs the words and music came together concurrently. “There’s a lot more jamming this time,” says Sanborn. “A lot of improvising, a lot of hanging out and playing with friends, then finding a song in that. A lot of iterative jams with friends for two days. Take 20 seconds of that, start a whole other thing, redo the whole thing. A lot of wheat-paste layers.”
There are many names in the album credits, songwriters, producers, and multi-instrumentalists including Daniel Aged, BJ Burton, Buddy Ross, Wilco’s Glenn Kotche, Hippo Campus’ Jake Luppen, Megafauna’s Joe Westerlund, and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner. Besides six drummers, there are lots of live instruments; in addition to guitar, bass, and piano, there’s vibraphone, woodwinds, Innato (a three-chambered harmonic flute), organ, and their signature electronics. “We were looking for a way to get out of our own way,” Sanborn says. “Fellowship is like a drug for me right now. It feels like the true antidote to fascism is knowing people and being known by them. It was the natural thing to want to have a bunch of friends around and hang out with the people we love more. Because we were working the whole time, we naturally ended up with a bunch of our friends in the picture.”
“We’ve been doing the same formula for a little while,” adds Meath. “We wanted more sounds.”
More sounds on Ow ∞ means a bigger live show for Sylvan Esso, which they’ve been previewing with underplays leading up to their world tour that kicked off at the beginning of September. They held a week-long residency in Los Angeles at Sid the Cat this past June as a way to play with their band for a live audience in a lower-stakes environment. Since then, they’ve played at least one gig a month to keep the band lubricated until the tour starts. They performed at The Broad Museum for Yoko Only last month, joining an all-star night of musicians covering Yoko Ono’s music that included Sleater-Kinney, Rufus Wainwright, Yo La Tengo, and Tune-Yards. While in town they stopped by El Cid for a DJ set, which they say is “a great way to have a party. It’s easy for people to come to, and we don’t have to bring a whole production.”
In October, they’ll be hosting their Good Moon event in Durham. In its third year (minus a year off in 2025), the festival will be taking over four venues in the city’s downtown and the Durham Performing Arts Center. It also includes a free daytime concert at the Amphitheater at American Tobacco Campus. Besides Sylvan Esso’s headlining set, the event’s special guests include Meshell Ndegeocello, aja monet, Tyler Childers, Rodrigo Amarante, and Jacques Greene. “I’m hyped,” says Sanborn. “Everyone who said yes, the list of artists is just insane. In what world would I ever imagine Meshell Ndegeocello would play? She’s so cool. I’m so excited.”
“One of the things I’ve always loved about our band is that it’s a really silly band. Even when we’ve gone into the hard, spiky satirical world, there’s a lot of giggling that we’ve done.” — Nick Sanborn
It feels like Sylvan Esso are catching up with themselves and seeing themselves the way others have seen them since “Coffee.” “It’s kind of tough to think back to that time,” Sanborn says of their early days and fast trajectory. “It feels so long ago. It definitely grew faster than I had the ability to keep up with it. I would do it very differently now.”
“You would?” Meath seems surprised.
“That first year, there’s things I would change,” he continues. “But it’s kind of impossible to remember myself back then in a clear way without trying to color it. Imposter syndrome was a pretty regular feeling. That era specifically, I had it more than any other time. But I don’t feel that anymore. I don’t think I felt it for a while. I feel confident that our point of view is unique, and that we’re better than we’ve ever been at the thing we do.” FL
