If you still have any doubt about the sense of earnestness behind Chastity Belt’s last album’s title, their follow-up to Live Laugh Love has your answer. All My Friends is made up of the same formula the Seattle quartet has relied upon for 15 years now—slacker rock that’s either disaffected in a distinctly ’90s alt-rock sort of way or merely daydreaming—only its focus is unwaveringly on the personal bond that’s kept the band together all these years. Friendship wasn’t even intended to be a throughline; it took the objective point of view of one of the album’s engineers to note that the majority of the album addressed this common theme.
Which is even more surprising when you consider that the 11 songs on All My Friends were recorded during several sessions across the world spanning half a decade. Yet even the sonic palette maintains a surprising consistency despite the fractured recording process, with the band noting that certain moments (and song titles) echo various earlier chapters in the band’s discography. “This record is a real amalgamation of songs from past and present written and recorded in different places,” shares guitarist Lydia Lund, “but it all feels very true to us in our process and where we’re at with our friendship and our creativity—there’s a lot of spaciousness to show up exactly as we are.”
With the album out today via Suicide Squeeze, Lund and longtime bandmates (and friends) Julia Shapiro, Hunter Truscott, and Gretchen Grimm broke down All My Friends track by track to provide a bit more context on their recording process and more. Check out their words and a stream of the album below, and purchase a copy here.
1. “Friends for This”
Hunter: As the title suggests, this song is about friendship. I love the interplay between the bass and lead guitar (played by Gretchen, with Julia on the drums) on this song. This song feels so nostalgic and sentimental to me. I love Lydia absolutely going off vocally at the end. It creates such a cool, dynamic feel to the song. I really love the line “A sewing machine and reality TV / Sleepovers at 34” and the imagery it conjures. It’s so important to enjoy the simple, beautiful things in life with friends. It’s also so good to have friends that will let you know (kindly) when you fuck up, but still have your back. It’s been beautiful to grow and change and navigate life’s ups and downs with Julia, Gretchen, and Lydia.
2. “Designs”
Julia: We recorded this song with Samur Khouja at Seahorse in LA in December 2024. A few months later he came up to Seattle and we did the vocals in Lydia’s basement. The song is about the wild ride that is life—you know, all the ups and downs. I was in a sort of flow state when I wrote the lyrics, so they came out pretty stream-of-consciousness. I love how hypnotizing the outro is. It reminds me a bit of the outro to our song “On the Floor” from Time to Go Home, which also ends with Lydia’s guitar and mine melting into each other and taking different shapes.
3. “To Decide”
Julia: I really love this one. We originally recorded it in 2021, but Lydia was still working out the lyrics then. The vocals were later recorded in her basement in 2025 at the same time we recorded the vocals for “Designs.” This record combines songs from at least four different recording sessions spanning four to five years!
Lydia: For the longest time I only had lyrics for the second chorus of this song, so those lines feel like the core of the song to me. I tend to be a real overthinker—there are so many factors to consider, and this song attempts to speak to a few.
4. “I Could Say Less”
Julia: We did the basic tracking for this one in December 2023 with Trevor Spencer at Way Out Recording Studio outside of Seattle. We’d only played the songs together for a day or two beforehand. The plan was to finish writing the songs in the studio and record some demos, but things came together really fast and we walked out with basic tracking for a few songs. At that point, I didn’t have all the lyrics figured out, just the main fingerpicking part. I love how intricate the guitars are on this song, but still somehow blend together almost seamlessly. I honestly didn’t like my part that much until playing it with the rest of the band. That tends to happen a lot—I’m inspired by my bandmates and playing music together, but it’s hard for me to get excited about a song playing acoustic guitar alone in my apartment. We finished recording overdubs with Samur in LA in 2024 and shortly after that I recorded my vocals in a snowed-in cabin in Kernville, California.
5. “Not Today”
Julia: I think Elliott Smith was the inspiration for this one. I didn’t set out to write a song in his style, but sometimes his essence just seeps into my guitar playing. I wrote it around the same time as “I Could Say Less,” so the two songs share a lot of the same themes. It’s about being torn between wanting to be seen and wanting to hide, getting stuck in a situation where you lose a bit of yourself.
6. “Be Kind”
Hunter: This song was written and recorded several years ago and finally found its home on this record. Messing around and finding the perfect bass outro was so fun, and I love the way Samur mixed the ending of this song with the instruments dropping out and Julia’s voice carrying the melody to the end. Gretchen’s robotic snare hits mesh so well with the fluidity of the other instruments.
7. “Pavement”
Lydia: The guts of this song were first written while we were on tour in Australia in 2018, staying a few days at the end of tour in Melbourne. The weather was somewhat gloomy. I was having a bit of a rough go of it. But also having some really sweet time with friends and fun nights out (I took myself out solo to see Angel Olsen two nights in a row at the Tote). I remember a morning walking around the outer suburbs of Melbourne where I was staying and seeing toys left out on driveways with no kids around. I was feeling really lonely and so far from home, but also very much at peace with where I was at then—knowing that I’d come back around to another high. That even in this moment of many beautiful things (being able to tour and travel in Australia, making new friends and playing music with best friends) there was a space for sadness (and vice versa).
I wrote the song in the backyard later that day. I picked the song back up many years later and brought it to the band. We recorded it in Hydra, Greece. This record is a real amalgamation of songs from past and present written and recorded in different places, but it all feels very true to us in our process and where we’re at with our friendship and our creativity—there’s a lot of spaciousness to show up exactly as we are.
8. “Talk About”
Gretchen: I had the line “All we do is talk about things that aren’t here anymore” for a while after a friend said it as we were walking around Capitol Hill in Seattle. I find myself in nostalgic conversations a lot lately, reminiscing on old haunts and habits. I think it’s part of getting older and also living in a city, ’cause things and neighborhoods are always changing. It’s funny how the tone of conversations can range from outrage to just, like, “Whelp, that’s just the way things go!” The lyrics in the bridge are from being back home in Michigan, driving with my dad as he was listing off places we drove by and whether they were still open or not.
9. “Trash”
Gretchen: This one’s an oldie but a goodie! We originally recorded it during a session where we accidentally played everything half-speed. It all felt right in the moment, and when we listened back later we realized we must have been in a time warp—we were actually dying laughing at how slow some of them were. When we re-recorded this one I remember we hadn’t played it in a long time, but were able to lock it in pretty quick. It’s been floating around since then, and hasn’t quite fit into an album until this one.
10. “Hold My Own”
Gretchen: We recorded this one in Greece and it felt like the perfect setting for it. I love a finger-picky acoustic guitar song; as soon as Lydia played this for us I knew it was gonna be a good one.
11. “Live Laugh Love”
Hunter: This track feels like a perfect album closer to me—slow and sort of melancholic, but really beautiful. The title is a callback to our previous record and really captures the main theme of this album: friendship. A line that always gets stuck in my head is “There’s no room for nuance now,” and I find that to be so true. In a world of AI and having the answers to every question at our fingertips, with algorithms showing us only what we want to see, we lose a sense of connection and nuance in the world around us. It’s kind of tragic.
