It wasn’t until that 11th hour when we lost perspective and made strange decisions. It’s always been funny to us, and it seems like one of those things that’s only funny to us. We make jokes that we have these meetings as the board of directors because we’re the band that we are, but at the same time we’re getting on calls to discuss insurance policies. What band wants to write about themselves being a corporation? It’s so stupid. SB: There are lots of things that are meant for closed doors: jokes for the band, drama, dirty laundry. In other words, our natural impulse to be completely stupid materialized in the final week. We cleared our minds of what we were working hard on so that this other idea could appear.
That’s what happened with the last few songs. ZM: In therapy, sometimes you work through a problem and in its place this new issue crystalizes. You can’t do that.” But by the end of it, having been locked inside this mansion for a month and a half, we were all like, “Yes, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. If we sat down on the first day with “Four Chords” and said, “Yes, we’re going to play this song on the same piano that ‘Fake Empire’ was recorded on,” we immediately would’ve said, “No, that’s a disgrace. It’s a snapshot of us throwing caution to the wind and saying yes to creative ideas that made us laugh: What if instead of a guitar solo, there’s a Mars Volta-style saxophone freakout? Going out of the bridge, what if we do an acoustic kumbaya campfire guitar moment? It’s a bunch of ideas that shouldn’t work together when abstracted like this. Steve Sladkowski: Zack and Nestor brought that in during the time crunch. How did you get the puzzle pieces to fit together on that one?
Is Filing for Bankruptcy,” which is full of diverging guitar lines and blown-out solos. When the band invites you to sing along, it feels less like being drafted into an emotional war and more like a Nerf gun fight with your friends: If you’re going to take some damage, you may as well have a blast.Ĭonversely, the album ends with “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Perhaps that’s why their records are an instant mood-booster. PUP sound happiest when they’re taking shots at their own mental illness through punchlines, gang vocals, and chipper riffs. The new songs are boisterous, catchy, and meta while also earnestly wading through the nuances of depression in a manner often reserved for “confessional” indie rock.
“I have negative self-talk to a degree that’s not normal,” says Mykula, “and there were huge advantages to growing together in the house as we made the record.” As Sladkowski puts it, “Even though it was an intense pressure cooker, it was the culmination of something, whether we recognized it or not: We are a support system for each other.” But more important was their renewed bond. The 18-hour days shifted things into perspective: There was a readiness to experiment with synths, center the piano, and lean further into joke songs than ever before. Over five weeks, Babcock, guitarist Steve Sladkowski, bassist Nestor Chumak, and drummer Zack Mykula locked themselves in a bat-infested mansion-turned-studio in Connecticut to create the album with producer Peter Katis, best known for his work with the National. That feeling of normalcy-or rather, the absence of constant anxiety and despair-was initially spurred by the recording of THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND last year.