Between solid guitars and chaotic arrangements, Pretty Baby’s new album Layaway Plot strips away the intellect to look grief directly in the eye. Read our discussion below!
Describe your sound in 3 words
Dynamic & Desperate & Hopeful
Tell us a few things about your new album Layaway Plot. What is the main idea behind it and how it differs from your EP untitled back in 2022?
it probably would have been a lot more fun to write if it were more of a confluence of a lot of ideas, but truthfully the whole idea & impetus behind the record was to examine death and grief up close, without intellectualizing it too much. pretty much, if it felt like we were hitting a nerve in ourselves when we were writing, that was the strand to pull.
The album is characterised by a calm before the storm vibe with sudden shifts from quiet tension to explosive post hardcore release. Is there a specific track on the record that you feel best captures the ‘Pretty Baby’ sound?
thanks! i think 8:25pm Greenwich Fucking Mean is probably our collective favorite one on the record. it was one that did not come together easily & took a lot of rigging to put together to give it the right sort of push & pull that i think we all admire in music, & i think contains a little bit of everything the record & us as a band have on offer.
You occupy a space between post-punk’s rigidity and post-rock’s expansiveness. When writing, do you consciously try to balance those elements, or is that just the natural byproduct of the band’s chemistry?
we tend pretty naturally toward those extremes. we like to let moments breathe as much as we like to get weird & angular for extended periods. but mostly i think we’re just influenced by bands & artists that ride that line between anxiety & relief.
Artists and people that have influenced you?
so so so many but i’ll try to will keep it short:
at the drive-in. unwound. shellac. pretty much all of gravity records discog. william gibson. godspeed you! black emperor. orchid. fucked up. sonic youth. moss icon & universal order of armageddon (really just every tonie joy band). drive like jehu. william blake. swans. cursive. protomartyr. blood brothers. rites of spring. lungfish. jesus lizard. mogwai. bill orcutt. pg.99, city of caterpillar, et al. nation of ulysses. fugazi. cormac mccarthy. envy. blood brothers. …and you will know us by the trail of dead. bloc party. sunny day real estate. saetia. pretty girls make graves. the fall. ursula k le guin.
What is the story behind your name?
i initially noticed the phrase as one of the characters in cursive’s album ‘domestica’ & that always stuck with me. but over the years i took note of it in so many songs that i already loved, particularly love songs, using ‘pretty baby’ as a term of endearment & i just thought it would be really cool to be the titular ‘pretty baby’ that all these songs sing about & pine after.
Thank you!
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