Naomi McPherson

Yeah, that's kind of our specialty.

I think there's also like a political element as well.

Like, I think there is a reason the music of the Reagan Cold War era had this kind of shiny, metallic, futuristic, bright, but also like something's off feeling to it.

And, you know, the anxiety about the future and, like, I think we all feel that now, too.

And so it makes sense that there's, like, a natural sort of, at least for us, like, there's a clear connection between our current reality as we experience it.

in this sort of conservative backlash with a lot of future anxiety and anxiety about the climate as sort of expressed in It Gets So Hot.

And it makes sense on a sort of academic level to like go back to that place because it's still rich to pull from.

And yeah, there's so many parallels.

There were a lot of songs that we had a few different sessions where we would listen through everything.

And also this had to do with the fact that

I had put out a solo record in between our third album and this album and I was like going out on stints for tour and then like would come back and we had to like certain amount of time and past and I had done like a certain amount of demos and they had also worked on stuff when I was gone so it was kind of like we need to like keep doing these like states of the union and um

yeah it started with like we had like a list b list c list um and i think at a certain point like songs did get put on the chopping block because they were not cohesive enough with the rest of the album like it would like count as a strike against them i think we like we're like this is important enough to us to make something that is like sonically consistent

And then, you know, like when it gets to the farther end of the process, then we had like a piece of paper on the wall that we like rolled out.

And it had like the songs not in track, not an album like order, but it took us a long time to get there.

And there were definitely like several conversations about that.

I think I felt like I had some moments of being like, this is really, really, really hard to meet the standards of this record.

And we had some good conversations about what I needed as the main songwriter of the band.

I needed a lot of positive reinforcement at different points to be like, don't give up.

You're doing a good job.

And we're going to get there.