Feel It All Around, out now on Other People’s Records, is fresh at the same time it’s familiar. Putting a finger on the sound takes the ears back to an earlier era of alt rock. Soul Blind get that, but they’re focused on their own music more than others. They got help focusing their vision from Will Yip at studio 4, but before Yip, this album was years and a ton of preparation in creation. Cen, the band’s singer and bassist, explains what went into making the album:
“We had we had a lot of these songs for three or four years before going into the studio. We all take a stab at writing as well. All four of us have different skeletons of songs or, like, demos of songs that we bring to each other and kind of like tweak and refine. We all play a part in instrumentally writing songs. It took a while to refine the actual songs that we wanted to cuz this is just our only opportunity to finally get to record a proper full-length the way that we wanted. We had, like, a bunch of demos, like, 20 songs or whatever. Then we went into the studio and kind of narrowed it down to 11. I write all the vocals, but other than that, we’re all very collaborative, and we took our time, especially for these songs to really get to their best state.”
If you need a soundtrack to pave Hades and build a space port for future airships, this is the album. Instead of shoegazing, the sound is metaphorically stargazing, lifting terra, scraping rock, and finding fire underneath, based loosely on molten metal, hitting cooling waves. The guitar bulldozes; the drums push forward, and Cen croons, all held down with his bass.
“I’m definitely pro ‘no genre,’ says Cen. “We got songs that sound this way, and long as I sound that way, to define it kind of puts, like, a limit on what you can do. A lot of people want to call (it) shoegaze. I personally don’t hear it. We got like one song that kind of floats in that range, but overall, I wouldn’t say so. Grunge, I can see grunge, but there’s some songs that aren’t really grunge. I’ll say, if you had to say anything, it’s just rock or alternative rock. I think that’s kind of broad, but at the same time, I like to tell people we just sound like Soul Blind.”
Back to earth, maybe they’re not building Martian hubs to Feel It All Around, but it has that feeling. The reality is, Cen is doing normal stuff.
“I’m in my apartment in Brooklyn. It’s cold, and it makes me not wanna leave my apartment cuz it’s really annoying outside,” laughs Cen. “It’s like holidays and all that, just been kicking it, playing some Call of Duty. Getting Popeye’s, going to shows.”
Traveling away from New York City, Soul Blind call the Hudson Valley home; traveling back there is going back to the beginning for the band. Cen says, “Everyone in the band grew up around the central city of Poughkeepsie, which is in Hudson Valley. And that’s our hub for different shows throughout my teens and going into my 20s.”
They got started, like a lot of musicians, on these songs during the quarantine. Cen takes us back to Poughkeepsie, “We were all still living around the same place, and we had the storage unit we were practicing in; we were still getting up and doing our thing. We recorded one song early on to put on the CD compilation, and we did that with a live stream video of just us playing in a studio. We were still doing stuff, just like not doing shows obviously, and didn’t wanna put out music necessarily until we got back to playing shows.”
Like other artists during this time, the space apart from the others, and their time together, gave Soul Blind room to grow their songwriting. Cen breaks down the shut down, “We had a little bit more time; it was a little easier to get together. We didn’t really care, I guess about the factors that were at play and just kind of kept it rocking. We knew that once it was back to normal, we had to have this body of work ready to go so we could hit the ground running and not have to play catch up.”
They worked with Will Yip to bring this music out of storage and this record to life after years of writing and playing music in the Hudson Valley.
“We all got into this alternative type scene in, like, the 2010s and late 2000s, and he was a figurehead, putting out bands that we all love and still love.”
Yip helped guide their process and helped them define the sound of Feel It All Around.
“Initially, before we even tracked anything, we were all just in the live room, jamming through the songs and just trying to, like, hash out different ideas. I thought at first there was gonna be a lot of nitpicking and a lot of disagreements between people in my band trying to narrow down what songs you wanna do, but he was just very inviting and was very, just fun to work. (He) makes everything enjoyable and fun and easy to navigate. We could just have a good time throughout the whole process and not be stressed—I don’t know—(not) be in our heads too much about certain things. He’ll just make your confidence be on 100.”
Cen concludes by saying, “It’s really cool to be able to put our name up next to all these awesome bands that we grew up listening to. He just made the record sound awesome sonically, and it was the longest we’ve ever spent on a record. We never dove in like that before.”
The dive was worth the wait. From Hudson Valley to Studio 4 and out to the sonic universe, Feel It All Around is a solid rock record that gives a listener many feels, like Soul Blind claim, and conjures many images from its musical landscape.
Photo courtesy of Soul Blind
