Photos provided by smush
UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
With inspiration from shoegaze legends such as My Bloody Valentine, the band smush has developed their an infectious style of their own. The duo has also recently released their debut album, if you were here, i’d be home by now. UCLA Radio got to sit down with the duo to talk about their musical and artistic style behind their debut album and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Chloe Gonzales
Chloe: Tell us about yourself!
Atley: Emily and I write music. We’re a husband and wife duo.
Emily: It’s definitely a love language between us–writing songs, doing music together. Atley has been a musician his whole life and I’ve always been really into music, but I don’t know anything about writing music. He’s definitely just like an outlet for me.
Atley: We started writing songs together when we met a few years ago and then really got into this kind of music [shoegaze] and started steering in that direction. Then we were in New York last year for a little while and got interested in some of the bands out there and took it in that direction. By that time we had enough music, we wanted to record it all and now we’re here!
Chloe: You’ve just mentioned that you liked some bands from New York and when I listen to your music it sounds similar to bands like Julie and feeble little horse. Who are your inspirations?
Atley: Well, whenever we met we had pretty different music tastes and we still have our own music that doesn’t overlap. But the kind of music that you mentioned, going back to My Bloody Valentine, kind of started the whole thing. A few years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, a friend of mine showed me My Bloody Valentine and told me about Loveless. I thought that it sounded like a sick album and that I would probably like it and so I listened to it and just did not like it at all. And then a few years later I gave it another try when I started dating Emily and she liked it and it became the first record that we really bonded over. So, even though we had really different music tastes we found common ground there. And we started to get pretty obsessed with the album and listened to it all the time in the car. That led both of us down the rabbit hole of finding some of these other bands you mentioned like feeble little horse, Hotline TNT, Weed, pretty much all of those East Coast bands. And so our relationship kind of formed around this music and that’s when it all started opening up for us.
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Chloe: I also wanted to know about the writing process for you two. Emily, you said earlier on that you write most of it?
Emily: I write most of our words. The way we collaborate usually starts by Atley writing the music.
Atley: Emily’s got really good taste. And sometimes I feel like I don’t have the right kind of– I went to music school and that can be a really damaging thing for somebody’s artistic perspective. I feel like for me I learned so much about music that you kind of stop thinking about it like an emotional thing, you know? I’ve heard people make jokes like after you go to jazz school, it’s like seven years before you can write a song properly again. And now that Emily and I are working together, Emily does a great job of hearing stuff that I write and having an ear for it, being like “That’s actually kind of a cool thing,” or “That’s kind of boring,” and she’s able to weed through that stuff. I trust her intuition on that. And it’s really helpful to write with her in that way. She’s a really great lyricist.
Chloe: That’s really nice, having the two different perspectives. It’s kind of like intellectualizing everything and it can fuck you over. At the end of the day, it’s about what you feel and how it makes you feel and everything.
Atley: Yeah it’s hard, when you’re thinking about all these numbers and stuff. It’s like, so not music.
Chloe: I also wanted to jump into your debut album a little bit. First of all, I wanted to talk about the album artwork, because that’s something I’m personally obsessed with. I wanted to know the process and intention behind it.
Emily: It’s a photo that Atley took that ended up really cool!
Atley: I was driving with a couple of friends and we were on the way to this show that my friend, Isaiah, was putting on for a band called Spiderman. And I had my little digital camera and just took the picture out of the window of Commercial Drive. The picture looked really cool and when I saw it, I was like, “Oh, that picture looks like it could be an album cover.” And we played around with it for a little bit for a while, but it didn’t really work. So we scrapped it for a long time and then started working on other things.
Emily: Then, we just started processing it and doing the most random stuff on GIMP.
Atley: We used different techniques and figured out different settings, seeing what we could get. It’s kind of Loveless inspired I would say.
Emily: It definitely is, the color scheme and everything. And our vinyls are gonna be pink as well. I care a lot about colors and making everything feel cohesive. I love the colors pink and purple and I definitely wanted it to feel girly, because I feel like I make music for the girls, personally. And we tried a couple of different layouts, like making a new layout for vinyl, a new layout for the cassette, one for digital, like moving all the components around and doing that stuff has been actually really fun.
Atley: Yeah, I really enjoy that. And I’m really stoked on how the back of the vinyl turned out.
Emily: Yes! That;s one of my favorite things. Atley did it all on his own. And it’s probably one of my favorite components of the album visually.
Atley: It features some art and a photo taken by our friend Carrie of us and our drummer Jay and then our logo that a friend of mine, Liam, made. It’s really cool.
Emily: It’s definitely been a lot of collaborating with our friends, which has really been fun, like all these little components from people. I visually care a lot about everything. I’m a tattoo artist and so I definitely think a lot about it and care a lot about the design things, and our friend Liam went to school for graphic design. He has really good insight for us sometimes, I love his opinion.
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Chloe: I was curious on why you chose your songs “if we didn’t cry” and “lizzy mcguire” to be your singles.
Emily: “if we didn’t cry,” I think the structure is the most normal of all of our songs. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus–I think that might be the only song that is truly like that. And it’s the most poppy in structure. That’s a song that came together when we were writing it and was just like, “Oh my God.” It was a really special song to us too because Atley had started writing that before we met and then scrapped the whole thing. We redid it together when we started writing music in New York. And “lizzy mcguire” was my personal favorite song of the album. It was my favorite song for a really long time.
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[after talking about Bandcamp and why their debut album is not on Spotify]
Emily: Yeah, building more of a community, I feel like a lot of people just message us and want to chat and that’s really fun too.
Atley: Yeah, we take the time to message people back, and when they buy the stuff on Bandcamp, we always take time to sit down and write somebody a message saying thank you. I think what we don’t want to do is just be like this song in somebody’s Spotify playlist. Obviously, that’ll happen eventually but we want people to get to know us and we want to know them.
We check in on every follower just to see who are the people who are into us and trying to learn about [them] and hear them out. So, that’s kind of been our mindset just to create a community, like Emily said, and our whole thing from the get go is just the intention behind the music. I think a lot of bands and people who get into rock music or indie rock–some bands will get into it with this mindset of wanting to go out there and be a band on stage and be cool in front of people. That’s kind of the opposite of what we’re trying to do. I would say in a lot of ways we’re not in it to be popular or any of that superficial stuff-
Emily: -which is hard because I feel like it’s a little necessary to like to make it in music in some ways.
Atley: Emily writes lyrics from the heart and what she writes about is really personal and meaningful. I think it’s stuff that a lot of people can relate to. And so we’re trying to just create a culture and a community around that stuff and not just be that catchy thing that somebody gets stuck in their head, which is valuable too, just in a different way.
Emily: I care a lot about singing to women as well. My life is being a girl and a girly girl and moving through the world and having that experience. I think it’s also on my mind, since I’m a tattoo artist, and that’s such a male-dominated industry, but it’s slowly becoming so girly. I think that’s been really beautiful to be a part of, especially in Vancouver; we have such a good scene of tattooers, specifically like girls who are tattooing. My client base is all women, not on purpose, but not surprised by it at all. I just care a lot about singing to girls and about girl stuff, and I feel like that’s also where a lot of my inner feelings come from.
Check out smush’s socials and music below!
