Sylvan Esso on No Rules Sandy

“We’re on vacation,” Amelia Meath beams as she and Nick Sanborn, her partner in Sylvan Esso, swivel their laptop to show off a lovely Cape Cod view. “Working, obviously…” adds Sanborn, somewhat underselling the situation.

Before autumn’s end, the Durham, North Carolina synth-pop duo will have three new releases out between them. They also have a record label and recording studio to tend to, and a host of festivals and outdoor gigs lined up across their various projects. As Meath says: “I think next time, we should just do one thing, and only do that. For a year.”

Yet No Rules Sandy, their fourth studio album, emerged somewhat unexpectedly from a January road trip to Los Angeles. Meath and Sanborn had a packed schedule lined up before COVID made a reappearance, so with a house in LA and time on their hands, they started writing.

Meath says: “The more songs we wrote, the more we realised that we were making an album, and it was going to be done so quickly and without half of the hand-wringing and worrying that we’d been doing. It was as if we gave ourselves permission, kind of, but also the songs were just appearing. We realised, ‘Why slow down? Why say no when we could just say yes and have more fun?’”

“It felt like we were finally reaping the rewards of all this work we’ve been doing,” Sanborn says. “I was like, ‘Oh, let’s just sit down and have fun together.’” “For me, the big lesson was just ‘chill out’,” Meath says, as the pair share a chuckle. “Calm down, just have fun. You literally have the most fun job ever, just do it and stop being all sad about it!”

That desire to work quickly and reflect themselves without second-guessing comes through on an album that constantly twists and turns, and sees Sylvan Esso draw on a wider sonic palette than ever. Opening track Moving is an abrasive slice of glitch-pop, Echo Party leans on a bouncy UK Garage beat, Alarm throws in some extremely wubby acid techno flourishes. There’s also room for fluttery jazz, danceable house riffs and some harsh industrial crunches, as well as the big melodies and pop sensibilities that have become the band’s hallmark.

“I think it’s just a confidence thing,” Sanborn says. “Maybe before I would have masked those things, worrying that they were too referential. Now it feels like: ‘No, I want those reference points’. These feel like we’re pointing at things that speak to our experience, and the idea of getting to recontextualise those sounds that we all know is really exciting to me.

“It’s cool that we could get more referential sonically while it also feels like the weirdest thing we’ve ever made. You know what I mean? That’s a weird polar opposite thing.”

Sylvan Esso. Photo: Bobby Strickland

Lyrically, No Rules Sandy is a more direct record than before. Meath’s vocals are filled with references to shaking heads, the rules of life, the desire to be seen and taken care of, crafted with an intention to be more open and truthful. “In a lot of ways," she says, "the lyrics are embarrassingly honest and more exposing than I normally let myself show other people. But I’m very proud of them.”

Yet for such a direct and immediate album, No Rules Sandy still feels remarkably grounded and situated within the duo’s trademark sound. Part of that comes from a series of interludes laced through the album with snippets of voicemails, vocal warm-ups, ambient noise and conversations between friends.

“The process was so collagey and intimate,” Sanborn tells us. “The more songs we wrote, the more we realised, ‘Oh, we're not going to hand this mix off to anyone’. This is going to be kind of raw and feel kind of taped together. We wanted that feeling because that was the emotional feeling we were getting from the songs.”

“There’s a particular moment on the record,” Meath says, referring to (Betty’s, May 4, 2022), “and that is from the night that we finished it. It was the last thing that we put in and it was right before we listened to it for the last time and sent it away.” Sanborn adds: “We literally time-stamped it.”

The other element that pulls the record together is its use of recurring Sylvan Esso collaborators like composer Gabriel Kahane and jazz musician Sam Gendel. The ability to, as Meath puts it, think about which person can make the sound they want rather than the instrument they need, was solidified on the band’s WITH tour in 2019. Sylvan Esso expanded to a ten-person band including the members of Mountain Man, Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, and Bon Iver drummer Matt McCaughan. “A big lesson there,” Sanborn says, “was that the more people we bring in, the more it feels like us.”

That big tent approach is perhaps most noticeable in two recent projects. Psychic Hotline is the band’s own record label, releasing new material and reissues from its artists and aiming to work differently from the extractive industry norm. Betty’s, the duo’s studio, is set in North Carolina woodlands and aims to be a hub for the community of artists in Meath and Sanborn’s orbit.

Meath is reflective but passionate about the need for bands in Sylvan Esso’s position to make steps towards change. “When you're in a band in general, your job becomes your life – it's a 24/7 enterprise," she says. "I started realising, particularly during the pandemic, that because we in some ways are the authors and creators of our own life in this situation, you need to create the environment that’s a place that you would be proud of within your work and in your life.

“This industry can be incredibly isolating, particularly when you're turning the artistic pursuit into capitalism and then trying to win at it. It's really easy to accidentally be like that, and I'm not interested in that anymore. It's not a way to spread joy, or to feel good, and I want to feel good as much as I can.” In the same vein, Meath describes Sylvan Esso’s expansion into the label and studio as expressions of a desire to be “truly independent”.

“By truly independent,” she says, “I mean supported by a community that we are members of and are constantly creating. That meant creating infrastructure that was able to sustain itself, and also able to foster the kind of creativity outside of striving to win. Creativity that was for exploration, as opposed to monetary gain.

“That being said, it’s all an experiment… and those are two businesses that have their own LLCs [Limited Liability Company]. We can talk about it as much as we want to, like this is us trying to reach beyond capitalism. And at the same time, we’re like, ‘Oh no, money! What do we do?’”

Sanborn adds: “It’s so hard and expensive to make things, it should just be easier. And we shouldn’t only be allowed to make the things that are going to make a lot of money. I hate that shit.”

“Yeah, and it’s trash,” Meath adds. “All of my favourite things didn’t make any money,” she says, to a loud ‘YES’ from Sanborn. “They make money now, now that a lot of people know about them.”

Sanborn continues: “There are entire genres that don't work in the current industry model, you know what I mean? That doesn't mean that work doesn't deserve to exist, it doesn’t mean there aren’t people who love it. It comes back to that thing – the more rope you give someone, the more they’re going to do with it.”

As for those other projects we mentioned at the start, Meath has just released a “stunt yodelling record” with fellow Mountain Man member Alexandra Sauser-Monnig as their new band, The A’s (“it’s all folk traditionals but the world is so whimsical and silly, and slightly menacing”). Sanborn, on the other hand is putting out “fucking heaters”, as Meath describes them, under his Made Of Oak moniker. His new collaboration with North Carolina producer GRRL has resulted in one track so far, Inertia, which he describes as “big time, aggressive bass music”.

The traditional folk and the foundation-crushing beats, the intimate moment-in-time album and the big picture planning – Sylvan Esso are covering a lot of bases, and having fun while they’re at it. For Meath, No Rules Sandy harks back to the band’s early days, when the pair first teamed up to rework a Mountain Man track. “It was just us,” she says, “being like, ‘Well, what can we do? What does it look like when we make music?”

Sanborn adds: “It was all about that feeling of ecstatic delight that comes from that situation where you’re ping-ponging an idea back and forth…”

“Instead of plotting and planning,” says Meath.

Sanborn laughs: “Yeah, even when the song is about, like, horribly sad shit…”

“Oh…” Meath says, “they’re always sad!”

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No Rules Sandy is out on 12 Aug via Loma Vista
Fruit by The A’s and Inertia by GRRL x Made of Oak are out now via Psychic Hotline