Spirit Crush is a guitar driven alt-pop 4-piece from New York City. On Violet, their newest release with LA label Danger Collective Records, the band confronts the romantic and social missteps of their early twenties. Over the course of the album’s 11 tracks, Spirit Crush delivers a dense wall of melodic pop rooted in shoegaze and inspired by 2nd wave Emo, Top 40, and Coldwave. Their lyrics largely explore the tension between honesty and facade, between being liked and being truly understood. Spirit Crush’s music weaves a thick but delicate web of floating guitars punctuated by punishing walls of fuzz, snarling buzzsaw synths, and driving dance rhythms. Their chorus-centric, classic pop song structures and heartache-driven melodies evoke a fierce wistfulness that is both familiar and difficult to categorize.
The band currently consists of guitarist and vocalist Dylan White (30), guitarist Erik Gundersen (31), bass player and vocalist Olivia Hu (28) and drummer Max Reide (24). The band originally formed in 2015 under the name MELT, and quickly became active in Brooklyn’s DIY music scene, opening for artists such as DIIV, Pill, Cassie Ramone, Mac DeMarco and Cold Beat.
“We originally recorded Violet with faster tempos and more of a live feel,” remembers Gundersen, “but when our old drummer quit, we had to play our live show with slower, simpler backing tracks. Our sound suddenly took on a darker feel and we realized that we could deliver the chord progressions we grew up on, but with more bleak and industrial textures. We fell in love with that sound and felt that we had to re-do the album in that style.” Over the following year, the band re-recorded and remixed Violet at White’s Ridgewood, Queens home. Working from home enabled the band to tweak and balance the album to reflect their lofty creative aspirations of fusing a wide array of influences into something fresh.
Violet’ s lyrics reflect on situations both real and embellished—often inspired by regrettable and puzzling moments from their collective past.
“Most of these lyrics are from the perspective of a hyperbolized version of ourselves,” says White. “I turned 30 and wanted to exorcise certain demons that still make me cringe and keep me up at night.” The album’s opener, “Automatic,” explores romantic self-sabotage with lyrics like, “the pedals in your hair / and the feeling in the air meant something / there you were, there I was, then we weren’t / shut it down / tuned you out / it was automatic.” On the rollicking indie-pop jam “Whatever You Need,” White sings from the perspective of a centerless, love-drunk, shapeshifting side-piece. He sings “I’m your grave / you dust me off at night just to drain your prey and float away / you burned my sage / never blew it out, I’m asleep under your throne / wake me up and tell me whatever you need... I’ll be anything you need.”
With Violet, Spirit Crush made an effort to refine and expanded the production techniques, lyrical themes and sonic palette explored on their debut Riffer, while giving nods to their musical heroes like American Football, OMD, and Slowdive. “Everyone in this band has made a lot of albums under a lot of different names. But Violet marks the first time we’ve slowed the tempo to really savor certain musical moments. I think that comes with age and with the kind of music we’ve been into as we grow out of our early and mid-twenties. We’re a bit less eager now,” says White. This new sense of patience and reflection is delivered with the hard-earned confidence of a group whose members have spent the past several years honing their craft in the New York DIY scene.
