There is a sense that Washington’s Chastity Belt are coming of age. Prankish at heart, their loose indie rock of albums past seems to be making way for reflective thinking.
On the cusp of their third studio album, I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone, the four-piece appear to be channelling life experiences in a more unfiltered way than before. Lead singer and guitarist Julia Shapiro sees stark improvement in their new record.
“We’re all much better musicians now,” says Shapiro. “There are more possibilities and more we can do, which makes songwriting way more fun because there’s less restriction.
“We’re able to play more complicated parts now,” she adds. “I think I’ve figured out what I want to sing about more too. It comes with more experience, growing up – we’ve gotten a lot closer from the amount of time we’ve spent together.”
Known for their wistful, guitar-driven dream pop and sun-flecked post-punk, the college-formed Chastity Belt continue to be a force for fun, friends and feminism: a highly refreshing – and endearing – challenge to pop’s incessant gender stereotyping. The band holds tightly to these principles with ‘Different Now’ and ‘Caught In A Lie’, the first two singles from the new album. But it’s on ‘Different Now’ especially where things feel, well, different.
“We wanted it to be the first single and the first track on the album because it felt like a bold statement,” Shapiro says. “It’s a theme for the album because we’re growing up and things are different now – things are always changing.”
There is no denying the quality of the lead single. Oddly galvanizing, it opens up to the struggles of solitude and ever-elusive hindsight. “Yeah it’s different now you’re old / And you try and you try,” codas the song, demanding we reflect upon life’s deterministic essence. While it’s not an about-turn sonically, it does feel like a decisive shift in tone for the band.
“It is a little jammier,” explains Shapiro. “While it has many different chords, it has two main chords in it the whole time. I feel like a lot of songs like that end up sounding really motivational or emotional. I know a lot of songs I like that I listen to over and over again are two-chord songs that have a lot of feeling in them and go on and on forever – it’s the kind of song that could go on forever if it wanted to.”
Shapiro found herself in a period of sustained creativity when it came to making the album as a whole, but her creativity wasn’t bound by a predefined goal.
“At the time it didn’t feel like we were writing an album,” she says. “It was more like, ‘Oh, here’s this new song,’ and it accumulated into a dozen songs, so we [thought we] should probably record. It wasn’t like we intentionally [set] out to write a concept album.”
While Shapiro concedes that the songs are “all over the place”, she keenly points out that the absence of an endgame fails to fracture the album’s wholeness. “It does feel cohesive,” she says. “We do seem to have a certain sound just from playing together for so long.
“Some recurring themes on the album are coping with growing up, life changes, making mistakes, trying to be a better person – everyday things that people can relate to. How it is to be a person.” Shapiro laughs. “It’s like your own little therapy session.”
We’re sick of playing the same songs over and over again.
While Shapiro is responsible for each song’s overall viewpoint as the lyricist and vocalist, Chastity Belt’s long-standing bond and enduring closeness mean her personal poetry can be interpreted through the collective gaze of the group – a four-picture panoramic, rather than Shapiro’s singular snapshot of the world.
“All the lyrics I write are from my own personal experiences, but because we’re close friends we share a lot of similar thoughts and feelings and ideas, so it’s a shared perspective in a way,” she agrees.
Aside from shared perspectives, Chastity Belt also have a taste for mixing it up musically, with guitarist Lydia Lund and drummer Gretchen Grimm trading their primary roles with Shapiro.
“Lydia recorded a song, ‘Bender’, one of the bonus tracks,” Shapiro explains. “She sings that one and wrote the lyrics for it, and Gretchen has a couple of songs too (‘Stuck’, ‘Don’t Worry’) that I drum on and Gretchen sings and plays guitar.”
With a 27-day American, UK and European tour coinciding with the album’s release, Chastity Belt are looking forward to hitting the road once again. Kicking off in their spiritual home of Seattle this week, Shapiro and co. are eager to find that sweet spot in the setlist: performing new songs alongside those that people already know.
“While I think people appreciate hearing new music, they maybe don’t express that as much in the audience,” says Shapiro. “It’s a different feeling seeing them dancing and singing along to an older song than having them stare at you and really listen, but not sing along – it’s hard to tell if they’re enjoying it.
“We try to balance it, because we do enjoy playing new songs more. We’re sick of playing the same songs over and over again. It’ll be nice when the album’s out because we can play songs from that which are still pretty new and people will have heard them after listening to the album.”
Photo: Connor Lyons
I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone is out Friday June 2 through Hardly Art/Inertia.
