Q&A: Meltt Introduces Their Year of Music at SXSW
INTRODUCING AN ELECTRIFYING EDGE — to a mellow and ambient soundscape, Meltt is staring down the barrel of an exciting year ahead. Composed of Chris Smith, Jamie Turner, James Porter, and Ian Winkler, the Vancouver-based band is releasing a flowing stream of new music throughout 2023 — including scattered singles, an EP, and an autumn album. An apt name, Meltt’s music is fluid and warm, sticky with lush instrumentals and inviting vocals.
Rising from Meltt’s hand-crafted take on the alternative psych-rock genre is the soothing yet invigorating glow of each of the band’s experimental tracks. Wrapped inside one another like Russian dolls, each track is simultaneously an aftershock of and diversion from its predecessor, creating a soundtrack perfect for creatures of habit and those in constant search of novel sounds.
Continuing on with their accelerating pace, Meltt is looking forward to a few live shows throughout the year. As the band bursts through their year of music, they leave behind in their wake a flurry of latent projects with potential to inspire future sounds. Read below to learn more about their experience at SXSW, how they translate their music into a live setting, and what’s in store for the rest of the year.
LUNA: How has the week been treating you so far?
MELTT: It’s been good balancing everything, seeing some stuff that we want to see and then doing stuff for Meltt — different press things and shows and sessions — and then going out and seeing some comedy [and] seeing some music.
LUNA: What kind of value and importance do you feel like events like South By have for the industry as a whole, but also for artists like yourself?
MELTT: I feel like it's a cool way to immerse yourself in a totally international variety of artists, industry people, fans — it's just kind of a cool hub for all of it. And comedy, too … the whole entertainment industry in general: film, TV too. It’s just a cool thing to immerse yourself in.
It's just such a huge scale of bands that you know that of, that you hear of, and that are kind of on your level or … around that. You just see how many of them are actually here that you can connect with — it's kind of one of the only places you can actually make that personal connection. Obviously the internet has made that easier, but to actually have the personal connection it's kind of special.
LUNA: How have you approached your sets differently this week than normal?
MELTT: I don't think we've approached them any differently — just had to figure out how to make them short. Our setup takes so long that by the time we’re set up we’re like, “Okay how many minutes do we have?” (Laughs)
Our soundcheck usually takes a long time and we have a lot of input so our biggest challenge for SXSW has been, “Okay, what’s the quickest way we can actually be ready to play?”
LUNA: Based on what we’ve heard so far, how does that compare to the upcoming music? Is it an intro to it, or is it its own entity?
MELTT: I’d say an intro to it. It was all made around the same time. It’s a little taster, maybe. I would say it represents the huge variety on the upcoming music, but there’s a lot more different stuff to come too. All of what’s gonna be released this year, [including] the EP, is part of the same project in terms of, it was made and written and recorded at the same time. But it’s all its own flavor.
So it’s similar and different. We really let ourselves go nuts with sounds and different things, [using] as many layers as we could throw at something and then play it back and see what we have.
LUNA: If you made it all in one sitting, how did you divvy things up? Was it like, “This group of songs feels cohesive together, and then this group of songs feels cohesive together”?
MELTT: It was a mix of that and taking a ton of demos and working on what was the strongest of them, as well as what was the most complete, as well as what works the best together. I’d say we had 30 or 40 — maybe even more — demos overall, but we whittled it down to 25 or something. Then we whittled that down even further to 16 and then 14.
It was a process of elimination. Some stuff that we left on the table, we still think has a lot of great potential. But for this project, we had a lot of stuff that was further along, or maybe they were really, really good and they were just not sounding right for this.
LUNA: In that creative process, are you thinking about what it’s gonna be like in a live setting?
MELTT: I feel like we think about it in terms of how fun it will be. Maybe we used to think about it in terms of limitations, but now we don't really think about it that much. We’ll make whatever we want to make, and then we find a way to adapt it for live and stuff.
LUNA: What intentions do you have for the upcoming months?
MELTT: We got a lot of new music coming. April 14th is the next new single. Then we're dropping something every six weeks until September, [when] we’ve got the full album dropping. There’ll be [about] three or four new singles … for the album as well. So it’ll have everything that’s on the EP plus all the new singles — which will be four or five — plus another four or five on the album.
LUNA: How much music are you, in total, gonna be releasing this year?
MELTT: Fourteen [songs]. Not this year, though. Eleven new tracks this year, spaced out. This will be the major tour for the first half of the year. We might do some shows in Vancouver — maybe a festival like Cats or something like that. We might go to Alberta — it looks like we’re gonna [do] a festival there. But then we probably won’t do another big tour until the fall — late September, after the album. So that’s kind of the plan for that. In the meantime, just releasing music and promoting it.
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