Q&A: Party Nails Redefines Pop with Genre-Bending Album ‘Pillow Talk’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
REFUSING TO PLAY IT SAFE – Multifaceted singer-songwriter, musician, and producer Party Nails has returned with her highly anticipated third album, Pillow Talk. The ten-track collection is a dazzling showcase of her musical evolution, blending retro synthwave, futuristic electro-pop, and lush indie rock into a genre-bending production that feels both timeless and forward-thinking. With Pillow Talk, Party Nails invites listeners on a dynamic emotional journey, balancing heartache and joy with her signature flair for melody and storytelling.
Opening with “Same Old Song,” an indie-rock gem that captures the bittersweetness of moving forward, Party Nails sets the tone for an album steeped in introspection.
As the album unfolds, Party Nails showcases her unhinged musical prowess, shifting seamlessly between brash synth-pop on tracks like “First Responder” and “Movie Scene” and the grunge and punk-infused energy of “Someway Somehow” and “Do U Know How.” Each song is a detour, full of unexpected twists that keep the listener engaged while highlighting her fearless approach to genre experimentation.
Despite its vibrant energy, Pillow Talk doesn’t shy away from vulnerability, culminating in tracks like “Trigger Warning” and “Dirty Water,” where intimate lyrics and stripped-down arrangements create a safe space. This tender conclusion brings the listener full circle, delivering a heartfelt close to an album that feels like a late-night conversation with a close friend.
Beyond her own artistry, Party Nails is a powerhouse behind the scenes. Operating her LA-based recording studio, Top Coat, she produces and mixes for other artists while crafting her own projects. Her technical expertise and creative vision are evident throughout Pillow Talk.
With Pillow Talk, Party Nails delivers a bold and infectious album that defies genre constraints and redefines the boundaries of pop music. From start to finish, the record is a kaleidoscope of sound and emotion, offering a dynamic exploration of joy, heartache, and everything in between.
Photography Credit: Naz Massaro
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
PARTY NAILS: I'm inspired by the artist Robin. She has been inspiring to me for many years. Also songwriters like Dolly Parton and SZA are a really big influence as well, people who are able to somehow be very emotive and personal, but also write very catchy, universally interesting and accessible pieces of music. I'm also really inspired by nature and cities, which seem like the opposite things, but there are different energies that make me think of different scenarios and stories and emotions depending on what setting I'm in.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
PARTY NAILS: I think one of immersion, and I just want them to feel like someone has been there before, so that they're not alone. Whether that's a good feeling or a bad feeling or maybe just one that's overwhelming or just complicated. I would like for people to feel like something has been articulated for them, if they need that or someone who recognizes this unique experience so that they feel less alone in the world.
LUNA: What inspires you to push boundaries within your sound? Are there any specific experiences, artists, or moments that have encouraged you to explore new musical territories?
PARTY NAILS: One of my biggest influences when I started doing production was The Knife, and they're still a band, but they're different from when I first got into them. And at the time, back in 2008, they were one of the only bands that was using vocal transformation. It just made my brain think really hard. I really loved thinking about electronic music, and the way that you can make electronic music sound organic, and the way that you can make shifting genres and identities sound really natural, or natural to the listener – it's satisfying. I feel like just being a fan of theirs has given me a lot of permission to play with genres. My very first music teacher also gave me a lot of permission. His name was Rob Caldwell. He recently passed away, but he too would just show all of the students, myself included, all kinds of music, and just present it just as a song. It didn't need to be a modern band. It could be like a renaissance piece or something, and he would present them all in the same way and be like, isn't that cool?
LUNA: You just released your third record Pillow Talk and huge congratulations! I love the genre-blending elements and how timeless and cohesive they sound. What is the inspiration behind the project and what themes and emotions do you explore?
PARTY NAILS: Once my album before Pillow Talk was done, I started thinking about the next one that ended up being Pillow Talk, and so a lot of different things congealed over time. There's a bit of writing that happened during COVID that's on this album, and I think the influence of that, sort of like stolen time, is very apparent on there too, because it's just hard to find time to work on something as much as we could during COVID. Just this idea that's all you could do was work on music as opposed to needing to go do something else, go on tour, play a show or something like that.
The things that were coming up over that time had a lot to do with toxic friendships, boundaries, grief and loss, in a way more loss and grief of home and childhood as opposed to the death of somebody that you love. There's a lot of looking back and reflecting. I think a lot of that was enabled because of the isolation as well. I didn't set out to write about COVID, and none of the songs are about that, but I think the space enabled there to be a reflection. I think just the energy of identifying where you feel powerful or not powerful. I think that that's a space that we experience when you’re like, ‘I don't know, I think I might be ready to move on from this thing, or I think something has moved on from me, whether I want that to be possible, and what that really feels like? What does it feel like to expend energy into a place that is no longer serving you?’
LUNA: I would love to talk more about the creative process behind Pillow Talk. Can you walk us through a typical writing and recording session for the album?
PARTY NAILS: A lot of it was done, and this is similar to the other to the other albums too, but I would wake up and sit in a chair and begin playing the guitar and singing and seeing what sorts of lyrics and melodies came up, and I make a voice memo of that, and then I do that again the next day and the next day and the next day. And then at some point, a song has congealed. Sometimes that happens all at once, like sometimes I might sit down and the song exists after I'm done playing. Other times it's these little vignettes that start to form. My sitting down and writing sessions might be putting together those pieces and being like, ‘oh, I see this thing that actually makes a lot of sense with the thing I just wrote just now.’ I'll make a voice memo of that, listen to that, make changes depending on what needs to happen, and then from there, recording a guitar and vocal demo. I just pick a tempo, pick the key and record that to a metronome, and then from there, start to build baselines synth parts. If I wanted to collaborate with people, that would be when I would either do a zoom session with them or send them a file that they can then add to and then send back to me.
LUNA: As a producer and the owner of Top Coat studio in LA, were there any specific production techniques or tools you leaned on to create the diverse sonic palette of Pillow Talk?
PARTY NAILS: That's a great question. Almost all of the live bass is a P bass run through a bunch of Universal Audio stuff, a 610 Preamp and an 1176 Limiter, that's also what I like to run my vocals through. The vocals were also run through a couple of other things depending on where they were recorded, because I recorded them at a friend's studio, so some are just the vocals. I just used a double lock plug in sound toys. Plugins are a big part of the sound and during COVID, was working at the synth company called Noise Engineering, so there's a lot of noise engineering synths and effects on this album, and there's a lot of 707 drum machine. Just the samples that come with Ableton and the TAL synth that is the replica of a Juno-60 is all over the album.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Pillow Talk and why do you love it? Is there a certain lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
PARTY NAILS: That’s a great question too. It's tied with a lot of other ones, but the lyric, “do you have permission to be this way” in “Same Old Song” feels very special in that I did not know what that pre-chorus should be. I like what that asks. I also like that from a songwriting perspective, it shifts that the narration goes from reflective to directly talking to someone. I just think that's what's cool about poems and songwriting, is that you don't necessarily have to maintain a tense or a perspective in order for the journey to make sense over time, over the course of the song.
LUNA: With Pillow Talk, you’ve expanded your sound and storytelling. What excites you most about this new chapter in your career and what are you hoping listeners can take away from this new era?
PARTY NAILS: I guess it's still what it used to be, which is that underlying photography and production is just a song, and the power of songwriting. If one day I could hear any of these songs reinterpreted by other musicians that would be so dear to me. I really would like for the takeaway to be about the strength of a song, not necessarily praising my own songwriting, but I would prefer for the emphasis to be on the song, rather than the whole world of the record. I love creating the world, and I love the visual aspect, but song is forever and a visual identity will always change depending on the album, and I would like for this to be a step in that direction.
LUNA: As you continue to evolve, what aspects of your artistry do you hope to push further in future projects?
PARTY NAILS: Great question. I have an equal love of the bare bones of songwriting, like a guitar vocal thing. I have an equal love of that as I do to electronic production and as I do to performing. I hope in the future to be able to go deeper into all of those worlds, but maybe these are the various projects as opposed to all in one album, perhaps the electronic production could be a film project, and the songwriting could be an album, and the performance can continue to be a promotion or something. It would be cool to have a more live sounding album for the next one, but still have engaged in a lot of electronic production during that time through like a film score or something like that. I really can't help but be interested in all of it, and I want to find good little nests to put all of it.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
PARTY NAILS: I feel a little confused. I feel like things are shifting with the internet. When I think about the music business at large, there's the element of the Spotify situation and the social media situation, and I simultaneously feel like I have a lot to say about that and that there's a lot of power in community and participating in your community and being a source of good energy in your community, and then I also feel at the same time, that the best course of action may be to not engage with a lot of the less helpful tools that have shifted in the last couple of years.
I don't really know exactly what that looks like, but there's times like when I'm on tour, where you're meeting a human in real life. When you're able to do that, it puts a lot of other things into perspective where you stay in touch with this actual human that feels a little bit different than making content every day. Of course, content can reach people that can't make it to shows, but if the content is just in service of a huge corporation, it does feel dirty. So unfortunately, that's what I'm thinking about right now. But from a creative perspective, I do feel inspired to write about those experiences. In terms of the erosion of community more than before, I think that if I had chosen to write about this a couple of years ago, I would have been more of a self-reflective thing on how it's affecting me, but I think that it's affecting all of us and the way that we engage with the world. I feel a loss of dignity for a lot of people. It feels like hustle culture has come for us all, and it's being sold as a freedom of sorts. I think we need to take good care of each other and recognize connections when we have it and be grateful for that.
Photography Credit: Naz Massaro
