Chastity Belt – Julia Shapiro in 'Live Laugh Love'
Spontaneity and Balance
March 29, 2024
Photo by Jena Feldman
Web Exclusive
It's a story as old as time: four college friends decide to pick up some instruments and start a band together. With no experience and no plans other than hanging out and making music, indie rock band Chastity Belt could easily see their career start and end before graduation. Thirteen years later, however, the band and its four members—Julia Shapiro (she/her), Lydia Lund (she/her), Gretchen Grimm (her/she), and Annie Truscott (them/them)— are as strong as they are as they release their fifth studio album, Live laugh Love (released today via Hardly Art).
Like any band that's been together for over a decade, Chastity Belt have seen their music evolve over the years, moving from noisy, downbeat slacker rock to more introspective expressions of modern malaise. According to Shapiro, one of the group's lead singers and guitarists, their music-making practices have seen just as much change. “The way we write and record music has changed over the years since we don't all live in the same city anymore and Annie goes to school. Our last two recordings went over Annie's Thanksgiving break. So we had Thanksgiving together in the studio, which was nice.”
As we chat on the phone on a chilly Friday night, it becomes clear that Chastity Belt's post-pandemic creative and songwriting processes are characterized by physical distance from each other, making moments the rare times they can all come together. condensed, productive music production. It is the reason why Live laugh Love It was recorded in just three sessions (albeit over three years), all three with engineer Samur Khouja at Seahorse Sound Studios in Los Angeles. “We've been touring a lot and that would get too tiring. And since COVID, the pace has slowed down and it's been nice for everyone to have different things to focus on, because doing this for 10 years is a long time. I just realize there are other things I want to do too. But doing it the way we have allows us not to feel that fatigue as much.”
You might think that this irregularity would add to the pressure, but quite the opposite: with so much history playing together and a “friends first, partners second” mentality, studio time became a space for collaborative spontaneity and the kind of relaxed flurry of ideas resulting from years of shared experiences. “We went to the recording [Live Laugh Love] like, “Let's use this time we all have free,” and we started practicing maybe a day or two before the recording, and a lot of it is everybody learning the songs for the first time…. We'll each bring a few songs to the band and then everyone else will write their part on the spot. Sometimes people don't even understand their parts until we record.”
This casual, spontaneous approach to songwriting means that, for the most part, the development of the album as a whole was driven more by intuition than by intention. “I feel like we're all kind of involuntary about these things in a nice way? We'll have ideas depending on the song, but [not] as an album as a whole, a cohesive unit…. We recorded a bunch of songs and some of them didn't make the album because they didn't fit well into that group of songs, so there must be something that connects them, but I'm not sure what it is. It just sounds like a Chastity Belt to me.” Unbounded by any conceptual or thematic goal, the process of introduction Live laugh Love in life it could instead flow freely, arising naturally from the dynamics and history between the members. “It forces us to make a decision and a lot of times your first idea is the best. It's just what comes most naturally. We've had so much experience playing together at this point that it's really quite natural. Things can happen very quickly, which is crazy.”
In a way, Shapiro admits, the band has become a source of comfort, without the pressure to accomplish anything in particular other than playing music together. “We've always approached music that way and I think some people would say, 'Hey, I'm starting this band, it's going to sound like this and this and that, these are the influences,' but when we started this band we never talked about it . It was our first band with other people, and we were like, “We're just going to play music and see what happens. So it's very casual that way. It's kind of unconscious, which is kind of healing.”
Despite the speed of recordings and on-the-spot decision-making, even with songs conceived and contributed individually by all four band members, Live laugh Love it's cohesive and very much a Chastity Belt record: bruised, rippling guitars and layers of muted vocals, fuzzy textures and dark outros. But while their signature raucous, moody underground snakes through the entire album, it's balanced by moments of languid sunbathing that sound more relaxed than ever. Tracks like “It's Cool,” “Laugh” and album opener “Hollow” feel relaxed and confident, cut from the same thoughtful cloth as the rest of the album without as much shoegazey drone.
And while many of their lyrics are as dark and brooding as ever (“Nothing that I do or say today / Will mean a thing / But I'm not soastated”? “Why does Everything normal feel so bad”), there is a subtle sense of self-acceptance and optimism that's stronger here than on previous work, a sense that coincides with the album's sonic forays into cooler territory (“Don't be upset about it, it'll pass / Tell all your friends therefore, they” I will laugh; “The warmth of everything / I waited, and it came”).
The boisterous, freewheeling days of songs like “Pussy Weed Beer” and “Cool Slut” have been replaced with more grounded material, but instances of unabashed irony and sarcasm still pepper the album, bringing a wry sense of humor and levity to existential concerns of the group. This tongue-in-cheek attitude is at the root of it Live laugh LoveIts name and promotional material – poking fun at a certain kind of aesthetic and ethos – and it's this balance between silly and serious that's been a key part of the band itself since its inception.
“A lot of our songs are quite emotional, so we try to balance that out with silly press photos or silly music videos…. We all use humor to process things and it shows in our lyrics for sure. We can't take being in a band too seriously. When I start doing that, I have to check myself because it's just not that serious,” laughs Shapiro. “We are friends who play music together.”
After all, Live laugh Love is an embodiment of that attitude, a scrapbook of thoughts and memories shared between friends that swirls freely around similar topics, with no preconceived idea or primary goal other than to hang out and make music. It's the same approach that started the band and the one that continues to guide them today, proving that even after five albums and 13 years, reinvention is overrated.
“It's pretty crazy,” laughs Shapiro. I say, “How long are we going to keep doing this?” But it really feels like such a big part of me. At this point, I can't really see us stopping.”
from our partners at http://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/chastity_belt_julia_shapiro_on_live_laugh_love
