The Shallows have aways been a band at playful odds with their name. The Boston foursome craft a deep and lush and expansive brand of shoegazing dream-pop, the type of roving sound that’s easy to get lost in as it cascades from a mental to emotional experience. We last connected with The Shallows a few years back through stirring debut single “Arsonist”, and now the band returns this month with “Channels,” the first delectable and vertical taste of the forthcoming Wave States album, due this spring.
“Channels” swirls around a lyrical theme, the band says, of “rocketing oneself from the gravity of everything that anchors us in our worlds.” And that’s pretty much what we need at this very moment.
“The song started with the chorus chord progression,” guitarist Brad Emerson tells Vanyaland. “I had just bought an old Yamaha Rack FX unit that had a patch called ‘Soft Focus’ — rumors are that patch was all over ’90s Slowdive records (it’s spawned a couple pedals trying to emulate it). I had been playing around with some alternate chord voicings — I put the two together and they worked perfectly. The loud(-ish) chorus called for space and ambience in the verse; from there it was just filling in the gaps.”
Emerson adds: “I ended up being stuck on the verse lyrics — I shared the tracks with [vocalist] Jess [Baggia] with its temporary working title. She read ‘Channels’ to mean radio channels — she wrote the verse with that theme in mind and they ended up working great with the chorus lyrics.”
Get lost deep within the magnetic world of The Shallows below.