It can be said that Boston’s cold and desolate winters yield a certain kind of isolation and loneliness. If that is indeed the case, Vivid Bloom have crafted a soundtrack to keep us in warm company through the distant spring. The Boston shoegaze band, which formed post-pandemic after two of its members first met at an Alanis Morrisette concert, released a stunning debut EP titled Out of Focus via Bandcamp this past Friday (December 1).
Across an expansive three tracks, the dynamic Vivid Bloom offer a whirling ocean of riffs; hazy grunge coated in neon grayscale, blending doom metal and post-rock into sonically rich, atmospheric record of startling depth and icy psychedelia that stands as not only one of the city’s finest of 2023, but one of the most inviting and alluring releases in the fields of modern shoegaze and dream-pop.
Vivid Bloom’s founding members, Erika Hansen (guitar, vocals) and Liz Walshak (guitar, vocals), were the pair who first linked up at that aforementioned Morrisette show, looking to create music as a form of catharsis to escape the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The songs on Out of Focus were formed through finding connection during a time of isolation,” says Walshak. “We were listening to a lot of shoegaze-adjacent music like DIIV’s Deceiver and the live tracks on To Venus and Back by Tori Amos. Those records contain songs that have an emotional quality, are spatial and ethereal, and are simultaneously dark and light, which inspired the mood of what we were writing. We demoed out arrangements digitally and sent them back forth, wrote vocal melodies, and polished them into song structures.”
Last year, Hansen and Walshak were rounded out by bassist Tracy Putnam and drummer Alison Murray, cementing the quartet and sharing a musical vision that plays out with spontaneous precision on the EP, especially as tracks like “Black Desert” and “Out of Focus” unfurl across its six minutes of sound.
“We immediately felt as though the four of us had great musical and interpersonal chemistry,” Walshak adds. “We began writing collaboratively as a four-piece and spent a lot of time riffing on ideas live in the practice space, embracing the spontaneity and magic that happens when you feed off each other’s energy while playing. The ending of the title track Out of Focus was written that way — it organically came together and afterwards we were all so excited about this beautiful noise we had just created.”
They’d eventually head into the studio to record Out of Focus with Adam Preston Cissell at Dead Moon Audio, with mixing and mastering by Alex Allinson at The Bridge Sound and Stage. Live shows across the city, as well as appearances at August’s Somergloom festival and an opening set for Warpaint’s September show at The Paradise, continue to shape the band’s early on-stage narrative.
“The songs on Out of Focus are really a snapshot of this new and exciting musical connection we all formed,” Walshak concludes, “and that we look forward to exploring further as we write new material and push the boundaries of what we can do.”
Engage in Out of Focus via Bandcamp below.