Header photo credit: Dan Russell-Pinson
Death is complicated, especially when it’s family, even more so when it’s close. Grief is hard, but at least we expect it. It’s the day-to-day surprises that cut deepest. Reading and signing and filing endless paperwork, chasing down passwords, shopping for an urn or coffin comprise a whirlwind of demands on your attention, all competing with ever-present grief.
Layaway Plot, the debut album from Charlotte’s Pretty Baby, tackles death from every angle in an attempt to express the inescapable. It’s an angsty onslaught of pulsing post-punk, momentous post-rock, and heaps of post-hardcore riffage.
I had the pleasure of seeing Pretty Baby perform on their album release tour. The live set is more ferocious than the record, a tour de force of organized cacophony. I was impressed with their intensity and control of momentum. Untethered from studio constraints, Pretty Baby is faster and more explosive, but also somber and gentler in turn. We sat down over Zoom to talk about Layaway Plot, the remainder of the tour, and their in-the-works music video.
How did Pretty Baby come about?
Bince (drums): I’ve been part of the Charlotte scene for so long, I’ve been in one million bands-
Rusty (guitar/vocals): -yeah, you just joined your millionth, congrats-
Bince: -we’ve always been hanging, one day we decided to start playing music.
Lenny (synth/bass/vocals): We decided we had to find a way to record Rusty’s singer-songwriter stuff when he and I lived together, and the idea was to bring those to a full band eventually.
Rusty: It was a solo thing for a while but I never dug into it, I really needed anybody else around me to make me do it, and this lineup is the core behind the record.
How was Layaway Plot made?
Rusty: Over a long period of time. At least one of those songs is five or six years ago at this point. We had some lineup shifts and some personal stuff that spurred the bulk of the songs. We all took it seriously, which was cool, and finished it out.
Where did you record?
Lenny: The Fidelitorium.
Ryan (guitar/synth): Beautiful facility.
Lenny: It was awesome, I loved it. We made a lot of decisions there in the little time that we had, I was pleased with the amount of time we ended up having.
Rusty: Going in, we made a concerted decision to embrace the emergent effects of the studio rather than protect our initial visions of the songs.
What is the record about?
Rusty: We had many long talks about what the record was going to be called, one of the initial frontrunners was “Ten Songs About Death and Dying” but I think it’s a little thematically richer than that. We tried to really focus and make a cohesive work about death and all the things that come with it – the aftermath, the socioeconomics of it. Dead stuff, dead people.
Which came first, the concept for the album or the idea of an album?
Lenny: I think as a band we continued to develop musical ideas that had a very clear throughline, and that opened the door to make it not at all weird to be writing about the same thing ten times.
Rusty: It was very “I guess we’ll keep pulling that thread.” Once we had it, the record was the goal. “A record” was already a goal for the band, it made sense.
The new record sounds very different from that first EP. What’s behind that?
Bince: Funny enough, Ryan, who engineered the EP but wasn’t in the band at the time, joined on guitar for the album, and I moved from bass to drums. The genre change happened really naturally. It was a little selfish because I wanted to play fast and heavy drums, so I took over and we went full steam ahead.
Rusty: For the EP, all the fully complete contributions stayed about the same and all the incomplete ideas became faster songs, and we naturally ran with that for the album.
Bince: I think we’ve already progressed into something different, we already have quite a few new songs in the works. It still feels like Pretty Baby, but it feels like we’re doing something differently.
Who are some of the bands that influenced this record?
Rusty: At the Drive-In is forever and always a shared influence, my guitar playing is influenced by Unwound and so many of those late 90’s early 00’s post-hardcore bands, and we’re into Godspeed, You! Black Emperor and Mogwai and that shows up on the record too.
Bince: I think each of us have very different backgrounds, but we all intersect right where Rusty said.
Image credit: Dan Russell-Pinson
What’s your favorite song on the record?
Lenny: “Sleepdrunk”. I don’t know where that bassline came from, there was no calculation. It came out easy, it’s like I’ve been listening to it since the moment we started playing it. I feel like usually it’s only after I spend a lot of time with a song that I get to hear it in my head like that.
There’s something to that, when you can imagine something and just play it. It takes work to get there.
Ryan: Definitely 8:25 [“8:25pm Greenwich Fucking Mean”]. The outro feels so good to me on the record and is so fun to play; it’s a solid rest point for me. You can be in the moment with it instead of focusing just on playing.
Bince: I’m between “Hector’s Loop” and “Faraway Lights”.
Rusty: It’s “Faraway Lights”. When we finished that song, we knew it would close the record, and so that’s when we knew we had a record.
Bince: It’s hard to say it’s not 8:25 [“8:25pm Greenwich F*****g Mean”]. All the songs on the album have moments that make them my favorites.
You guys have a music video coming out, tell me about it!
Rusty: We do! We filmed it about a month ago, our friend Josiah, who’s a really talented videographer – he’s got a series of shorts out called Small Vices, look that up – and our friend Grayson made custom masks for some of the characters. It’s sort of a True Detective meets scary monster guy video for our song “8:25pm Greenwich F*****g Mean”. We got to be four severed heads in a cabinet, it was sick.
Where did the concept originate, with you or Josiah?
Rusty: It was back and forth, I had had some conversations with Grayson about a puppet video because they do a lot with puppets, and conceptually the song is kind of about a showdown with death itself. We were talking about who would do the video, then we got Josiah and everything else fell out of him.
Who picked the song?
Rusty: That was me. That song has a long, storied history in the band. I’m very proud of that song because we lost some night’s sleep over it when it was getting put together. I really wanted that song to have a video. I also like when longer songs have a video, it gives the video more time to develop.
Was there concern about it being too long a song?
Rusty: I mean, no.
Lenny: Not really.
Ryan: I don’t know how long the song is.
Rusty: It’s like six minutes.
Ryan: That’s not too long.
Lenny: I only start raising questions at 8.
Bince: I think that song works with its length. It’s split into different sections that make it feel like more than one song. I’m pretty sure when people were only hearing it live, they didn’t realize it was one song until it came out on the record.
Rusty: They start clapping halfway and we’re like “no, this is the ambient part.”
You already have the “Sleepdrunk” video, but you’re not in it. Have you been in a video before?
Bince: I’ve done a few videos before, honestly it was pretty hands off for most of us.
Rusty: They did a day of principle with the main actors the day before we showed up to finish. There’s very little actual footage of us in the video, which is nice.
When we first met, you were on tour. How did the tour go?
Bince: That’s our only tour as this band. It was incredible, very validating and fun. And I’d say we sold a good few records.
Rusty: We had people in every city come out and see us and it was very heartwarming. Lenny and Bince’s other band Lofidels went with us and it was a big band hang.
Lenny: I think we got an incredible cross-section of different scenes. Beyond city to city, we played a college basement, we played an old established venue in Baltimore.
Rusty: I blew out my voice after the New York show from talking. I woke up the next day and knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to be able to perform. I ingested maybe 200 cough drops and I was fine. I performed in Baltimore, woke up again and was totally fine. Any young, aspiring vocalists: just do cough drops.
What’s your brand? Let’s get you sponsored.
Rusty: It was Halls. I’d love to get a smaller, lesser known brand involved, but it was Halls.
Lenny and Bince, how was playing two sets every night?
Lenny: I found out pretty quickly that we had two very different experiences.
Bince: Yeah we did!
Lenny: We played back to back every night. Bince sets up the drums once, plays a set, fucks off forever, plays a second set. I went from center stage with a guitar and two guitar amps to stage-right with bass and synthesizer. I could have made things easier, but if you do a set you do the whole thing.
Bince: None of this would have been easy without our sound guy, Ian Pasquini. He figured out how to get us from Lofidels to Pretty Baby like that every single night.
Rusty: We also sounded great in every room, which is a luxury that you don’t get on tour often.
Ryan: And he’s a real pleasure to be around.
Rusty: He’s a real problem-solver.
Bince: We love that man.
How’d that come about? Bands at this level don’t usually take sound people on tour.
Bince: He’s our best friend-
Lenny: -we just wanted his van and he said “Well, I’m not really comfortable with you just taking it, what if I come with you?”
Bince: He needed a little convincing.
Any local folks you want to shout out?
Bince: Ian Pasquini, Snug Harbor for throwing our album release, Goodyear Arts for letting us practice there for the last five years.
Lenny: Jeremy Snyder, for recording the record.
Rusty: My wife Erin for her encouragement and support. Coughing Dove, lofidels, Pleasure House, Mozart’s Bird, Telepathetics, Patois Counselors, Mindvac, Bible Belt, Redwood Sleeper, and countless others.
Any final words?
Rusty: We are playing Hopscotch this year! We’re very very excited. We don’t know where, we don’t know when, but we are.
Bince: We’re incredibly excited.
Note: Pretty Baby’s official Hopscotch show is Friday, 9/11 at King’s. They play day parties 9/11 at Neptune’s and 9/12 at Pour House.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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