Sugarpulp has been lighting up stages around Chicago for a few years now, and with a dynamite 2019 behind them the four piece genre explosion is setting their sights on the new year with new EP Underwater/Outerspace under their belt. They met up with us at Cafe Mustache ahead of their show this Sunday at Sub T Downstairs opening for Last Import, to discuss the Chicago scene, the difficulty describing their sound, and how they came to find that vibe that screams Sugarpulp.

-Kyle Land

DC: Deb Chesterman (Vocals/Keys)
SA: Sam Allyn (Guitar)
PF: Patrick Foley (Bass)
BB: Brian Becmer (Drums)

Let’s rewind to 2015, and layout the history of Sugarpulp.

DC: Well I started the band with our former drummer Patrick Riley, and Sam composed music to a theatre piece.

SA: It was really by happenstance that I came along, because our old drummer was involved in a theatre company called Walkabout, and I composed music for a production.

DC: We had been looking for a guitarist and Patrick told me to come to the show, and I was blown away by not only Sam’s composition but also his tone. He was so badass.

SA: Ahhh, thanks. Yeah, Patick said “do you want to come jam with us” and that’s how this happened.

DC: And we were in between bassists for awhile and oddly enough we found this Patrick, Patrick Foley through Craigslist.

SA: In this very establishment. (Cafe Mustache)

DC: This is our jam. We’ve been having band meetings here for a bit.

PF: I sent out the Craigslist reply and said “Yeah this will be fun, where do you want to meet?” and I said “Well, I can walk to this place, let’s go here.” And that was December 2017?

DC: Was that December 2017?

SA: I think so, yeah.

DC: It was right before . . . well we were in the middle of recording an EP. We had written our first recording, and on the release show was our first show we played with Foley, and he was on board and we all got along. Then our drummer, who I started the band with, Patrick Riley, went back to school for Chinese Medicine. So Brian and I met through friends, he had played with Blue Dream…

BB: We met mostly through Jimmy.

DC: Yeah, through Jimmy of Blue Dream. Well Brian came to the release show and we were chatting afterwards and he said he liked us and I asked “will you please come jam with us.”

BB: And so it was.

DC: Especially because we were trying to find the right pieces to the puzzle for so long. We had found our bassist and had to go on tour with a fill in drummer, which was great and we were super thankful for Alex but it was really awesome finding a friend to play with. Because we all know the same group of people it felt really easy to lock in right away.

BB: It was familial from the onset.

You had a big 2019, you released an album in the winter (Teeth) and now you just had an EP come out (Underwater/Outerspace), let's talk about how you seem to be ramping things up.

SA: I think we’re trying to, yeah.

DC: We have a music video coming out in January.

SA: We just finished shooting miscellaneous footage this morning. We’re gonna sew it all together soon.

DC: We’re trying to do another two week tour, and ultimately we want to put out another full length in 2020. I think at the end of 2018 we decided to go balls to the wall.

SA: We’re going to use the first half of the year to do a lot of writing and we’ll see what happens. We’re already throwing around a bunch of ideas.

PF: 2019 was fun though. We played something like 20-25 shows. We had a show at least every month. It helps that we’re all friends, because we spend half of our free time together.

DC: I keep telling people 2019 has been the most fruitful year of my life and the hardest. It’s been so rewarding and so fun, and it’s crazy having seen what can happen just clawing your way through the day sometimes. Like, we did it! You know.

SA: We really set ourselves up for success next year.

Where did you record the EP?

SA: Kingsize Sound Labs.

DC: With Mike Haglar.

SA: Mike the Madman Haglar.

DC: He hasn’t really done much advertising, you can’t really look up Kingsize Sound Labs, he’s just been recording people for like 30 years.

PF: A hundred percent word of mouth.

SA: In a very Reservoir Of Dogs warehouse building. Very bleak and cold.

DC: He just moved out of it, for twenty years he lived there. He moved in with his wife.

PF: It’s a great space, and he’s really good. We’ve been working with him for over a year now. Everything from Teeth onwards.

DC: We love him. We’re pals.

BB: He really knows how to record drums. It was interesting because I really didn’t know anything about him till we got there, and I’m looking around and seeing all these flyers for some of my favorite, most formative bands, like Slint and King Kong and Pavement, and I was all “are these real show flyers” and he said “yeah, I was there, I’ve been recording these guys low key for awhile now.” So I felt by proxy that I was attached to that.

DC: We all found our own little personal connection with Mike. We just go in and it feels like, well not a band member, but that missing part that you need.

SA: The trust is there.

PF: He won’t coddle you, he won’t bullshit you, he’ll just tell you what’s correct.

BB: But he also does what you ask him to do. Which is a very good balance of him standing his ground with “no this is my opinion on this” but also you can ask “do you mind doing it this way?” And he’s open to pretty much anything you throw at him.

PF: We actually had him mix the last EP. Which was the first time we had anybody who wasn’t us, mix a recording. And he was great, got it done really quickly, which is something we’ve struggled with. He got it done and he got it done well, and brought his opinions to the table and fit in with us.

You had mentioned tour plans, you have another tour booked?

SA: We’re working on it. Now’s the time to start doing that, but it is going to happen next year. The plan is to retrace our steps from this year. We did a Southwest thing, down through Texas and up through Oklahoma and back North.

DC: Now that we’ve gone, we have some pals we loved playing with.

PF: We’ve got recommendations on where to play, because last time it was “Well, they’ll take us so let's go.”

DC: We’re excited to go see our friends down South.

SA: Go have some sweet tea.

DC: Definitely early Spring.

Did the cohesive sound you’ve developed take a lot of work to shape or did it come naturally?

DC: It took about two and a half years.

SA: Yes, it took a lot of refining. Sort of like working with pottery, you just keep spinning.

DC: Something Sam and I were talking about a couple weeks ago, now that it’s landed it just kind of works. He’ll be playing a melody and he’ll send it to me and I’ll pull out a set of lyrics I’ve been humming to myself and be able to sing it over what he’s written. Which is really cool, but it took a long time to lock in. Brian talks a lot about once you’re on that telepathic level it gets very juicy.

There are quite a few genres piled on top of each other in Sugarpulp’s sound. From Psych, to New Wave, to Radio Rock, was that something you did knowingly or did it evolve?

DC: I think both.

SA: Yeah, probably both. We all have, well there’s overlap, but we all have different influences and over time found a way to overlap them.

DC: We call ourselves “Glam Psych” and we’ve been rehearsing a song before and stopped to analyze what we want it to sound like. Maybe this part should be more psych, or this melody is really pop how can we dirty it up.

SA: And we’re on the same page, enough so, that we can reference and band, and say well what if we did it more Yeah Yeah Yeahs or something.

DC: We talk a lot about atmosphere, the way we talk about our sound can be super metaphorical. But I think we stumbled upon a lot that works for us. Then we labeled it in our own way, and we try and go back and find those things while we’re writing.

BB: It’s just easier to communicate in that way. When you already have words you can associate to an abstract concept like sound. Personally I don’t think about is this a pop beat, is this psychedelic, is this glamorous, I just try to play what serves the song. They’re bringing the music into the room and I have to hear it and come up with something that serves what they’re bringing me. I don’t think too much in terms of genre or labeling. I just try and let it channel and flow, whatever comes out. Then the refining happens. It’s really hard for me to nail down sound with a word, because I’m in the middle of it. I’m not objectively looking at it, it’s a subjective thing that's coming out of me. It gets really tough to explain to other people: “I’m in this band, and we call it Glam Psych” but I don’t know what that means to you.

PF: People ask me all the time, “what music do you play,” and I say “here, take a listen, tell me what you think” but it’s really cool because there is not a lot of what we do in Chicago.

Not in Chicago, no.

PF: I’m sure if you dug you’d find someone similar. But we talk all the time in putting bills together what would sound right with us, but there are so many things that we do that we can play with the Indie bands…

BB: I think eclectic bills work so well with us because it doesn’t have to be all psychedelic bands or whatever, it’s open enough to include a bunch of different genres on the same bill and have it seem cohesive. There’s never too many bands that would shift the mood of the night.

DC: We play with Brian’s other band St. Marlboro, which is a country punk band.

SA: I would hate playing the same genre of music. I like having an ambiguous genre.

BB: Genre fluid.

PF: I like that. Genre fluid.

Did it take awhile to feel accepted in the Chicago scene?

SA: I still struggle to feel accepted everywhere I go. (laughs)

DC: I think any scene, or anything that you do, whether its work or art, there’s politics involved. It’s like if you’re at a new school, you don’t know anyone, you don’t have any friends. It takes a minute for you to get to know people.

SA: Starting out as a band, with the exception of Brain, we’re all from out of state, and a lot of the bands are from here. They went to school here, or are from the suburbs.

PF: It’s a little insular, you get people crossing over bands all the time. Everybody knows each other. Debs been putting in a ton of work.

SA: Deb’s going to a show every other night.

DC: But once you make friends the floodgates open. This year especially felt like this was…(makes “boom” gesture)

PF: We started turning down shows. Which is great, well not great for those that want to play with us, but it feels like we’re moving up in the scene.

DC: It doesn’t feel like a race anymore. Once you’ve made those friends then you have a lot of friends.

SA: Absolutely.

DC: It might be hard to get into that group hug, but once you get a little arm in there.

PF: It kind of pulls you in.

DC: Even though it felt a little difficult sometimes, it’s really rewarding to be a part of such a talented and energetic and giving community.

SA: I’ve always thought of it as a privilege. I’ve never been a part of anything like it, coming from Central Iowa. To come here and throw ourselves into it and be accepted is pretty incredible.

DC: The not having a genre or label has really benefited us and we love it, people didn’t really know what to do with us.

PF: They didn’t know where to look for us. Often it’s “we’re a girl fronted acoustic band, lets go find four of them and we’ll play a show together.” Well, we could fit that if we wanted to but nobody would look for us for that.

DC: When we first started playing around we would get booked with a lot of very quiet female fronted bands, and they’re wonderful and we’ve enjoyed it, but we are so LOUD!

SA: For a few shows we would hand out earplugs before hand.

PF: We make friends and even if we don’t fit with them musically or play with them, they’re still our friends.

What are some of your local influences, or bands you really love?

SA: There is a band that is now unfortunately defunct called Blue Dream.

BB: That’s a conduit for us finding each other, I went on tour with Blue Dream. Their drummer couldn’t go so I filled in, and we have solid relationships with the members of that band; and I feel like that rubs off, when you spend so much time together and you’re in the same headspace, whatever you’re manifesting is going to share a common denominator.

DC: We played a show with them at Treehouse, a long time ago, 2016 maybe. When we saw them play it was…

SA: Ok, we have to get better.

PF: That’s always motivation. We play with people all the time and I wish we were that good.

DC: I saw Absolutely Not while we were rewriting “Machete.”

SA: That’s where that came from…

DC: That’s when I decided we needed organ on that song. I don’t think any of our music is influenced by Cold Beaches, but going to their shows, or Uma Bloo, is inspirational for me performance wise. Tomblands, again they’re very different, but I think about their riffs while I write.

SA: They’re riffs, right! Cause there’s like eight of those dudes onstage…

There’s five, it must be the two drum kits that fool you.

SA: Yeah but they’re really tight, and its “that’s what we need to do.” I take mental notes, it’s tough for me to go to a local show and not end up thinking “I want to do that better.”

PF: I compare myself to Jimmy (Blue Dream bassist), every time I see him play. I know that we’re different, that we’re our own individual artists, but I still say “he doesn’t miss notes, he’s really good.”

SA: Great moves too.

DC: And Djunah, maybe some of Brain’s drumming, I don’t know.

BB: When I joined Sugarpulp I was coming out of a punk band, well St. Marlboro is a punk band, but I played in Roaming Bear before that and that’s where I started defining my chops. It was very punky, very loud and abrasive. I still incorporate those elements into my drumming in Sugarpulp, but it serves what everyone else is doing. So any loud, really percussive drumming I’m doing could be derived from a similar space as the Djunah noise rock drumming; but at the same time I’ve been heavily influenced by bands like Bailey Minzenberger who are a slow core indie band that don’t waste a beat, and everything is deliberate and subtle and on the nose. So wherever the spectrum is, I like to suck in whatever is interesting, it doesn’t have to be one side or the other; and I incorporate whatever that is into what I’m doing, in this case Sugarpulp.

We love Donna, Djunah is awesome.

BB: I had the pleasure of playing with Beat Drun Juel before they went defunct, we had a couple practices because they lost their drummer. I think he went to play in Montrose Man, which is also a very good loud Chicago noise rock band. But they were kind of in the death throes while I was practicing with them, but that was cool because Djunah came out of that and I got to see the progression of the songs from their infancy to the fleshed out album version. Goddamn that was impressive. To lose the bass player and have it be a two piece but not lose the bass, was “holy shit.”

DC: Her aesthetic is great too, I love it. LATE is another band, their guitarist plays through a bass amp and guitar amp and just drums and the singer doesn’t play anything. They’ve got a really cool heavy sound. They have something coming out next year.

What are some of your favorite venues to play in town?

DC: Sleeping Village!

SA: We finally played Sleeping Village and I just have to say...it was awesome. The sound was great, so many people where there.

PF: I really enjoy when we play Schubas.

DC: Liar’s (Club). Empty Bottle.

SA: Liar’s is...Gary Kessler is a class act, and that place is so fun.

DC: It’s kind of become our hometown club.

SA: Our home haunt. We just had our EP release there.

PF: He’s the nicest guy in the world, and the best reason to play there is he’ll put together bills the venue will like, so it’s not necessarily on you to bring in your fans because the crowd is there. It works.

If you got to play any festival in the city what festival would be your dream booking?

SA: Riot Fest.

PF: I’d play any of the big fests. Riot Fest, Pitchfork. If we got an offer from any of those festivals it's an absolute yes.

SA: I stand by Riot Fest.

DC: It’s my favorite festival in the city, if we’re talking about big fests. I think we’d be awesome.

What about street fests?

SA: Wicker Park Fest.

DC: or West Fest.

SA: They both book really good bands.