Speedy Ortiz singer and guitarist Sadie Dupuis is wearing a black dress backstage at the Bowery Ballroom, a few hours before Speedy Ortiz’s sold-out New York show. She is wearing a convex gold necklace. “My bandmates told me I look like I’m dressed for prom right now,” she says. This dress also illustrates her idea of the Foil Deer, the title of the record the Massachusetts band released last week.
“I think the Foil Deer idea is sort of gilding yourself to approach the world,” she says. “I’m naturally a little shy, and it’s just like the ways you trick yourself into being able to talk to people and exist in front of them when you’d rather be a bit reclusive.”
But sitting in a room and being slightly reclusive is where the band started. Speedy Ortiz originated in 2011 as a collection of Dupuis’s home recordings, then it developed into a band with bassist Darl Ferm and drummer Mike Falcone. Guitarist Devin McKnight from Grass is Green joined the lineup last year, replacing Matt Robidoux, and he’s been seamlessly absorbed into the band. (“The songs sound more like they were supposed to now that he’s playing on them,” Dupuis told Spin earlier this year.)
Although the project has moved on from Dupuis’s home recordings, she is still the focal point both on stage and in terms of ideas. Some of the more head-turning drumming parts from the new album derived from sounds in Dupuis’s head. “There are certain things where I have an idea in my head of exactly what the drums should sound like,” she says. “But I’m not really a drummer so some of the things I’m thinking of are not really playable. And Mike has to work really slowly with me to translate what the fuck I’m thinking of.”
Onstage at the Bowery Ballroom guitar phrases twist and splinter into lateral angles, like branches on a tree. At one point, Dupuis approaches the mic and starts to talk about her father, a former record label A&R representative, manager, engineer, and producer, who passed away last month. “[My dad] really liked this album, and he’s a really tough critic. He was really stoked about us playing here,” she said. “I wish he could’ve been here, and I’m playing for him a little bit tonight.”
Dupuis’s lyrics tend to describe emotional trauma in rhetorical knots, and the songs especially haunt when they seem to eclipse traditional sense and enter a realm of pure association. They’re also capable of illustrating the comical and mundane. In the song Zig, she sings, in a timbre that’s both precise and conversational: “How many laps does it take to decide you’re back at the start? / Pace ’er like a machine, anachronistic with scissor kicking / No good at at all.” But it’s more than simple word association. Apparently, swimming laps was a big influence on the new record.
“Scissor kicking is what you do when you’re doing a crawl stroke,” Dupuis says. “I kind of stopped hanging out with people and just exercised a lot and wrote songs every day for the month I was writing [Foil Deer],” she says. “There’s a number of songs that were written while swimming.”
The song Puffer feels almost directly aquatic. “Puffer’s Pond is a pond in Amherst, Massachusetts,” Dupuis says. “I wrote it in the pond while swimming. I would do a certain amount of laps and get out early to sing into my little voice recorder.” On the final recording, Falcone’s kick drum sounds deeply immersed and resonant, as if recorded underwater. “It’s also where they used a contact mic for the bass,” says Ferm. “The bass was reverberating off a ventilation unit, and they put a contact mic on there,” which accounts for the spectral, metallic echo roaming through the track.
Dupuis wrote My Dead Girl immediately after swimming with her friend in Lake Waramaug. “About halfway into writing out this song, a bunch of fratty looking bros park across the street from me,” she told Noisey. They then surrounded her car and talked about how they were going to break in. That sexist, threatening backdrop can also be heard on a track such as Mr Difficult, when she sings: “I’m just a ratchet kid that sits here stretching out my thighs / Between the drills / But I’d never flex for your benefit,” she’s drawing on a long, rich history of hostile male attention. “I think that’s a history for most women,” she says.
At times the album has a hint of nu metal to it, like on Puffer. When I bring it up to the band we end up talking about Incubus for 10 minutes. It occurred to me, revisiting Incubus’s 2001 album Morning View, that the song Just a Phase has a skeletal similarity to Speedy Ortiz songs. “We love us some nu metal,” Dupuis says. “There’s a song that specifically kind of rips [Just a Phase] off. Our song Gary [from 2013’s Major Arcana]. I’ve been ripping off of their guitarist for forever, actually,” says McKnight. “So, whatever. I’m not embarrassed.”
Like the few enduring bands of nu metal, there’s a grace and subtlety to Speedy Ortiz’s sound; they play together remarkably and intelligently. It’s, in a way, athletic, almost like swimming in how they harmonize competing rhythms within a single coherent body – Falcone’s fractured and expressive drumming, the aggressive drift of Ferm’s bass, the braiding, ribbony quality of Dupuis’s and McKnight’s guitars, and the acute mosaics shaped by Dupuis’s words. “I’ve heard twice that our record is someone’s gym music,” Dupuis says. “Which, cool, me too!”
