Sunshine Slackers is a band built on a decade of shared musical history. When Jack Linden (guitar/vocals) brought a handful of new songs to Deirdre Padric (drums) and Chris Dubrow (bass), the trio, who had played together in various projects over the years, quickly threw together a raw, spontaneous recording session. One three-hour practice later, they were in a basement studio in Philadelphia—surprisingly Gothic for its location—banging out tracks in just eight hours, with minimal fuss: no drum comps, a single bass edit, and a few layers of guitar. The vocals came after a Chinese takeout and a questionable throat spray, resulting in a no-frills, visceral album that cuts out the overthinking and goes straight for gut instinct. Their sound is all tension and release, full of angry, lonely energy that would lose its edge if overworked. With a photo by Bart of a crumbling theater on the cover, the album captures exactly what the band’s about: fast, imperfect, and unpretentious.
How did the band form and what does the band name mean?
We’ve all been playing together for about 10 years; this version of it came around because we had tried to get 2 or 3 other things going before Jack brought in 4 songs that felt immediate and right and we wanted to bash them out and get them out as quickly as possible. The band name came about because Jack sent us a list of band names that included the name Exhaustamundo which I actually love a lot in hindsight but he had the word Slacker in there and we played around with words and sounds that felt right. There’s very little intellectualizing and a lot of instinct with this band: Sunshine Slackers is kinda silly, its alliterative, and it has this sort of malaise to it that felt right. Even writing the word malaise felt unbecoming of what this whole thing is.
Previous musical projects? How'd you first get into music?
Oh boy lets go:
-Rose Boulevard: Big Old Family Folk Pop Band, we had a banjo and a dude named Griffin played Trumpet. There were Hey Ho backing vocals. Chris always wore suspenders.
-Karma Gambit: We still have 10 Power Pop songs that will get recorded one of these days, sorry Neil.
-Jeff Linden and the Black Spot Society: We played in Jack’s brothers Pirate Folk Punk Band
-What was Deirdre’s project called? I think the album was called Social Anxiety: The Musical. Whispers. That project was called whispers, lmao
-Oh yeah Jack did a band called Bombshell Winter for like, 3 months once, great band name
-Deirdre plays with American Stereo, a band that has 3x more guitars than this band, but its not a competition.
-Chris will one day debut his Squeeze cover band, Squoozen and is currently working on an Oasis cover album called ‘I Was Three Pints Deep Whenever I Worked on This”
-Jack one time played Chris an entire garage band project he made in like 2013 after he got really into The National, Jack does that still exist? That was crazy, it was like 7 songs that just sounded like The National.
First concert that you ever went to?
-We all probably have pretty stock answers but my buddy from High School’s first concert was Weird Al when he was like 16 years old and he didn’t really know Weird Al. I think about that pretty regularly.
What's your writing process like?
For this EP specifically, Jack sent Deirdre & Chris 4 songs, we practiced them once for like 3 hours and we went in and recorded: the nature of this project was to put as little space between the creation and the recording as possible, we didn’t want to sit on the songs for too long or try to hyper arrange or overthink anything.
What other artists or songs inspire your music?
Chris: I think Kim Deal will probably sue me for copyright infringement over the bass lines
What's the live experience like and your philosophy on playing live? Do you think the music live should be identical to the recorded version or should it be it's own thing?
This started off as a studio project so we haven’t played these songs live yet. But we can guarantee that Chris will use both a fuzz and an overdrive on the bass at the same time, Jack will wear Flannel, and Deirdre will do that thing where she lands an insane fill and it throws Chris off.
What's up next for the band?
Jack’s gonna come over Chris’ house and record demos for a new batch of songs; we’re then going to send them to Deirdre who’s going not answer the group chat and then Jack and Chris are going to argue in the groupchat about something dumb and then some time will pass and we’ll record those songs. Within all of this is a plan to play these songs live and also get into arguements about whether or not we should try a “grunge cover of This Love by Maroon 5” whatever the fuck that means.