Splitting the difference between early post-punk and shoegaze revival, Los Angeles 4-piece Steel Wool rose to insignificance in the summer of 2024. The band, consisting of Sean Lissner (guitar/singing), Jaden Amjadi (bass/screaming), Evan Landi (drums), and Sam Schlesinger (guitar), blends ethereal synthesizers and fuzzed-out guitars to deliver soft-yet-abrasive anthems for sitting in traffic on the 101.
Q: In your opinion, what are the essential qualities that make a “good songwriter”?
JADEN: Most essentially a good songwriter writes good songs. It’s something you can feel when a melody fits with a rhythm just right. Or when the artist knows the conventions of their genre and knows just when to lean into them or subvert them – I love to be surprised by songs. Good songs should make you feel something that words alone can’t.
Q: What is the basis for writing attention-grabbing music in this day and age?
SEAN: I think sincerity is so important. The world is constantly bombarding us with so much awful, terrible news all the time that a lot of art has responded by turning to irony and sarcasm. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but honest music is so transportive that you can just blink and find yourself in someone else’s shoes. We’re hardwired as humans to seek connection with each other and I think that when you really try and put yourself into the music and write about issues that are truly affecting you people relate to it with more urgency.
Q: Can you pinpoint some specific songs and songwriters that changed the way you write music?
SAM: Yuck’s self-titled debut rewired my brain when I first heard it as a teenager. I bought the CD at Amoeba Records when I was 15 because I liked the cover art, and it’s stayed with me ever since. They run the gamut from gentle, sweet, mostly acoustic tracks like “Suicide Policeman” to dense, heavy, wall-of-sound songs like “Rubber”. It was a watershed discovery for me, the first time I started to see the guitar as a tool of unlimited sonic exploration. Your guitar doesn’t even have to sound like a guitar! It can sound like a vacuum cleaner, or a jet taking off, or a volcano erupting underground. We draw from that ethos a lot. You catch yourself in the studio saying things like, “how can we get this part to sound more elephant-y?” Beyond that, we all really like The Radio Dept. - they have a really unique sound, like something loud is happening far away. Makes you want to lean in to get closer to the action.
Q: Q: Do you find it hard to be inspired by your peers? Can you name any new artists you find inspiring?
SAM: I don’t find it hard at all. I go to 2-3 shows a week and have my mind blown virtually every time by what people in the scene are coming up with. The other night, I saw this experimental noise rock band Fat Lady Sang, and I think they might be one of the best bands in the city. They do this discordant, post-hardcore set of guttural yells and angular sounds, all the while everyone in the band is dressed in vintage three-piece suits from the 70s. I also really love this band Dutch Interior and have seen them live a few times. There’s six of them, and five of the guys have lead vocals on at least one song, so their sets have a range of different styles and influences, ranging from straight up country western to feedback-y, droning shoegaze. One of their guitarists uses a screwdriver as a slide.
Q: For your new album, what inspired the lyrical content, album title, and overall vibe?
SEAN: A lot of it honestly comes from living in LA. It’s such a large, disparate place filled with so much love and adversity that it’s hard to not get inspired by its sheer scale. It’s not really a city in the traditional sense; it’s more like one hundred cities overlapping and bleeding into each other. You spend enough time here and you start to notice subtle differences - this block uses different streetlamps, the trees smell different on this side of town - and it opens your eyes to how much of the urban fabric is hyperlocal and yet it all blends together to form this cohesive union. We tried to take a similar approach with our record - some of these songs sound nothing alike, but we want them to feel like they belong in the same sonic universe we’re building.
Q: Do you find that you ruminate over writing songs and hold on to them for a long time before including them on a record? Or do you prefer to write them, release them, and be done with them? Do you ever re-visit old material to do a re-write or once it’s done it’s done?
EVAN: It's definitely a balance between the two, but we lean towards releasing and being done with them. We’re big believers in going pencils down at some point because writing and rewriting can yield diminishing returns. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle, and you have to know when you're capturing it, and when the storm is starting to dissipate.
Q: Were there any lessons you learned in the writing and recording process for your current release that you will take with you into your next project?
EVAN: One of the big takeaways is that getting a song to sound so texturally dense is hard! On the next EP, we want to take those textures to the next level. Even more washed out synths, wall-of-sound guitar parts, and swelling ambient details, all happening at the same time. Making those textures sound organized, intentional, and beautiful is a fun challenge and we’re looking forward to diving deeper next time we hit the studio..