The Story Behind Every Song On Priests’ New Album The Seduction Of Kansas
In the beginning of 2017, Priests released their debut album Nothing Feels Natural. It was a long-awaited confirmation that this was one of the most exciting young rock bands of our time, and it wound up ranking towards the top of our list of the best albums of that year. Just under two years later, they announced a follow-up called The Seduction Of Kansas. And, today, that album is here.
Having perfected a particular version of their sound on Nothing Feels Natural, Priests may have embarked on an exploratory phase with their sophomore effort one way or another. But they were also forced to reevaluate things after Taylor Mulitz departed to focus on his own band Flasher full-time. With Priests reset to the original trio — vocalist Katie Alice Greer, guitarist G.L. Jaguar, and drummer Daniele Daniele — the band set out to find new sounds, to find new ways of playing and writing. The project required redefinition.
In the process, the band teamed with some new names to help them achieve the ambitious goals for their new music. Their latest touring bassist, Alexandra Tyson, contributed to the album, as did DC multi-instrumentalist Janel Leppin, who also played bass while helping craft songs with the trio. All of this was eventually overseen by the all-star indie producer John Congleton, who guided the band in sculpting the wide variety of textures across The Seduction Of Kansas.
The resulting album finds Priests pushing in all sorts of directions, forever dismissing any shorthand descriptions of them as a punk band. The Seduction Of Kansas covers a ton of musical ground and, characteristically, the range of inspirations behind it are vast. Talking over a late lunch in Brooklyn on a snowy afternoon, the three of them dissected the album song by song, throwing out a surprising array of musical touchstones rivaled only by the dizzying collection of non-musical influences — from essays to performance art to podcasts to films to TV shows they haven’t actually watched — that informed The Seduction Of Kansas.
As the band themselves would be quick to stress, you can enjoy The Seduction Of Kansas without knowing each song’s layered backstory. There are moments of customary Priests intensity, like “Control Freak,” and moments of shocking pop sensibility, from the infectious-yet-sneakily-dark “Carol” and “Texas Instruments” to the skewed title track. There are songs that sit in between, like the album’s roaring opener “Jesus’ Son” or “Good Time Charlie,” and there are experimental ventures in the one-two of “68 Screen” and “Not Perceived.”
Now that you can hear all those new songs for yourself, Priests’ footnotes on The Seduction Of Kansas could serve as a listening companion. With the three of them quickly bouncing off of each other, it gives you a sense of everything that went into this album, all the thoughts shared and reframed within the context of Priests’ new incarnation. Read along below.
1. “Jesus’ Son”
STEREOGUM: Why did you want this to be the opener?
DANIELE DANIELE: Musically, it’s the only one that has an intro, by our standards. I like an album that doesn’t just dive into a song in media res, and “Jesus’ Son” has that noise guitar, the bass hits, and then we drop into the song.
KATIE ALICE GREER: It just has this opening feeling for us. “Jesus’ Son” was originally one G.L. didn’t like very much.
G.L. JAGUAR: The song went through many, many incarnations.
DANIELE: It was a trap song for a minute.
GREER: It was, that’s true, there’s actually a lot of versions of it.
JAGUAR: When we first started writing a lot of the songs on this record, our former bass player [Taylor Mulitz] had decided to move on and pursue his own band, Flasher. It was a hard thing, we were really trying to push through and we didn’t take a step back to say, “OK, what are we doing?”
I wanted to be playing a lot more sparsely and taking up less space. Because we were doing it in the original configuration in the band, I was falling back into a lot of traps I’d normally fallen in. Through the process of writing a lot of these songs, I had to relearn how to play guitar in a lot of ways. I had to rethink my approach. The song “Jesus’ Son” took many different incarnations. At first it was more rockin’ janky thing, then it turned into a trap thing —
GREER: It wasn’t literally a trap song —
DANIELE: It just had this sweet R&B vibe. We added this bongos thing —
GREER: We were talking about Primal Scream at one point.
DANIELE: We were testing out different loops in Logic and I accidentally hit something under “Bongos.” At the end of the day we threw it out, admitted it’s a rocker.
JAGUAR: The version before was disco-y. We were all going through a Chic moment.
GREER: Our reference points are always pretty all over the place.
STEREOGUM: I noticed that when the album’s initial press release cited Mezzanine and Portishead and Nine Inch Nails. Those were three things I didn’t expect to see associated with a Priests album.
JAGUAR: Those records all sound really big, and that’s what we wanted to go for. A lot of the lyrics on this album were poking fun at big rock or dude mentality. One band I get a lot of inspiration from is Royal Trux, so I wanted the guitar tone to be very Royal Trux-y, but I was also obsessed with Adrian Belew. How he did a lot of things with effects to make the guitar not sound like a guitar. So when we were doing the solo, I was just trying very hard to … “Do The Belew.”
DANIELE: It’s funny we didn’t land on the Royal Trux thing sooner. If you’re doing a piss take on rock music, your number one inspo should be Royal Trux.
GREER: For me, the idea with this song was a combination of taking the piss out of something but taking the piss out of something that I love and has informed my music tastes. I love … I love rock ‘n’ roll, to quote the Joan Jett song. [Laughs] It was definitely a reference to the Lou Reed line from the song “Heroin,” but also an intentional reference to the Denis Johnson short story, particularly where the story ends. On the last record, I started writing a lot more lyrics that, to me, felt like short stories and character sketches. So I really tried to lean into that.
STEREOGUM: In several of these songs, you’re inhabiting reprehensible characters. Was it strange to enter that headspace constantly?
GREER: Um … no, because it was really fun. When I first got the idea, I was reading the Denis Johnson short story book on tour in Europe last summer, and I thought, “Damn, that’d just be so fun to write a song where I could yell ‘I’m Jesus’ son!’ Oh, ‘Young and dumb and full of cum,’ that rhymes.” I think Daniele has said this a couple times when we were working on this record: Being bad is fun. Think of a villain like Cruella de Vil. The villains in the movies always have the best clothes, they always seem the coolest.
2. “The Seduction Of Kansas”
STEREOGUM: What came first, the song or the album title?
GREER: Song first, we didn’t decide on the album until the 11th hour, when it was like, “You guys have to pick a fucking title.” We were going through so many options.
STEREOGUM: What were some of the alternatives?
DANIELE: All Hat, No Cattle.
GREER: Horny For War, Horny For Sadness.
JAGUAR: In The Windows Of Despair, Stanley Tucci. Not a real title…
GREER: An incredibly high joke from recording. I was really campaigning for Horny For War, Horny For Sadness, and everyone told me we weren’t allowed to make that the title. There were so many though, whereas with Nothing Feels Natural, I came up with the title before we even knew we were making an album. Many things about this record were very different than how we made the last one, which was by design.
STEREOGUM: I’m surprised the title was such a contentious last-minute thing, because hearing this as the lead single and title track, it really feels like it sums up a lot of different directions the album goes in later.
GREER: We wrote the song, and I think afterwards I was like, “Let’s call it this, and what if we call the album this?” Everyone said let’s do it, and then the next day I had a visceral reaction against it. I worried that maybe it would sound too pretentious. But, originally, that’s why I thought it would be a good title. This epic, novel-esque title, like The Rape Of Lucretia, or something.
JAGUAR: Another one you came up with was The Machine, which I really liked.
GREER: This song came together pretty quickly. We were jamming with our friend [and touring bassist] Alexandra Tyson. She and G.L. had come up with this riff together. Eventually we thought it could be a cool song. Then Janel, who was still playing with us, came in and wrote the mellotron parts. They really fleshed out the song musically before I had the lyrics.
I’d been reading What’s The Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank and just thought … kind of like the character study with “Jesus’ Son,” more of a character study with how this writer views the state. I love his writing politically, but I think he’s also great at drawing out these cinematic elements of Americana.
STEREOGUM: Does he use the word “seduction”?
GREER: No, that was mine. A lot of times in the past, we only see it during campaign cycles for the presidency. But nowadays, everything is so obviously polarized that everyone is trying to so hard. Either people are not speaking to the other side or they’re just trying so hard to push that through. I just thought about if this state is a place where different political ideologies have often tried to literally seduce the populace into thinking one way or another… I liked the idea of writing a more traditional pop chorus, saying something like, “It’s you, I’m the one who loves you,” because that’s not really traditionally Priests’ lyrical subject matter.
3. “Youtube Sartre”
STEREOGUM: Towards the end of the song, Katie sings, “Peter Fonda’s USA … Baby Boomer please don’t play.” Clearly you’re interested enough in these Americana iconographies to include and dissect them across the album. But I was curious, are you drawn to it out of a discomfort with that interest in the current social climate? Or is it about reclaiming them as your own?
GREER: It’s definitely been something on the brain for us for a while, inhabiting characters. That’s a cool entry point, those lyrics, because the song was a meditation on taking things out of context. I literally started writing lyrics down as I was watching a film that used a YouTube clip of Sartre talking about how, if we’re going to destroy the bourgeoisie, we will have to literally destroy them, toss a grenade and blow up the whole thing. I was thinking about how creatively fruitful but incredibly dangerous it can be to cherry-pick things out of context. What a dangerous idea that is, to suggest the only way to destroy this evil other side is to blow it up or something.
That last verse you were mentioning was just sort of a nod to — have you seen this recent SNL sketch called “Millennial Millions”? I’m not super hip to SNL but I thought that was very funny. The lyrics about the old USA from Easy Rider that people want to hearken back to and talk about and, “Well, back in my day it was like this and why can’t you do this and that?” The USA’s always been in bed with horrible, imperialistic leaders, you know? That’s probably one of my favorite lines from the record, “Personal freedom has always been ugly.” Because, again, “freedom” is so central to a lot of this American mythology we’ve been taught about. We’ve been taught freedom is the ultimate feeling or goal that we’re working towards, but when you break that down there’s this myth of choice in there, and what does freedom mean, and at whose expense?
JAGUAR: What a time to be alive.
GREER: Musically, it was one of the last songs we wrote for the record. We wrote it with Janel, jamming in the studio one day. I love how Daniele’s drums went once we got into the studio. It sounds like you’re in a race car track and the race hasn’t started yet but there’s dust clouds coming up.
DANIELE: Janel had a very specific reference point for this one…
JAGUAR: It was the bassline for the Herbie Hancock song “Watermelon Man.” She was listening to it in the car on the way. We probably wrote it in five or 10 minutes.
4. “I’m Clean”
STEREOGUM: Daniele, you sing this one. How do you two divide songs up?
GREER: It’s usually if someone brings the lyrics, they’ll take the lead. With the absence of Taylor, a lot of the impetus for our songwriting was like, “If in the past our songs came out of the four of us jamming, how will we do these new ones?” A lot of these songs came out of one person bringing in this idea or that idea. Daniele had been working on this.
DANIELE: Katie and I were jamming. The vocal line mimics the guitar line I was playing, then we dropped that guitar line altogether and put in a different guitar. There’s this podcast called You Must Remember This that I really like. There’s an episode about Grace Kelly, and I’ve always been really into Hitchcock’s Blondes. I heard the episode, I was like, “This is my shit.” One of the things they talk about is how many times she was described as a “snow-covered mountain,” you know like she’s so classy and icy cold on the exterior, but she’s a fucking nymphomaniac volcano on the inside, whooooaa. Like, really? Maybe I’m just scared for my life and that’s why I’m trying to show no hint of desire because if I do you’re going to fucking do something to me and then it’s going to be my fault.
I got really into the iconography of icy exteriors and women. I re-read The Chronicles Of Narnia, so there’s the White Witch line. Just these icy figures and why women present that way. Obviously it’s a defense mechanism. Even a defense mechanism of, “I have no desire,” gets flipped on its head to, “Ohhh, she’s a sex kitten under there.”
I wrote this short story about a woman where, it’s happened to her so many times that she disassociates and becomes a serial killer. A part of her thing is that she knows no matter what she does, men will project their fantasies onto her. So she goes to find the sickest, most violent, most perverted rapists in the seediest bars ever, like “This is nothing,” and smiles and nods. And she has this magic power where after they project all this gross shit she becomes a mirror and shows them how disgusting they are and they are begging and then she kills them out of mercy. I don’t know, I like this short story. And the song came out of that.
5. “Ice Cream”
STEREOGUM: This is one of the more unnerving songs aesthetically, in my opinion.
GREER: That came originally from a demo Janel brought in to practice one day. It’s a really cool song to have on the record because Janel, Daniele, and I all collectively wrote the lyrics. We had just been meditating on anger, and specifically feminine anger: when is it allowed, when is it not allowed, how do people respond to that. When we were recording it, John was like, “Damn, you all sound like the Dixie Chicks.” Which I think was a joke, but it was fun for us to be harmonizing as a trio together.
DANIELE: It’s all one vocal take, we’re all in the same room. If any of us had to redo a part, we all had to. John was really into that one. It made me excited. It gives the vocals … it’s weird how they all meet in a harmony that’s not a traditional harmony.
6. “Good Time Charlie”
STEREOGUM: This song is inspired by a 12 year old movie with Tom Hanks in it.
GREER: Yes! Charlie Wilson’s War. Adam Curtis documentaries are a regular lyrical inspiration for me, and in the film Bitter Lake, he really gives a great deep dive into the West’s relationship with the Middle East over a really long period of time. There’s a snippet in there where he has interviews with this one wealthy-looking blond woman named Joanne Herring who’s talking about how passionately she feels about arming the Afghani rebels and that she truly believes that these people worship the same God as her. So she befriended Charlie Wilson, and convinced this kinda hard-partying congressman who doesn’t really have a direction to push this through Congress.
They made a movie about it. The film was very interesting to me because it came out in a very different era than right now. The way Tom Hanks plays the character, the way the whole movie is done — Charlie Wilson, whether or not it’s explicit, he’s definitely meant to be seen as someone everyone wants to embody. “He has power! He has beautiful naked women around! He does serious work, but he knows how to have a good time!”
JAGUAR: “He’s a devil, but the kinda devil ya like.”
GREER: I was watching it and I was like, “I wanna be Charlie Wilson, his life looks sweet.” But the song was definitely meant to be making fun of, or at least pointing to the absurdity of mythologizing a person like this. If you read the Wikipedia entry for the film, at one point toward the end they were trying to work more into the storyline. The actual truth is that Charlie Wilson’s War fomented what turned into 9/11 eventually. Apparently Tom Hanks said he “just couldn’t deal with the 9/11 thing” and they just pretty much dropped that from the end of the movie. You know, just too icky for him —
JAGUAR: Thanks, Big.
GREER: The whole thing just struck me as very American in many ways. You get to keep the fun guy everyone wants to be, but erase the complicated parts.
DANIELE: Think about how much he looks like Tony Stark. The way his character in that movie is such a Tony Stark character.
GREER: In case anyone’s confused, definitely not meant to be a “Wow, Charlie Wilson is so cool” song.
JAGUAR: This is my mom’s favorite song on the record, if that counts for anything. She’s a wonk.
7. “68 Screen”
STEREOGUM: Whether you go back to your earlier releases or to Nothing Feels Natural, you can catch glimpses of different stylistic detours. But there’s a whole lot of variety on The Seduction Of Kansas. And “68 Screen” in particular is one of the ones that stands out.
DANIELE: I’ve had those lyrics for a really long time. There’s a whole demo of that song, me and my boyfriend at home in the kitchen, me recording with my phone. It was a 4/4, traditional disco-y Daniele shit that I like. I was listening back to our practice space recordings and all the sudden the line popped into my head and I realized if you sang it, it sounded really good in 6/8. But then the verse was in 4/4, and of course Priests never met a weird thing it didn’t like so we were like, “Let’s just jam them together!”
GREER: When we started jamming this one out we were split. Like, “This song isn’t coming together, it’s a lot of weird Frankenstein parts.” But for the same reason feeling like, “This is really cool!”
JAGUAR: It’s really cool to be working with someone like John Congleton, because there are times when it’s almost there and you sit with him and he says, “I see what you’re doing,” and was able to figure out how to make it work.
GREER: Wait! Aw man, one of my favorite things I contributed to this record is the vibraphone riff on “I’m Clean” but I forgot to mention it at the time.
STEREOGUM: You can mention it now!
GREER: The vibraphone, everyone please listen to the vibraphone solo on “I’m Clean.” [Laughs] I asked John to put a lot of noise and distortion on it and I was like, “This is the sound I’ve been looking for.” I also got to play waterphone on “Not Perceived.”
JAGUAR: Katie and I both made our vibraphone debuts on this record. And Daniele on “Kansas.”
STEREOGUM: Why did you all get so excited about vibraphones all the sudden?
DANIELE: Because they sound awesome.
JAGUAR: When does a vibraphone ever sound bad?
GREER: The riff I’d come up with for “I’m Clean” wasn’t working on guitar, and for whatever reason hitting it with the mallets [worked], figuring out the right kind of fucked up noise.
8. “Not Perceived”
GREER: Also a song we have a couple different versions of. I first came in with that as a sketch. I told G.L., “I have this idea, I think it sounds like Sade but like, scary, so it probably doesn’t sound anything like Sade at all.” We were losing our minds for a while while writing this record. There were many different versions, but eventually we got to a place where we were referencing “Hurt” from The Downward Spiral a lot more. Just in terms of how the production builds. We kinda dropped this song for a while, because musically we weren’t getting it to a place where the vibe was quite how we wanted it.
STEREOGUM: And then you discovered the waterphone.
JAGUAR: And the rest is history!
GREER: Before the waterphone —
DANIELE: What was the Rolling Stones song we were thinking of?
GREER: I had been watching Westworld, which uses the Rolling Stones song “Play With Fire” in one of the episodes. It was so effective. I was thinking, what if we tried to apply some of that to this. And then Janel had this lounge-y bass almost. The song, for a while, we couldn’t actually play, because G.L.’s riff and my melody weren’t meshing. But Janel’s bassline was the connecter and it fell into place.
Then we almost dropped it. I don’t even necessarily think of this version as the definitive version of this song. I don’t mean that as a slight. Lyrically, I was happy where it was going. For me, it was a meditation on how weird it is to live in a surveillance culture. A lot of times, we’re thinking about how something is perceived, and sometimes it’s nice to feel invisible.
STEREOGUM: Wait, so whose idea was it to add a waterphone? I still want to know about this.
GREER: Oh, so we were going to John’s studio and looking at his gear list, and I was sending everyone emails like, “Guys! Look at this! Do you know what this is!? Guys do you know what a waterphone is!?”
DANIELE: There were originally like four songs with waterphone…
GREER: [Laughs] Just looking for opportunities to play the waterphone, my new favorite instrument. And finally it made it onto this one.
9. “Control Freak”
DANIELE: This is the first song we wrote.
STEREOGUM: That’s fitting. It’s more aggressive, feels more related to the early stuff. It also sounds like it’s about an abusive relationship.
GREER: Yeah, definitely meant to just be a fucked up person.
DANIELE: [Laughs]
GREER: What are you laughing about?
DANIELE: I was just thinking about how one time you were like, “This song is about us,” and he’s like, “It’s about an abusive relationship.”
GREER: [Laughs] Another one of my favorite lyrics on the record, for more personal reasons, is “I feel misunderstood like I’m some kind of enemy/ When I’m the one in charge of all the things that make you happy.” I’ve just related to that feeling a lot. I was looking for ways to draw up very unsavory, unsympathetic characters for the record but find commonality with them, I guess. I like basing things off of things I don’t actually know much about, because it allows me to be more creative. [Laughs] In that show Twin Peaks, the waitress has a boyfriend who’s really fucked up, and I was kinda thinking of that guy while writing it.
I brought this idea to G.L. when we first started writing the record, and he liked the idea of leaning into this early Sabbath, super stripped back riff that feels mean when you keep hitting people over the head with it.
JAGUAR: When we were just getting started, we were listening to things like Happy Mondays. The Madchester stuff. But I was also diving deep into the Prodigy. We wanted to have this really aggressive song. This was loosely inspired by “Firestarter.” There’s this tremendous drop.
GREER: That’s an important detail. Our original production sensibility for the song was really inspired by “Firestarter.” We mapped out that song and tried to apply it. We’re not usually a genre exercise band, but we were really like, “This feels analogous.”
JAGUAR: It was also the first step in learning how to play again. I was taking up as much bombastic space as I could, which is not what I was trying to do but it ended up working out.
DANIELE: Something about this song feels really indulgent. Like all of us are just wagging our dicks around. There’s a drum solo, just simple hits as hard as possible…
GREER: Really gratuitous —
DANIELE: The effect G.L. uses is so obnoxious —
JAGUAR: So obnoxious.
GREER: We should write up our own track reviews. “Really overindulgent.”
10. “Carol”
STEREOGUM: That’s cool that the one that’s more OG Priests is kinda like, “We’re gonna really do it, and then not do it again.” It’s funny how these songs sit next to each other, because you have one of the nastier songs and then one of the album’s prettiest.
JAGUAR: Originally, there was a point where we were going to start the album with “Control Freak.”
GREER: And at one point it was the closer. We had like 15 different sequences of the album.
STEREOGUM: One of the influences you cited for the album was “strip malls,” and this song actually mentions a strip mall.
GREER: This song isn’t actually about this, but … it’s really depressing how this feels like way more than a year ago. There was a lot in the news when there was the shooting in Las Vegas. One thing that struck me in the news coverage was reading that he had just been able to pick up a gun in a shop that was in a strip mall next to a Dollar Tree and a Sears and a Thai bistro.
STEREOGUM: So one of the prettier songs is also one of the darker ones.
GREER: Lyrically, it’s inspired by this Chris Kraus essay called “Pay Attention.” One of my favorite essays of all time. She tells an anecdote about a conceptual artist named Carol Irving, who had a career in the Foreign Service. She was assaulted while jogging and that changed her perception of life and she decided to go into art. I think maybe part of processing that for her was making art not so much about the assault itself but about having to go to trial and testify. She said she was so struck by how the jurors seemed so grotesquely preoccupied with her describing the assault, and them asking her to describe what it was like to be knifed.
She did this piece where she had people come in and she had a polygraph lie detector set up, and she would ask you questions like, “Is age a barrier to intimacy? Do you believe in free elections?” Stuff that ranged from the really macro to like, “Did your mother tell you she loved you?” A lot of people walked away from the piece feeling angry, like they’d been violated. For her, she was drawing these parallels between being assaulted and the experience of having to go through being questioned about that in order to see retributive justice. Anyway, this is a whole tangent on where the lyrics come from. This was a fun one to musically construct and another that went through many iterations, because we were figuring out how to keep it feeling linear in the sense of you’re moving forward through space in a tunnel, but there’s also action happening around it.
11. “Interlude: I Dream This Dream In Which My Body Is My Own… “
DANIELE: It’s just me and guitar. We wanted more interludes on this record. The poem … it was so last minute, that I had it written down in a really old journal and I pulled it out and I actually read it wrong. I never got to fix it.
GREER: Ah! I didn’t realize that.
DANIELE: There’s one phrase where the words are wrong and it still drives me a little crazy when I hear it. But I think it makes it more spontaneous, which is part of its charm.
GREER: I think at one point you also tried to suggest this shouldn’t go on the record and I was like, “Absolutely not, absolutely not, this has to go on the record.” There’s something about it — I don’t think I can put into words what it is — but it feels like it ties a lot of disparate conceptual elements from the record together.
STEREOGUM: Anytime there’s a spoken word track it sticks out, and that had crossed my mind at some point, too. Actually the more I listened to the album it was almost like “Carol” ended it and the last two tracks were a separate final chapter, doing what you’re saying — spreading out through a lot of the different themes.
GREER: Cool, like an epilogue. I’m glad someone else heard it that way.
12. “Texas Instruments”
GREER: Also one we wrote pretty early on. I remember for a long time thinking I didn’t love where that song was going because it felt very grey to me. Then we started talking about Stereolab more as a reference. At some point Daniele started — I always think of it as the Road Runner or some kind of character running off the edge of the cliff and you hear the drums drop out and then she switches to maracas. Something about that really just felt like, “Here’s the color I was looking for in this song.”
STEREOGUM: This was inspired by David Byrne as well, right?
GREER: Lyrically, this came from the opening monologue in the film True Stories, which is him being an outsider in Texas, a little bit mystified by it.
DANIELE: Oh! In Texas! That was another one of the titles we thought about that we didn’t use.
GREER: It started with that. This song helped me to realize more that — lyrically, for me — it’s not so much an album about trying to be like, “This is America,” but it was about people’s perceptions and mythologies of places. I really relate to that sensibility he has in the film where you go somewhere and you’re marveling at everything around you. Maybe your perception is fake and filtered through your own ideas about things. I mean, that’s a film about supermarket tabloid stories that are not literally true stories. Then the end is a meditation on how we come up with the stories we come up with in history books. Just thinking about the official narratives of what the USA is and built on.
STEREOGUM: It feels like a very appropriate closer. Another pretty song about some heavy subject matter.
GREER: I definitely like playing with that. This is something that people don’t always realize about Priests, but we definitely see ourselves as a pop band trying to make music that is accessible and fun. We want you to be able to dance and nod your head and enjoy the music, and if you want to dig in the concepts, there’s more going on. But you can get into it even without that.