The Ophelias Find Their Groove On Spring Grove

"Open Sky", the opening track from the Ophelias' new album Spring Grove, is addressed to an estranged friend who just got out of a bad relationship. Lead vocalist Spencer Peppet sings, "I don't see you anymore/ It's been three years, I'm better off/ But I had heard what's going on/ And I have got a single thought/ It's: Good for you/ I'm really happy for you."

The whole song is plainspoken like this, like a letter to someone who Peppet knows may never read it. In fact, almost all of the album feels addressed to somebody who is no longer in the narrator's life — although they're not all so cordial. "Even though I don't know what you look like in present tense, the feeling of you haunts me," Peppet sings on "Cicada." "The things that I didn't say are always going to hang above you like a cumulonimbus," goes the chorus of "Cumulonimbus." This would all make for a straightforwardly melancholic album if not for the eerie, dread-infused sonics — cavernous production, queasy violins, low and stalking bass. It makes the presence of these memories feel like honest-to-god hauntings.

The songs were inspired by a period of Peppet's life where she frequently dreamed about having conversations with people from her past. "I think the weirdest part was that most of these dreams were resolutions. Like, I was dreaming about things improving," Peppet says now, on a Zoom call with bassist (and Peppet's fiancée) Jo Shaffer and drummer Mic Adams (the band is completed by violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes). "It was not me getting into arguments with people in my dreams, like screaming 'Fuck you,' or 'I can't believe you would do that.' A lot of the dreams were finding resolution, or people being like, 'Yeah, I understand.' And I was like, 'Oh fuck, I have to go into my subconscious to like, have someone understand me?'

The range of relationships that she drew on was wider than in her previous, more breakup-heavy songwriting, Peppet adds. She's been with Shaffer since 2016, and these songs were written through 2020 and 2021. With one part of her life settled, there was space to explore the other stuff that wasn't. "Part of this record was realizing, yeah, I'm in a happy, stable, loving relationship — [but] I also am still feeling grief and loss and heartbreak, just not in a romantic sense," she says. "A lot of these are not even like just like, friend breakup versus romantic breakup. They're these weird, hard-to-classify relationships, where the thing that helps is writing about them. Trying to figure out what they mean, and what's my relationship to this person, and why does this hurt so bad? But then also, once it's out in the world it's not mine anymore, so if it is a breakup song for someone, I fully support it."

The Ophelias formed as teenagers in Cincinnati. At first they had a different bassist, Grace Weir; Shaffer, who had already directed some of their music videos, joined in 2018. In Cincy, there was a thriving under-21 music scene with the DIY ethos that tends to happen in cities with little cultural infrastructure. "All of us had been playing in bands with some — you know the type — commandeering teenage boys," Peppet recalls. When they got together in Adams' bedroom for their first practice, it was their first time playing together with other girls (Adams came out as a trans man in his early 20s). The chemistry was immediate; they wrote almost their entire first album, 2015's Creature Native, in that practice. "There was just a level of respect and listening that [made us] really tuned into each other right off the bat," Peppet says.

The band caught the attention of Why?'s Yoni Wolf, who took them under his wing, helping to get them signed to Joyful Noise and producing their next album, 2018's Almost. It was while they were touring on Almost that they met Julien Baker; her friend was working the door at a Nashville show and had told her to come check it out. They talked a little at the merch table, exchanged contacts, and a little later the band invited Baker to sing on a track from their 2021 album Crocus, "Neil Young On High." She did, and then hit them up with a counteroffer: she wanted to produce their next record. It would be her first time producing for another band.

So in 2021 the band rented a house in Memphis and spent 10 days tracking Spring Grove with Baker (the band tend to call her "JB") and her usual engineering partner, Calvin Lauber. "Julien is a really good producer," Peppet says. "She's good at looking at both the big, overarching stuff and then also the little tiny details within a song, and manages to feel very holistic and very thoughtful and very nuanced. Also, she has an [audio] engineering degree, so she's able to dial in stuff — 'Oh, I want this amp to sound a little bit more like this, how do you feel about that?' She brought two suitcases of pedals with her." They were a little nervous to get to know her, but the ice broke quickly — the first time they hung out, her dog, Beans, escaped from the band's house, and they bonded while chasing her back down. "That was incredibly disarming," Adams grins. "Frantically running around the neighborhood [with her], I was like, 'Oh wow, I can talk to this person.'"

The fact that the band were in a new city, immersed in making the album instead of treating it like a nine-to-five addition to their normal lives, brought them closer together, and kept them in touch with themselves too. When they came home from the studio, Adams would make dinner, and they'd watch Drag Race together. "You have to figure out ways to maintain this sense of self," Adams says. "This was my life for, like, two weeks. And I kind of felt like I had to just be myself during it, because all I had was myself — I wasn't going home to anything."

Inside the studio they felt encouraged to be themselves too. Since their last record both Adams and Shaffer had transitioned — Adams as a man, Shaffer as a woman. "That does a lot for feeling comfortable in a space, when you're like, oh, I'm actually myself in this space," Peppet says. Adams agrees: "I felt in my own body while we were recording, and not like recording was something that was happening to me, or around me." The environment that Baker and Lauber created for recording felt encouraging and exploratory. Peppet recalls one memory, when she was struggling to get a take right in the vocal booth for the track "Parade." "JB came in and was like, 'Stop thinking about it. Just sing it, and remember what all of the words mean.' And that's the take that ended up on the record."

Another anecdote stands out. After Adams had finished tracking drums for the intense, soaring outro of the title track "Spring Grove," Lauber asked him to get back in there and "play the outro as hard as you can." He did, and watching on the studio couch, Peppet was so affected it made her cry. "It was the first time I needed to play really loudly, and it wasn't like some sound guy at a venue being like, [condescendingly] 'Is that as loud as you're gonna play?'" Adams recounts. "It felt symbolic of being very open and able to be myself."

"It feels like that encapsulates a lot of the experience," Peppet adds. "Just permission."

While the process felt experimental and open, it also felt more focused and deliberate than ever. "With Crocus, we were like, 'Okay, we're gonna invite everyone we've ever met to come play on this record.' Like, let's just expand and expand and expand and expand. Which I think loses a little bit of that purpose, that intentionality, that direction," Peppet says. "With Spring Grove, it was just the four of us and Cal and Julien. So it kind of went from this big thing to like, a distillation of the band and our sound."

Previous Ophelias albums have been folk-tinged indie rock with simple instrumentation and production (Almost got a little more production-heavy, but they scaled it back down for Crocus), but there's always been a hint of darkness under it. "We always used to joke on the road, like, 'Call me chill one more time,'" laughs Peppet. Spring Grove turns that tension into its crux, using carefully-landscaped atmosphere to make the darkness manifest sonically. The lurching "Spring Grove" and hushed, chilling "Vulture Tree" are some of its creepiest moments, while big chorus tracks like "Open Sky" and "Say To You" strike a balance between pop smarts and uneasy undercurrents. It's no coincidence that Shaffer is a horror filmmaker — she's made two feature films — and Peppet has worked with her on scores. "I think the sense of dread and anticipation are really important in horror, and I associate dread with this record, in the textures of it," Shaffer says.

Also palpable across Spring Grove is its sense of release, of long-held anger expressed. The force of that anger comes to a head on "Salome," a cool and driving track where Peppet repeats, "I want your head on a platter." The title and narrative make reference to the Biblical story of Salome, the teenage stepdaughter of King Herod who asked for, and received, the head of John the Baptist on a platter. When she learned the story at Catholic school as a teenager, Peppet thought Salome sounded pretty awesome. "It's using a Biblical story to explain the hundreds of stupid misogynistic things that have happened to us as a band. It gets to the point where the only thing you can say is like, I need to run through the woods with a knife, right?" Peppet says. "Obviously Mic is a trans guy, Jo's a trans woman, we've had a fair amount of different experiences of accepting and rejecting womanhood. And I think that one of the parts that makes this [album] distinctly feel like it is connected to that experience is that feeling of righteous anger."

Spring Grove feels like a landmark moment for the Ophelias. It's a delivery on the promise that they've been showing over their last several records, and a statement of fully-realized identity. It's fun to think about what will happen from here — and excitingly, there are a lot of new songs sitting in a Google Drive folder, Peppet reveals.

"Something we've been talking about is trying to play more new songs on the road, and just road test them before we record them, which we haven't done before," Peppet says. Adams agrees: "Time is really important, I think, fleshing out a song and living with it and letting it grow and breathe."

"I feel like electronic sounds is something that I'm curious about," adds Shaffer. "We've talked about adding a sampler into our live sound. Just continuing to play with texture."


Peppet sums up: "I think [the plan is] more exploration, with all of the trust that we've built up over the years."

Spring Grove is out now via Get Better. Purchase it here.