It Took Sylvan Esso Three Weeks To Create An Album That Is “More Real And About Us, Even If That Was Embarrassing.”

On a Wednesday afternoon during an unusually hot spell in Los Angeles, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn are having lunch on the roof of a Koreatown hotel. The indie pop/electronic duo Sylvan Esso are drinking in the shade of the patio umbrellas, with her sipping white wine and him sipping beer from a can as the sun beats down from a typically cloudless sky.

Meath and Sanborn, a married couple from Durham, North Carolina, have returned to Los Angeles, but they will find a city very different from the one that allowed the event that brought them here to take place. Early in 2022, they drove across the country to Los Angeles to hang out with music friends and write new songs. After omicron ruined New Year’s, the bandmates spent the time making music in their rented house in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. None of them had any other goals than to make the other laugh.

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“Because we were like, ‘Well, it’s about this three-week period of time,'” Meath explains, the rush to release the film was understandable.
They had to wait nine months before returning to Los Angeles, but now that No Rules Sandy is finally out, they can rejoice. It’s an unplanned album, and it’ll be released on Loma Vista this Friday (August 12). The title references Sanborn’s nickname as well as the boundless inspiration they felt while creating it. They both agree that the album was made at a much faster pace than their previous three albums, Sylvan Esso (2014), What Now (2017), and Free Love (2020), the latter two of which were nominated for Grammys in the best dance/electronic album category.

According to the band’s lead singer, the success of Free Love and their tour “kind of got rid of our fears about feeling like we needed to sound a certain way or do a certain thing,” which he reflected on while recording No Rules Sandy in their Durham studio. Hearing that made us realize how much we’d sound like Sylvan Esso if we tried it.”
Meath’s distinct voice floats over productions that are more oriented toward IDM than previous work, but both are clever, playful, and often challenging. The album is the most out-of-the-box thing they’ve ever done, but it’s also the most true to their sound.

It also comes at an inconvenient time for us. Sanborn recently released GRRL x Made of Oak, a techno collaboration with fellow North Carolina producer James Mapley-Brittle, and Meath recently released The A’s, her debut album with Mountain Man’s Alexandra Sauser-Monnig. Sylvan Esso began their summer amphitheatre tour as support for ODESZA on July 24 after performing No Rules Sandy for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival. (Their No Rules Sandy tour is set to begin in 2023)
While they have both expressed concern about there being too much going on at the same time, their demeanors this afternoon indicate that they are simply embracing the chaos. In this video, Meath and Sanborn discuss selling out (or not), being vulnerable, and their new album, which they refer to as “the random detritus of this scrapbook moment.”
You stated that No Rules Sandy marks the start of a new era for Sylvan Esso, whereas Free Love felt like the conclusion of a trilogy. When did you realise it was true?
Meath: The first was about trying new things, and the second was about facing your fears and adapting to the success of the first. And by the third, we’d figured it out; Free Love was a breeze. The release occurred in the midst of a global pandemic, which was tragic. However, despite the fact that it had previously eluded us, the process of recording music became incredibly simple a moment later. The formula was not a mystery; we all knew what it was.
Sanborn: I believe there must be a formula here. We were probably still wondering, “Who do we think Sylvan Esso is?” We were also thinking about what we wanted to achieve as a band and with this album at the time. We felt like we had made our point, said what we wanted to say, and, in some ways, perfected the ideas we had begun toying with on the first record with Free Love. Lyrically, I get the impression that the album just keeps going in circles. It’s a nod to the very first song we ever worked on together. It’s like putting the final touches on a circle.