Talking Sertraline Dreams with Pretty the Band
Photo by Elijah Shark
Antidepressants and studio time with Psychedelic rock band Pretty
When asked about the concept of their upcoming album and newest single “Sertraline Dream,” vocalist and guitarist Torin Craig replied quickly: antidepressants.
“It’s an unintentional concept album now. The name “Sertraline Dream”—that’s Zoloft. I can't tell you what one song is about over another but the whole hodgepodge thing of it is just trying to be happy or just figuring that kind of shit out. [It’s about] being a young person nowadays, when everyone you know has to take medication to get through their day, having a smile on your face as you take your pills.”
The heady, psychedelic sounds Pretty evokes this in their latest release. Their sound is equally euphoric and contrived, meant to bring a room of people together, much like they sought to do in their recording process. The band laid out the new music on a 16 track in a matter of days back in January.
“It was honestly such a fun process,” bassist Will Macquarrie comments. “This is how it all clicked together. We essentially went in and did our live set. It's so much more real when you have the energy of everyone in the room.”
“[It’s] always interesting to show that to people and have them be like ‘wait, you actually performed that?’” adds guitarist Eliot Rossi. “It's also super weird to hear that ‘cause the songs on that record are [examples of] just one of the hundreds of times we played those at this point. So to think about the fact that people are going to be hearing those versions but forever [as] the definitive version is very surreal because we know we played them both better—and worse.”
With the surge of home recording, studio time is becoming less accessible and commonplace. The band noted the benefits of being in the same space together during the recording process.
“Being in a group of people together trying to do a creative pursuit when you're all dealing with your own shit—being able to just get into a room and having a good time together and then be like, ‘All right, what we did that, we're going to put that away now.’—is very nice, instead of sitting in front of a computer full of waveforms drowning in everything you could do and the perfectionist attitude,” says Torin. “It was the best recording process for us in the sense that we could actually just go in and enjoy ourselves. It cut out a lot of the anxiety that goes around music-making.”
“You have to figure stuff out with other people, because over time you learn what works and what doesn't, versus if you are just layering stuff in a computer by yourself,” says Eliot. “Studio time has never been cheap, but at least there's been financial backing behind it in the past. It doesn't exist now, so a lot of people kind of have to resort to bedroom recording.”
Like many artists in the midst of the global pandemic, finding ways to keep creating has been difficult. “Not playing live shows sucks,” says Will. Torin adds, “It makes you re-evaluate everything on the whole. You're sitting in a city that is getting ravaged by austerity and incompetent leaders and it makes you wonder if they would even want music or art here given the way they treat it.”
“It's a slap in the face to musicians as well, specifically because a lot of the COVID restrictions affect music performance,” adds Eliot. “I think not performing is kind of untenable. I don't think we can carry on not playing music for people like for an extended period of time, so we're going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn't look like what you know. We're going to have to figure out how to perform not at a bar, basically.”
Despite the bleakness of the pandemic, the band noted the opportunities for much-needed change within the Toronto scene brought on in the last few months. We're going to have opportunities for new venues, new places to perform at, and new styles of performances that are outside of that atmosphere that we had for so long, which wasn't really working anyway,” says Torin. “Socially, [the pandemic has] also given people a chance to evaluate who is in the scene, and be able to purge the scene of people who treat other people like shit.”
“There will be more venues, music is not going to disappear,” adds Will. “Maybe it just means that things will look different.”
You can stream Pretty’s latest single “Sertraline Dream” on Spotify now.
Instagram @prettytheband