Taking the ‘Highway’ to new sound
After viral hit, Melt gets meditative with quarantine EP
Melt’s new EP, “West Side Highway,” pushes back with wounded, meditative songs. What’s Melt pushing back against? Its own sound, life without an audience, art in quarantine.
A seven-piece indie rock/ soul/folk band fronted by current Tufts student Veronica Stewart-Frommer, Melt scored a viral hit in 2017 with “Sour Candy” — an irresistible pop song that trades gloss for r&b vocals, jazz instrumentation and a thoroughly organic feel. The track’s success opened the door for the band to build a solid fan base through weekend-warrior touring (like Stewart-Frommer, most of the band members are still in college, although not at Tufts).
“The first song (keyboardist) Eric (Gabriel) ever wrote together was ‘Sour Candy’ and we were in high school and didn’t mean for the band to go anywhere,”
Stewart-Frommer said. “But we decided to put a video out and someone put it on Reddit and our whole world was turned upside down.”
Despite everyone heading off to different colleges, Melt made the band work. On weekends and breaks, the group wrote, recorded and toured. Then came the pandemic.
Most of “West Side Highway” sounds nothing like “Sour Candy.” The band’s decision to explore new ground was both a conscious choice and a byproduct of abandoning the road and quarantining.
“The mood in the studio wasn’t, ‘Hell, yes, let’s go play a live show,’ it was mellow and reflective,” StewartFrommer said. “Since ‘Sour
Candy’ went viral when we were such a young band we always thought it would be a shame if we were to lock ourselves into one thing. … We are definitely testing different sounds out and I doubt that this will be where we land.”
Collaboration was integral to the writing process on “West Side Highway.” Members brought in scraps of music and the band built them up together. And unlike Melt’s early songs, which seem designed to get an audience on their feet and dancing, much of the EP lets the members interact in subtle, understated ways.
“Looking back at our previous discography, a lot of the swelling of the songs goes straight up and ends with me just wailing,” Stewart-Frommer said. “I love that. I love to go for it and riff and do my thing. But this process was really new for me because we focused on stripping songs back and trying
to capture the essentials.”
By May, all the members besides Stewart-Frommer will have graduated — she is set to graduate in 2022. The singer says she’s happy she stayed in school and never really considered leaving. But she misses the chaos and fun of cramming together classes and dozens of shows a year. The new EP is a triumph, but not being able to perform has sucked a lot of joy out of Melt, which manages itself and releases its music independently.
“A lot of the stuff we do day-to-day is administrative stuff, doing the finances and all the boring stuff that’s not making art,” she said. “Shows are what invigorates us artistically. … It’s like, ‘Damn, am I really a musician right now or an administrative assistant.’ We are so excited for shows to come back.”