Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Modeling Each Other
Brothers make music from shared images, memories
Images rather than sound move Modeling to create music. Connor Brogran, the eldest of the three brothers who make up the indie electronic band, says that while they draw from their own musical influences and lives, images anchor their songwriting. With their upcoming release, “Somewhere Before,” they even created a visual blog of grainy film images and gifs to accompany their nostalgic soundscapes.
“Some of those photos have a sound — you can look at those photos and you can feel something instantly,” Cuinn, the youngest of the three, explains. “That kind of stems from movies we see, some of the imagery that Connor collected for that blog. We’ve grown up seeing some of that stuff. So we have a sound in our head — a mood, a feeling.”
“I was very inspired by the movies ‘ET’ and ‘Blade Runner’ for this album. I just listened to those soundtracks a lot, and I watched those movies a lot,” middle brother Ryan says, adding that “Alien” (1986) also seeped into his songwriting over the two years that the three have been working on the album.
The influences of those films show up in Modeling’s “Nightwalker” video as well. Shot at night in and around Arkadia Retrocade in Fayetteville, the video has the vibe of a neglected VHS movie as a brooding Connor walks in front of empty stores in the Evelyn Hills Shopping Center then through abandoned tunnels and along deserted streets. While the video doesn’t contain their music, it shows the kind of images that inspire them.
On top of shooting the video locally, the brothers also made their debut album at home. They had a friend master the album and used artwork from photographer Anders Beulic, who experiments with film and older cameras.
“What’s cool about this album is this is the first thing, the first piece of work, that we’ve ever done solely by ourselves. So we recorded it, produced it and mixed it and wrote it all in our apartment here in Fayetteville, in our little home studio that’s located in our garage, which is where we practice. And it’s like just a little humble studio,” Connor explains. “We started the record at the beginning of the lockdown in 2020.” They had just released their single, “Lodestone,” and started to slowly piece together the album. One of the advantages of the three living together is that they can always find each other to make music.
“We are very comfortable with each other. We know how we all work. So getting into the working environment is very easy, because we just know each other so well,” Connor says. “We have a lot of things that we have similarities that we all share, like with movies or things that we remember from our childhood, that kind of shape how we create music and things like that. So it’s easy to … do that.”
“I think because we’re so comfortable, sometimes we don’t treat it like a job. We tend to just take our time with things because our studio is in our apartment, we are around all the time, so we can just kind of do it at our own pace. I think that’s the only thing that’s a disadvantage,” Connor adds. “We do make an effort to try to make it like a job and show up at a certain time and end at a certain time. So we’re not overworking or just being lazy.”
“The interesting thing about the album is that it’s spanned over two years. So the very first song and almost linearly, when you listen to it, if you hear the first song we ever wrote two years ago, and the last song the one we wrote, like, five months ago,” Ryan explains. “You hear a progression of where we started and how we ended. So that’s kind of interesting to me, because it’s very different. It’s kind of spread out that way.”
Their new album, “Somewhere Before,” drops May 15 across all streaming platforms. Physical copies of the album are on their Bandcamp page.