SeeYouSpaceCowboy: To The Dance Floor For Shelter

“What are we gonna do instead? Write a commercially applicable record? No – that’s not really us, it’s never been us.” If there is a theme that has defined the work of SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY work over the past eight years – and indeed our conversation with their frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa just days ahead of the release of their third full-length album Coup De Grâce – it is this. Formed in 2016 by Sgarbossa and her brother and guitarist Ethan, the San Diego-based five-piece have only ever done it their own way, essentially changing skin with every record but never in the pursuit of the approval of others and instead always with the insistence that it is everyone else who must keep up.

Of course, they’ve attracted a fair few people who are willing to try along the way. Even with their earliest and scrappiest recordings the band were quick to build a steady following, one that grew considerably with the release of their outstanding debut LP The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds in 2019. Tempting though it must have been to seek to replicate the success and the savagery of that record – written at what Sgarbossa describes as “a very gnarly time” – subsequent releases saw the band expand their sound significantly, with both their 2021 split with IF I DIE FIRST and their sophomore LP The Romance Of Affliction dipping their toes into the waters of post-hardcore and thus laying the foundations for what was to become their most ambitious, intricate and impossible to pigeonhole work yet.

“For this one for me personally I didn’t really feel like I had to write a really gnarly record,” explains Sgarbossa. “I wanted to do something more fun. I wanted to have something that had influence from dancier records and the spontaneity of old sass records and old indie rock records. It just kind of felt right and it cohesively came together this thing of like ‘we’re gonna go all out with this visual aesthetic and we’re also gonna go all out with this tone that we want to set of basically like a mirror reflection of why we all like hardcore or screamo or anything like that’.”

“It’s like a cathartic expression but not in this detrimental ‘the world is gonna end’ way,” she continues. “More in a hedonistic, almost pure explosion sort of way in which it could be fun, it could be dancey, it could be all these things. It doesn’t have to just be like ‘we take our band super seriously and this is what we feel’. I wanted to have something that reflected that fun, dancier part of catharsis.”

Part of that is also a reflection of the better place Sgarbossa is in right now. Where previous SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY releases have always been unflinchingly rooted in the frontwoman’s own experiences of trauma, addiction and suicidal ideation – Sgarbossa has been very open about the fact that she tried to take her own life just two weeks after the completion of The Romance Of Affliction, for example – Coup De Grâce takes place in a world of the singer’s creation. It’s inspired by noir and neo-noir and pulp comics from the 50s and 60s, inviting the listener into a smoky jazz club to hear stories of a cast of characters in a city that burns to the ground. It’s fictional, sure, but the characters still stem from Sgarbossa and those around her; their world may be more decadent and dystopian than ours – more sensational even – but this is still a personal record.

“I almost approached it like still writing in this very confessional way,” elaborates Sgarbossa . “But I just kind of switched mindsets to being more focused on these external characters and this hyperbolic situation that I might have been in but being able to write it through the lens of a character in a completely different setting. So it wasn’t too difficult to take my own and other members’ experiences and be like ‘how do we turn that into this more visual noir setting?’, because most people who write songs don’t write exactly what the scene was like. We write about experiences that might be more dull in reality, but then you jazz them up and use a lot of crazy visuals and stuff like that to get across what you’re trying to say.”

Coup De Grâce is also the product of more of a collaborative effort than anything the band have done before. With their line-up completed by bassist/vocalist Taylor Allen, guitarist Timmy Moreno and drummer AJ Tartol – as it has been for a while now – everyone had a say in the creative process this time around, the quintet keen to tap into the full breadth of their collective tastes and to ensure that absolutely nothing was off the table. “This was one of the first records where there wasn’t a lot of one of us going off and writing a song and bringing it to everybody,” offers Sgarbossa. “This was very much more like we all sat in their room and wrote everything for the most part together. So it was a much more collaborative process and probably lends to the chaos that this record is.”

“There’s never like a ‘you have to write a gnarly song so I can write gnarly lyrics’,” she adds on the crucial next part she plays in the process. “I’ll always write whatever I want over whatever is put in front of me, whatever feels right at that time… For this record especially, the way that the lyrics and story were structured in a way of telling tales of a city taking from pulp, noir, novels and comics from the 50s and the 60s and stuff like that, it was way more freeing to be like ‘this song feels like this, I want to write this story over it’.”

Ultimately, one of Sgarbossa’s main hopes for Coup De Grâce is that it is approached and digested as a whole, not as a series of vignettes or a selection of catchy choruses and crushing breakdowns to be appreciated in isolation from one another. Perhaps that is no small ask in the day and age of diminishing attention spans and the relentless stream of content and distractions with which we are bombarded in our every waking moment, but those willing to invest in Coup De Grâce will find an album that gives back as much as you give to it – a fully realised world to lose yourself in both visually and sonically, and, above all, proof as if it were still needed of one of the most exciting bands in whatever scene one might try to place them in.

“We’re in [the age of] TikTok and this and that and blah blah blah…” concludes Sgarbossa. “But I still think there’s so much value in albums that are cohesive visions and that tell stories and things like that. That would be the main thing I would want people to take from this, even if we are in this era of short attention spans and massive explosions of appreciation and such, that the art of making an LP and making a cohesive album is still there.”

Coup De Grâce is out now via Pure Noise Records.

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