The Seafloor Cinema: Adjusting Expectations
If you’ve ever been sold the American Dream, you’ll first have to make it through the trials and tribulations of high school. And at high school, there’s always cliques. Jocks and cheerleaders, freaks and geeks, band kids and brainiacs. Music genres are just the same. Draft up a Venn diagram and you might find there’s a few folk who don’t quite fit just one group. Sacramento’s THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA are just that.
If their complex math-rock makes them the nerds of their musical high school, their new-found love for pop sensibilities puts them in with the popular kids, too. And let’s not forget the pop-punk makes them skaters, and their Midwest emo vibes throw them in a bunch of groups. For some it’s a nightmare. On their new album In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound, they’re living the dream.
“We are all big fans of pop music,” beams bassist Seth Lawrenson like a badge of pride. “Justin listens to a lot of EDM and I listen to a lot hyper-pop, so it’s something we’ve always been influenced by but have never let it come out in our music. We haven’t heard a lot of bands have high production like pop songs but with a lot of math-rock technicality, so it seemed like a cool idea.”
It’s not just an idea though. It’s not just something that slipped into a writing session. THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA manifested it. They leaped over to the bright lights of Los Angeles to hang out on Hollywood Boulevard. They huddled down with pop specialist Courtney Ballard (who’s worked with everyone from ALL TIME LOW and GOOD CHARLOTTE to JESSIE J and TORI KELLY). And most importantly, they uttered the words few rock bands muster.
“The entire reason we decided to go with Courtney in the first place is because we wanted to make a pop record,” Seth admits with confidence, before guitarist and vocalist Justin Murry adds, “we wanted to make it more accessible than our old stuff – our last one was more niche, this one is more of a radio kind of thing.” Don’t worry though, THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA aren’t selling their souls just yet. Meddling with twiddly time-signatures and math-rock structures, they found themselves at odds with stirring in a little pop into the mix – but that’s where Courtney comes in.
“We came in with our regular kind of wacky writing, and Courtney was like ‘why are there five bridges in this song? We’re definitely not doing that – make it have one bridge, repeat the chorus three times, and make the hook hit’ and everything he said makes sense, it does make it hit hard.”
It’s hard to make a hit song with a hook that hits so hard you sing in the shower these days. Because music’s moving so fast. Streaming culture has put playlisting on a pedestal and with that comes the need to categorise everything and anything. But THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA refuse to colour within the industry lines. “With today’s music, it’s all categorised and everyone has their specific little niches that they’re going for, but for us, we’re mashing all sorts of different genres together to make something new,” explains Seth, before Justin adds, “this album has a lot of variety – we’re hitting on a lot of pop-punk, and there’s a hyper-pop song in there, there’s a weird cyberpunk electronic song in there, and there’s heavier songs, lighter songs, and an acoustic song. Even though they’re all vastly different, they all retain the same set of SEAFLOOR’s quintessential values.”
As a trio, they wear their values like hearts on their sleeves. Even as they push for pop supremacy, they’ve not forgotten their DIY roots. With a global pandemic putting a stop to all their touring plans, they needed to find other ways to fund a new record. So they went back to the source of it all, the reason they do what they do: the fans. They took to crowd funder Kickstarter to launch a campaign for $20,000 to help them make In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound. It’s a target they were worried about hitting, but by offering rewards as lucrative as naming a song on the record and booking the band for a house show, they’ve since raised $20,760 from 175 different fans.
“We were actually really hesitant, our manager at the time was like ‘let’s set it for this goal’ and we really weren’t sure, and we actually ended up getting there despite all of us thinking we wouldn’t hit it,” admits Justin, before drummer Tim Aldama adds, “20k is a pretty daunting number man, but getting there was absolutely insane – it’s really, really cool to see how many people came through for us.”
By bringing it back to their fans, THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA have found there’s more to crowd-funding than simply raising the cash to keep going. They’ve found they’ve got a family all across the world, ready and willing to support them no matter the cost. “It’s super important to create a family when you’re doing something with heart. The closer people can feel to a family other than just fans is way more important than us just saying ‘you gave me $10’,” Tim explains. “If someone can get a t-shirt or name a song, it’s like we can all remember that little chapter of our life that we just lived. Instead of someone being like ‘oh, yeah, I just gave them a certain amount of money’, they have something they’ll remember forever – they’re not a fan, but a family member, and that’s rad.”
Having made an album backed by their family of fans, they found it easier to pour their feelings into the cake batter that’s created In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound. Written during the height of the pandemic, the anxiety and paranoia it bought to the world is felt throughout the album, even on songs as comically titled as Crash Nebula…On Ice!, Drip God, and Such Smol Hands. “Being at home in isolation was very lonely and put us all in the feels a bit more, so the songs are just a giant range of emotions,” explains Justin, before Tim adds, “writing the record was simultaneously really easy and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do and I think you can definitely hear that in the music.”
It’s a feeling everyone in the band echoed without a doubt. For Justin, just trying to pull it together to make it happen in LA threatened to derail it all – and it went right into the record, he explains, “for me it was just one giant long anxiety attack, from figuring out living situations in LA to hitting our target and staying safe so the entirety of being in LA was so tough that it’s like a fog to me now, to the point I don’t remember tracking some songs.” It’s the same for Seth, too. “The initial writing before we went to LA was a piece, but once we were there, it was super rough just trying to work with Courtney. LA is super huge and everyone’s always doing everything, but we’d be rolling down the highways and there’d be absolutely no one around, Hollywood Boulevard was completely desolate.”
“Our AirBnB’s were cancelling on us, the city itself would try to kill you, and the whole thing was incredibly stressful, and on top of that we have to record an album during a pandemic, so we had this shared mindset of ‘oh my god, I’m so anxious all the time’,” adds Tim, who as the new guy, felt like it was either going to make or break the band.
Thankfully, they made it through the trials and tribulations of a locked-down Los Angeles. And in their wake they’ve sewn the seeds of In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound, an album that sounds as much like COHEED & CAMBRIA as it does WATERPARKS. But more importantly, it sounds like THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA. “I think it’s the definitive version of us so far. We came to LA to make a pop record that had crazy guitars and crazy instrumentation and we succeeded,” admits Justin, as Tim adds, “we definitely made the record we wanted to make – we’re learning how to be a band at its best capacity by doing something that is always evolving, and always trying new things.”
They’re so into trying new things, they’ve got a few ideas for future records already, although we’d take them with a pinch of salt, as Seth jokes “being a part of this band feels like anything goes now, so the next record could be a death metal record and we’d probably all be fine with that.”
Whether they wrestle with death metal or double down on pop-rock, one thing’s for sure: THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA will always be the outsiders everyone loves.
In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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