Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
New York City transplants are, and always have been, the subject of scrutiny. Most of the time it’s called for. It’s easy to picture an audacious, “former” theater kid that just got their degree from a small liberal arts college and is desperate to make sure nobody finds out the square footage of their parents’ Jersey Shore beach house.
Indie rock quartet Laveda are in the process of being fully based in Queens, with each member moving from their previous residence in Albany one by one. Where many would approach this life change bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, frontwoman Ali Genevich and band members Jake Brooks (guitar, vocals), Joe Taurone (drums), and Dan Carr (Bass) keep their ears to the ground. They still have their day jobs, but their music is made with the attention to detail that proves they’re in it for the long haul.
I met up with the band just after watching their sound check at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. They played “Troy Creeps,” a highlight from my introduction to them, 2023’s A Place You Grew Up In. That record is a true testament to Laveda’s range: from the trippy, brooding “So Long” to the forlorn balladry of “Crawl” and “Be Yours” and the hooky pop-rock sensibilities of “Surprise” and the aforementioned “Troy Creeps.” Their newest record, Love, Darla, released last Friday, is a step inward. Inspired by the NYC underground of the ’80s and ’90s, the LP is unmistakably, traditionally, punk.
Upon wrapping their soundcheck, we made our way to a Mexican joint down the street, one that Genevich and Brooks have already found themselves to be frequent visitors. The place exemplified the craftiness of the city’s nooks and crannies. We put in our orders on index cards with pens taped to plastic butter knives – we dined in a repurposed warehouse with routine alarms and bells briefly interrupting our conversation. Environments like this are at the heart of Love, Darla. “I feel like at least for this new album, for me, it was very inspired by my natural environment. All the sounds and the people – kind of crazy interactions and just the kind of constant buzzing that you really feel in the atmosphere. I think that definitely got its way into a lot of the new record,” Genevich explains. Brooks continues her thought: “When we wrote the record, it was the two of us here and we were like going up to Albany to rehearse the songs that Ali and I had done without [Carr and Taurone]. I feel like it was really inspired by a lot of the noisier bands that we were seeing in the scene. We started listening a lot of Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead as well.”
Those influences make themselves clear in the disoriented fervor that Love, Darla encapsulates. Opener “Care” sets the scene with wailing, distorted guitar feedback segueing into the song’s breakneck paced body. Second single “Cellphone,” was once declared a song with filler lyrics, but has become a succinct and direct airing of frustration with social media. “I don’t need to know that my hair looks like a boy,” Genevich repeats at the end of each verse. She attempts to be true to both her experiences in the present, and those of the bands that inspire her. “A lot of legacy New York bands, I feel like I was asking myself, ‘what were they doing when they lived here?’ It just felt appropriate to visit a lot of those sort of bands and sounds. I never had really wanted to do that until living here. Anytime I listened to Sonic Youth upstate, I was just kind of like, ‘eh, it’s a noise rock band, whatever,’ you know? There’s something that kind of clicked about it here,” she explained. “I think also being on the train and listening to noisy music is awesome because it just complements so well. If you’re wearing AirPods, you’re not wearing noise canceling headphones, so you can hear everything else going on. You might as well just like accept it as part of the whole.”
While some may take a band’s sudden shift to punk as the mark of a poser, Genevich is honest and genuine about their newfound inspirations. “My friend Jayanna, she puts me onto a lot of cool music and she was like, ‘Oh, we gotta watch this Fugazi documentary.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re one of those bands that I heard some of their popular songs on the radio growing up, but I had never done a deep dive.’ Her and I watched some of the documentary, and then Jake and I watched it because I was like, ‘It’s so good, you have to watch it,’ she recalls. “I just liked all the energy kind of around their sort of like fan base and their like DIY ethics. And their music is also very like, it’s cool. It’s got a lot of different, they have a lot of different bases I think that they went through as a band too. Like punkier, a little like more mainstream. And then they have some like ballads too, which I think is awesome. I feel like everything in DIY ends up like tracing back to them. Unwound, too.”
Love, Darla finds itself in bits and spurts of Laveda’s past year. The hums of moving trucks and tour vans penetrated many waking moments. Genevich reckoned with unfamiliar processes. Their consistent touring schedule caused for a lot of songs to evolve in real time, on stage. “We were playing ‘Strawberry’ and ‘Heaven’ on our tour last March down to SXSW when they were brand new songs. We were really excited to play them but I think because we played them for four weeks I think like we all figured out all the little nuances and the way that we wanted to play those songs together,” she recalls. “That was a big factor into shaping the rest of the songs on the record. I was like, ‘I know how much fun we all have playing these two songs specifically. So, how can we do that for a whole album?’”
“Heaven,” the record’s first single and crown jewel, breaks from the outright punkiness of the rest of the record. Its dreamy, chorus-pumped guitars harken back to their previous records with a newfound maturity. Laveda’s running producer Scoops Dadaris rounded out the record’s creative team, and the band gushed about his penchant for rules as a strategy to incite creativity. They abandoned using a metronome during recording, calling for bending tempo naturally as a band. More unconventionally, Dadaris would tell everyone to take a bit of a hot pepper to see if it affects their playing. “Didn’t help, but it was very fun,” Taurone recalled. “I think a lot of people think that having rules limits you creatively, but I think it’s actually the opposite,” Carr added.
Genevich may have written most of these songs on her own, but she rushes to give the rest of the crew their flowers. “I showed [Dadaris] he demos of the record right when I’d finished them and I have to give him props because I was like, ‘this could just be terrible.’ I felt like I was in a very vulnerable position and he really liked them so I was like, ‘thank God someone I really trust is good at what they do,’” she admits. “I was just happy that he was into it because I think it did give me more confidence and think ‘ok, if they are good the way they are now, then they’ll only be better after [the rest of the band] come in and put their shit on it.’”
The result of that built confidence is the backbone of Love, Darla. The soft, breathy, vocals Genevich cultivated on Laveda’s previous records is traded in for riot grrrl screaming and talk-singing. They pack a punch – retracing the footsteps of their NYC underground predecessors.
Love, Darla is out now.
—
Leah Weinstein | @leahetc_
The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.