Kaydelis POPS off with "UrgentPop"

Kaydelis sat down with Urs Truly ahead of their album release to discuss their experiences, transitions, and hopes for their latest record titled "UrgentPop". A fusion of psychedelic pop and dance, the band dives into the birth of this project, giving us a closer look at how they reached their current sound and a glimpse into their past.

Can you walk us through “Put It To Rest” and the other single “Just Because You Can?”

Jack: We’re trying to make people dance. We have some experiences with the Atlanta club life scene or whatever. That’s kinda what we’re trying to emulate.

Do you guys party?

Jack: Not that we party like crazy or whatever, but it's something we can tap into because I think it's real for us and something that we’re experiencing at this stage in our lives. It seems like it's a genuine thing to express.

Adam: It's almost a critique of that same scene. A lot of people in our generation are caught up in the nightlife, and I don't take “urgent pop” as shrouding it, but more of looking at it and making observations. Not necessarily saying you know…

It's good or bad.

Adam: No, just enjoyable.

“Put It To Rest” kind of seems like a city boy anthem.

Martín: Most definitely.

Adam: I don't wanna say it's ironic, but definitely not from our perspective. The lyrics are pretty cut and dry but not something I would endorse.

Jack: No, it's definitely a city boy anthem. It’s just stories from perspective, almost like vignettes of ideas of things within this realm of partying and dancing.

Adam: I don't know if you’ve ever seen the film Magnolia by [Paul Thomas Anderson]?

I have not. You might have just put me on.

Adam: It's vignettes of people's lives and just interconnects with each other. I would say the album is a model of that.

Adam and Jack met in ninth-grade biology, where they mentioned their teacher at the time still keeps up with the band to this day. Gaining attraction throughout high school, they hosted shows in which their current guitarist, Martín, was initially an audience member.

What’d you think as an audience member?

Martín: That moment was one of the moments where I was like, “I want to do this for myself.” It really had me grinding to get better at my instrument. I had no band, but I wanted to make a band. I just knew I wanted that for myself. Eventually, they lost a bandmate, and so the opportunity kind of presented itself to me. That was like a full-circle moment for me.

Jack: I was friends with Martín even before he was in the band too from soccer and stuff. Me and Martín were hanging all the time, and Martín started playing guitar. I wanted him to keep doing it, and then the way that started, I was like, “Let Martín join.”

The band starts talking about their first show together.

Martín: That was an amazing experience.

Jack: There were like a hundred people there. It was fun.

Were you nervous, Martín?

Martín: Dude, I have never been more nervous in my life.

Jack: He killed it though. He did great.

Martín: It was scary, bro, and like it was kind of cold. I felt like I couldn't feel my fingertips and froze up on stage.

What do you think is different about chemistry?

Adam: We have defined roles. Clear communication, channels of communication. We all know what we're supposed to do. Whether we deliver on what we're supposed to do all the time… you know we’re not perfect. I take care of production. Martín takes care of booking, and Jack takes care of a lot of social media.

Jack: It's like pillars. These three pillars, and they blend.

Martín: We’re all capable to some degree of doing the other person’s role too. It's fun because we get to experiment.

Before Kaydelis, y'all were known as Lakota. Back then, it was kind of more of a garage rock sound maybe inspired by that 60s and 70s y'all were talking about earlier. Now that you’ve made the full transition to Kaydelis, I feel like we’re more genreless. How did y'all get to this part of the creation process?

Adam: I think we’ve spent a lot of time trying to decide what our genre’s gonna be. Probably too much time. Then we unlocked being able to do a full album from our basement. Once we were able to unlock that quality that we could do it, it became genreless because we could create anything. We listen to a ton of music. There are days where I wanna have a country thing going on or maybe EDM-based or whatever it is. I think becoming a music collective and more genreless opens you up to more opportunities.

The band then opened up about their song Wrath/Fury, a collaboration between Kaydelis and The Vents, featuring lead vocals from Kelley Cantrell. At the time of this interview, the song was nearing twenty thousand listens on Spotify and has since reached twenty-three thousand streams in only a few weeks.

Do you think you’ll dive deeper into making more songs like that?

Jack: We were listening to a lot of Men I Trust, and a lot of female-led artists. We were obsessed with that.

What is the writing process like?

Adam: Nowadays we each do our own thing. We don't really write together at all unless it's down to the last finishing touches. Put It To Rest, for example, pretty much the entire production was done before any of them had heard it, and then Jack hopped on the vocals.

We got songs on the latter half of the album that Jack did entirely, and then I just heard them once we were doing the vocals. It's not like a team writing process. I think we’ve had problems with that in the past.

Martín: Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of times where we’re all sitting down working on a song. We’ll dedicate days, “today we're working on the album,” but it's never like we're writing a song from scratch. It's more about wrapping a song up when we're all together for it.

Jack: It's so much easier when there's less people attached to it. It's nice when you can kind of choose when you're ready for input.

Adam: A lot of it is in the box, on the computer. In the old days “What's the Use” or what are some of our older songs?

Martín: “Fiasco”

I love Fiasco by the way. I actually wanted to do it for your visualizer later. But Martín said he hated it or something like that.

Band: It's just old.

But it's timeless. To an audience member, they’re not going to realize that it came out 2 years ago.

Jack: Some people [say] that's their favorite.

The band begins to discuss their days of living on campus at Kennesaw State University. They share that much of their early projects were recorded at KSU place. Today, the band records in their home, where they converted the basement into a studio known as 30 Foot Studios.

Do you know when you're in album mode?

Adam: When we set out to make "UrgentPop", it was what? Probably a year ago. We knew we were writing songs for this project and kept it within certain bounds. Not necessarily saying nothing can go, but it was pretty tight.

Jack: We’ve cut tons of songs from this record.

Adam: There are probably 25 demos of this project.

I can't wait to hear it.

Jack: It only does get better.

Martín: I definitely feel like this is another level. This is gonna feel like a complete record, whereas I feel like “World’s Greatest Race Car Driver” was more a collection of songs. This is an album.

It sounds like you guys know what process you're in for this album, which leads me to my next question. Content might be the next thing to think about. Jack, could you walk us through the content creation process? It seems like you handle a lot of it.

Jack: All of it.

Do you have free range to try every idea?

Martín: All of our album covers are done by him.

I saw a black and white sketch, and it was in one of your visualizers for a song.

Martín: I think it's ballads.

Yeah, you won something for that, right?

Jack: In high school, I was taking an AP art program. So I had to make a portfolio, and it had to be guided by a sustained investigation, which is a question. The question is, "How does music affect me as an artist?" I had to answer that question through 10 different pieces, so I chose to do a bunch of multimedia and self-portraits. That black one was one of the pieces I made. I just had all these pieces, and I didn't know what to really do with them, so I turned them into album covers.

So everything from that senior year you compiled into covers for the band?

Jack: Yeah, I love them.

They’re badass, dude.

Jack: Thank you. They're all around our house. The “Wrath/Fury” one is painted on cardboard and is just sitting in the studio.

On visualizers for “Just Because You Can”:

We saw that “Just Because You Can” has a visualizer that reminds me of the old Apple commercials. Are we going to see similar vibes that give off a nostalgic feel?

Jack: I liked how each song had its own thing on the last record. I want to explore that with this record but condense it a bit more. I think I’ll go for giving each song its particular vibe within the album's overall vibe—like different stories being told throughout the same night or summer.

This current state of Kaydelis sounds like you’ve been experimenting with new sounds but have been in a groove for a while. Did it come naturally or was it an accident?

Adam: It’s got to be a happy accident, right? The new sound, especially for "UrgentPop", has a lot of breakbeats and four-on-the-floor stuff, but everyone can do that. This guy (points to Jack) came up with the idea to put 606’s on almost every track. That’s our sauce right now, just putting that drum machine on there. It has a warm, vintage sound—almost like a 90s or early 2000s nostalgia. I think that has defined our sound so far.

Jack: There are certain synth sounds we’ve repurposed and used intentionally across the record, whether upfront or in the background.

Martín: All the synths we use are different plugins.

Adam: We like to work in the box a lot. None of us are real keys players, but I feel like the thing you can really tell is that we're not real keys players.

Jack: It's just simple stuff to us. We're not virtuoso musicians or anything; we just like pop songs.

Kaydelis might not say it, but they definitely achieved a sound that's fully their own. Listening to the album, it’s very consistent in areas, but you can tell it's something they took a lot of time to craft. With every song, each LED pattern of the dance floor illuminates, inviting you to stay and hang for a bit. I listen and hear elements inspired from synth-pop like Daft Punk. "To Korea, With Love" features that similar robotic vocal effect. It's tastefully done so that it doesn’t overbear but adds a chromatic flavor to the record.

We're going to go back a little bit. Talking about “World’s Greatest Race Car Driver,” I'm going to give y'all my first thoughts, but then I want to hear what it was like making the album and where your heads are at now that it's been out for a while. I personally love the album, and I can hear it visually—it feels like a movie to me when I listen to it.

Starting with "Ballads," you have someone who’s excited to see the world, and then in "Transmission," it feels like where the transition is happening to where the person who was excited now sees the world for what it is. They've matured a lot in tracks like "Stardeck" and "Wrath/Fury." When y'all were making it, did y'all see it like that?

Adam: I think you've put it into a new perspective for me, and now I can appreciate it more. "Ballads" was supposed to be a goodbye to the music we had been making—very single-heavy, ballad-oriented songs. It was about getting away from wanting to make more pop music, things that really resonate more in the modern times. A lot of that record is wanting to take it towards a more synthy, Men I Trust, Marias kind of chilled-out sound. "Stardeck" and "Wrath/Fury," I feel like that really shines through. In fact, we were really making a record centered around "Wrath/Fury." That record never came to fruition.

Martín: It might one day.

Jack: It might one day, but "UrgentPop" just grabbed us.

Adam: "Hardly Yours" was one of those songs. The latter half of that album, World’s Greatest Race Car Driver, transitions, and I feel like that was the step-off point of, "Okay, once we made the WGRC song, that is the music we want to make. We want to make dance music." That's what sparked "UrgentPop", a love for that song. We went through three different versions of that song. One was more of a Radiohead, slowed-down version, and then the second ended up being what came out. I wish we had that old version, 'cause that'd be pretty cool.

Any other initial thoughts or post-thoughts about “World’s Greatest Race Car Driver?”

Martín: I've said this before, and I genuinely feel like the reason maybe we don't like some of those songs is actually what makes people love it. You can see clear growth throughout the progression of that album 'cause that was literally the first album we had ever made in our new space as well. So that was a huge growing period, and I mean, what one person deems to be a mistake, a listener can take it as a nuance or a new take. So, there are some mixes that maybe we would listen to and be like, "Well, this just sounds messed up," but somebody else thinks that sounds really unique and cool.

Adam: Like how you said "Hate This City," you really like that song a lot.

I can relate to it. The subject of the song, I've been a guy who's had a lot of crushes before, and it kind of feels like "Hate This City." When I was listening to it, you see something that kind of made you feel some type of way when you saw it, therefore you hate everything around it, and you hate everything to do with the city... also the traffic.

Adam: We were literally in traffic when the term "Hate This City" was coined. None of us said it, actually. But when I hear that, it’s probably the worst mix I've ever made in my entire life, so it's hard for me to understand, but I also can't look at it from my experience, 'cause that's not really what matters.

Jack: We got to give ourselves a little credit because our perspective as a band our age is not normal.

Adam: I think on that whole record, it's a lot about learning how to make songs, whereas on this new record, that's not gonna be a problem. We know what we want—these songs are going to be refined, carefully refined. I feel like we really know what we're doing on this next one.

Jack: Back to our perspective of having a studio—that's not normal for most bands. Most bands don't have the full access to the little detail of the sound, and that works in our favor and also could be working to our detriment, too. It's just perspective. It makes it different, you know? Even the nuances in our mixes, like Adam, is fairly new to production compared to somebody who pays five thousand dollars for their album at whatever established studio. That guy that they pay five thousand to is gonna now produce your song, and if he is, it's gonna be different. I think that with all of us having just our eyes and hands on it is pretty cool.

"UrgentPop" is out now! Stream it and be on the lookout for any show updates from Urs Truly or Kaydelis!

Special thanks to Martín Rodriguez, Adam Edwards, and Jack McWhorter.