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Music

BRONCHO Choose Their Own Adventure

The Oklahoma boys return a third LP of woozy, narcotized grooves. They might be psych-pop, nu gaze but now they've got their sights set on Bey.

If you know BRONCHO, you’ve probably cursed at them at least once for lodging an upbeat, unstoppably catchy song in your head—perhaps you heard “It’s On” soundtracking the closing credits of an episode of Girls. If you don’t know them, the staccato “doot-doot-doot” in “Class Historian” will make you understand the sitch immediately. But on their newly released third LP, Double Vanity (via Dine Alone Records), the Oklahoma-based quartet are switching it up by slowing things way down. Don’t worry, though: They’re still staying true to their signature garage-tinged glam rock.

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“I wanted to play slow but still have energy,” explains lead singer and guitarist Ryan Lindsey. “So I started thinking about people doing this…” Lindsey trails off, then demonstrates by closing his eyes and swaying back and forth. “A slow headbang, a slow groove. Chill, but still really feeling it …” Smiling, he lands on a fitting phrase: “An emotional slow headbang.”

At this point, Lindsey and his bandmates (including drummer Nathan Price, guitarist Ben King and bassist Penny Pitchlynn) start to laugh. The quartet are perched around a hightop table at Bouchon Bakery in New York’s Columbus Circle, and despite a busy morning—they’ve stopped by on their way out of the city, headed for Nashville—they’re pleasant and surprisingly soft-spoken. Though Lindsey talks the most out of the group, he’s still the definition of chill: dark, tousled hair, circular sunglasses hanging around his neck, and a hazy half-smile on his face.

Lindsey’s characterization of Double Vanity does feel spot-on—and not just because he swears he’s seen crowds at BRONCHO shows doing the newly christened “emotional slow headbang.” Clearly, the album’s connective thread is a woozy, narcotized groove, but what makes it work is that the songs don’t sound the same. The record’s first two singles, “Señora Borealis” and “Fantasy Boys,” are prime examples: the former is a slinky call-and-response between gritty guitars and Lindsey’s heavily reverbed vocals; the latter is ethereal, laced with spaced out layered harmonies.

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Double Vanity’s slower pace does feel like new territory, but oddly enough, the other thing that differentiates the album from BRONCHO’s first two full-lengths (2014’s Just Enough Hip to Be Woman and 2011’s Can’t Get Past the Lips) involves time too, but in the opposite way. “This record just happened much quicker than the first two, ” Lindsey says. “[With Double Vanity], we had melodies, and then showed up at the studio and just started knocking out lyrics. It was really nice, really uplifting, to just go [to the studio] and do it.”

One reason the record materialized so swiftly is that the band wrote “Highly Unintentional” and “Jenny Loves Jenae,” for Just Hip Enough to Be Woman. When the songs didn’t fit, they ended up as the foundation for Double Vanity: “[Those two songs] were slower,” says Lindsey. “But there was an emotional quality to them that I felt was just as strong as the more uptempo songs from our last record.”

“Jenny Loves Jenae” also happens to be the song on the record that’s most personal to Lindsey, even though he says it’s not based on his own experiences: “It’s a love story. With most of our songs, you can take multiple meanings from what we’re saying, so I like the fact that that one is so straightforward, that there’s only one way to take it. I’d been playing with the song for a while, so the fact that it worked out on this record made me feel like I’d accomplished something.”

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Besides “Jenny Loves Jenae,” Lindsey loves the lyrical ambiguity of the songs on Double Vanity: “I always liked Choose Your Own Adventure books and I like doing that, musically,” he says. “The [books] give you a role and then you have a little bit of control over the situation. I don’t necessarily need to control things, myself, but I like that you can [listen to the record and] play a part in choosing. This is our Choose Your Own Adventure record.”

The singer becomes resolute when explaining how he finds songwriting process both cathartic and stressful. “A song will play through my head for weeks,” he says. “Sometimes it’ll drive me nuts. And sometimes it’ll be something that keeps me calm for a while. If I have an idea I really like, it can make me feel really good, it can pull me out of depression, or it can send me to depression… But that’s what I like about writing, in general. It helps me through anything I could be going through.”

Even though BRONCHO are embarking on another adventure this summer—they’re opening for Cage the Elephant—the center of their universe has always been Norman, Oklahoma. All four members are originally from the area, but met when they started playing in bands that ran in the same circles. “We were bumping into each other all the time,” Price says. “Just playing on each other’s shit.”

Lindsey adds wrly: “We all found each other and formed a perfect union.” Unofficially, this union also includes their friends who own Blackwatch Studios in Norman, where the quartet has recorded all of their albums since forming in 2010. “[Our friends at Blackwatch] co-produce and engineer our stuff with us,” Lindsey explains. “Ultimately, they know how to communicate with us. That’s the reason we’ve done every record with them. But that’s not to say we wouldn’t [make a record] with someone else. Who knows. There might be some dude who just walks in the door and mesmerizes us.”

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At present BRONCHO are rather mesmerized by another artist: Beyoncé. “After playing those big shows [with Billy Idol], I really want to see more big shows, like Beyoncé’s Formation Tour,” adds Lindsey. “Her songs make tons of sense already, but I can hear her songs making the most sense in that environment.”

It seems unlikely given the music they make, but Queen Bey is first on the list of artists they’d like to collaborate and tour with. Pitchlynn even downloaded TIDAL just to watch Lemonade.

Price floats a hypothetical about how that relationship would blossom: “After going on tour [with Beyoncé], we’d become friends, and then we’d go to her studio and lay some shit down. And then Flying Lotus would show up and give us some sick beats.”

If only.

BRONCHO TOUR DATES
6/18: Wicker Park Green Music Festival - Chicago, IL
6/20: Horseshoe Tavern - Toronto, ON
6/21: Casa Del Popolo - Montreal, QC
6/22: Great Scott - Boston, MA
6/23: Johnny Brenda's - Philadelphia, PA
6/24: Bowery Ballroom - New York, NY
6/25: DC9 - Washington, DC
6/26: Strange Matter - Richmond, VA
6/29: Hi Watt - Nashville, TN
6/30: Outland - Springfield, MO
8/03: Riot Room - Kansas City, MO
8/04: Off Broadway - St. Louis, MO
8/05: Cosmic Charlie's - Lexington, KY
8/06: Hi Fi - Indianapolis, IN
8/07: Zanzabar - Louisville, KY
8/08: The Basement - Columbus, OH
8/09: Club Cafe - Pittsburgh, PA
8/10: Majestic Cafe - Detroit, MI
8/11: Mohawk - Buffalo, NY

Double Vanity is out now Dine Alone Records.

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