The Slaps are a Chicago indie rock band composed of guitarist Rand Kelly, bassist Ramsey Bell, and drummer Josh Resing. Kelly and Bell have been friends since kindergarten and grew up going to the same schools in Lexington, Kentucky, but it wasn’t until their freshman year at Chicago’s Depaul University that the Slaps came together as a trio. The group’s first release, 2017’s Susan’s Room, was attached to tags like “beach blues” and “boner rock,” and they continued to explore their sound with 2019’s A and B EPs but it was 2022’s Tomato Tree, their first proper full-length, that fully showcased their adventurous, wiry sensibilities. The release was followed by a period of creative reorientation and extensive touring, including a slot opening for Lunar Vacation (who feature, along with fellow Artist Spotlight alumnus Merce Lemon, on the Slaps’ recent single ‘Compromised Dirt’). Last year, they released Pathless, an improvised project recorded at Experimental Sound Studio, as well as the country-leaning collection This Is My First Day At Drawing. Their latest effort, Mudglimmer, homes in on the tender, pastoral Americana captured by the latter release, but juxtaposes its earthy warmth with eerily winding stretches of jazz-funk and experimental rock. “We don’t get that aerial view of disaster,” the band casually reminds us, but they’ll evoke the ground shifting underneath our feet – and, of course, that glimmer of sunlight hitting it.
We caught up with the Slaps’ Rand Kelly and Ramsey Bell for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the band’s early days, their musical trajectory, making Mudglimmer, and more.
I know you formed the band during your freshman year of college in 2017, but you played together in school before that. How do you look back on those years and the way music came into your life?
Rand Kelly: Ramsey and I played in a band in Lexington, Kentucky, just some high school friends. I had some songs that I wanted to write and perform, and we entered – or kind of created, I guess – a really brief scene in Lexington with a high school crowd. It broke us into playing shows and being in musical environments. There was a cool DIY space that we played in that these older skater guys rented out and threw shows.
Ramsey Bell: Actually so crazy that that was a thing.
RK: Yeah, that’s not there anymore. It happened for like a year or two years.
RB: These people who I guess were our age now, maybe even younger, bought a warehouse and turned it into this all-ages venue and skate shop. It really was huge for the local Lexington music scene. It gave all these high school bands a place to play and hang out. The bands didn’t sell anything, you just played the show and stood around in the parking lot after the show. It was the best.
RK: I think that that introduced us to the culture that we’re at now, where we just got used to loading in, playing the show, loading out. We didn’t really get paid, but that was the first time we screen-printed our own merch. We got to do that in that space.
RB: The place is called Big Hair HQ. Definitely the first look at a healthy music scene and people being excited about each other’s music in a non-pretentious or gatekeeper-y way.
Going into university, what excited you about continuing to play together?
RK: I wanted to continue performing. I’m sure Ramsey did, too. We didn’t really talk about it at that point, but we just wanted to perform and continue what we were doing in high school, but on a slightly bigger scale in Chicago. It’s a historically amazing place for music in every sense and we thought it would be cool to be a part of that.
RB: It was definitely sparked by the excitement to perform and play and hang out with people. We weren’t moving to Chicago like, “We’re gonna work our way up the music industry ladder” – it was not like a big scheme. It was just like, “There’s more opportunity to play more shows in Chicago than there would be if we stayed in Lexington.”
RK: And we were playing DIY shows the first two years of being a band. We’d ask people who had apartments, “Hey, would you host a show for us?” We just wanted to perform, have fun.
You said you didn’t really talk about it at the time, but when did you start having conversations around your ambitions as a band?
RB: I think we’ve kind of historically not talked about long-term goals within the band much – the first five years, definitely not. I think graduating college was a big conversation point, just because we’re like, “Are we actually gonna do this?” Well, it was also the pandemic, so it was like, “Do we stay dedicated to this idea, or do we go elsewhere?”
RK: But after the lockdown lightened up, we went on a couple of tours. I think in that time is when we started having more conversations because everyone’s getting older. We have a wide variety of interests as it stands that aren’t just music, but as far as life goals and career paths go, we’re interested in trying new things. But music just became too important to us to not try and make it work.
During that time, did you sense a kind of dynamic beginning to take root between the three of you?
RK: I think a lot of the dynamic formed out of the way that we just picked up our instruments at the beginning of a practice and would play together. It’s what formed the path of our improvisation – that unspoken musical relationship where you just like what the other person is playing and go along with it. And then eventually, that translates into the songwriting, where you can compose things together and trust each other. But we’ve lived together for a few years, and we play a lot together: just wake up and go into the living room and have all of our instruments set up. We’d play for hours. Just got comfortable with each other, really.
RB: Like with any good relationship, the dynamic changes and shifts and evolves. It’s definitely not the same as it was when we started, but in a really good way, and it’ll probably change again and again. Rand and I have known each other since kindergarten, so we were hanging out for 15 years before we played music together. It’s just a lot of history and a lot of hanging out, making music with each other.
When it comes to songwriting, do you see yourselves having more fixed roles or is still becoming more fluid? How has that evolved within the band over time?
RB: The dynamic of songwriting has always been fluid in the band. When we first started, it was all of these songs that Rand had written – some tie-overs from high school, mostly a bunch of fresh songs. And then pretty quickly, Josh also started writing some words. I think the roles within the band continue and will continue to shift – we’re all getting more comfortable with writing on our own, having our own recording practices. There’s never been too many songs written in the same way within the band.
RK: Now, Josh is writing full guitar songs – writing something on guitar, teaching them to me to play. Ramsey’s writing full guitar songs. I’ve not yet played drums on a recording, but I’ve started to play drums, which might manifest in the next year or so. You might see a fully shifted stage plot, at least for a couple of songs. But we’re just interested in exploring different instruments, because why not?
That fluidity manifests in the stylistic territory you’ve explored over the years. At one point, you called your sound “beach blues,” but I’m sure that wasn’t necessarily meant as a fixed descriptor.
RB: I don’t think we thought that that term was going to follow us as long as it did – not that it’s haunted us in any way, but people definitely brought it up for many years, wanting an explanation of what that meant. It was definitely on our website at one point, so we definitely typed it out intentionally.
RK: I think that could have described the first couple of projects, but it was just a point in time. The thing is, we’ve never really planned out – I guess the most intentional things have been the experimental improv album that we did, and then the 4-track acoustic singer-songwriter project. These are the most genre-centric or most intentional projects we’ve ever done with genre in mind. But we’ve never like tried to categorize ourselves specifically or planned for the next era of the Slaps’ sound. I think it’s mostly just based on what we’ve listened to during this period of being in a band. We share a lot of music with each other and listen to a wide variety of stuff. I don’t think anybody is obsessed with a single genre.
I was listening back to Tomato Tree, and the song ‘It’s Dense’ could reasonably fit into that early sound, but it’s preceded by this eerie, experimental instrumental, ‘Autotelic’. Did it feel like you were becoming more comfortable with wildly juxtaposing these interests as a band?
RB: Even on Susan’s Room, the very first album, there’s this song ‘Wintertime’, which is just fucking weird. It barely fits on that album if you’re really gonna look at it from a genre perspective. Tomato Tree was our first full-length album, and it felt right to throw some noise, some larger swings at it. And we were just really stoked to make that track.
As you mentioned, after Tomato Tree, you put out two very different records, the entirely improvised Pathless and the country-leaning This Is My First Day at Drawing. What did those projects serve for you?
RB: Pathless came at the end of this moment when we decided that we really wanted to be in a band and wanted to make it as a band. So we toured for pretty much four months straight, and that was the first time we were consistently playing every single night for an hour-and-a-half, two-hour headlining shows. Early on in that whole touring block, we met this band in Boston called the Blues Dream Box, they’re from this Berkeley world of free improvisation. We played a show with them and jammed with them all night and just goofed around. We’re really inspired by their freedom in improvising, which we kind of had already been doing live a bit, but more in the jamming world of it and less in the improv world – jamming on existing song structures, taking solos, things like that. By the end of that tour, we were improvising so much live that people were like, “Oh, I had no idea that you guys did that.” So we wanted to release a project on streaming that had some of that ethos so that people knew what to expect.
RK: Then This Is My First Day of Drawing, we had all those songs ready to go for seven months at that point. Those are songs that we’d demoed before, constant different variations of those tracks. We had another completely different batch of demos that was going to be basically what Mudglimmer is right now, and we were shopping it around to labels and working with managers to try and get some funding for the full studio project. This industry stuff takes so long, no one was really biting or wanted to move forward with the projects, so we were like, “Let’s just do something that we have full control of.” Because we like to release music every year, and we were just tired of waiting around for someone to give us that approval.
I’m curious how that informed your approach going into what is now Mudglimmer – not just in terms of the release process, but recording the new songs after having gone in different directions with the previous projects.
RB: There is a world in which This Is My First Day of Drawing and Mudglimmer are one record. All the songs on Mudglimmer, except for maybe ‘Flip’ and ‘The Thaw’, existed before we recorded This Is My First Day of Drawing. I don’t know about the recording aspect of it – the improv, jazzy thing was pretty helpful for writing ‘Mudglimmer’ in that we kept exploding it and improvising over it. The recorded version of ‘To London’, there was a structure was there already, but it was one-take improv, first-thought-best-thought for a lot of people’s parts.
RK: I think the way that we recorded This Is My First Day Drawing, the minimalist way, helped simplify our studio setup where there’s not a lot of overdubbed guitar solos, it’s pretty bare-bones, straight to the core, the three of us playing in a room. For the sake of simplification, This Is My First Day Drawing kind of set the stage for what we did with Mudglimmer.
That’s something I especially hear in quieter tracks on this record, which have some of my favorite instrumental choices, like the resonator solo on ‘Filthy Sex Maneuvers’, what I saw credited as wooden logs on ‘Bunny’, or the bass part on ‘Soul’d and Settled’. It sounds like relaxing into these songs also allowed you to be creative with them without necessarily stretching the structure.
RB: Yeah, definitely. Especially songs like ‘Soul’d and Settled’ that are so old, we’ve had a long time to settle into the nuances of them and really figure out where different things need to happen – where you can play and overplay and underplay. There’s a couple of songs that we’ve put out in the past that we just can’t do live very well, be it because it has keys on it or whatever whatever, and those are ultimately very frustrating because we want to play our songs live. I think we’ve settled into a mode of creating where, at the end of the day, if we can’t do a good enough interpretation of it live, then we’re probably in the wrong version of the song.
There’s a stretch of songs, from ‘Fool’ to ‘King’, that are more propulsive and jittery. What made you want to shift the flow of the record at that point?
RK: I feel like it goes with the fluidity of the genres that we like to play. At our core, we’re a rock trio, and those songs are really just loose and fun; I guess ‘Fool’ is a little on the tighter rock side. But we like playing loud rock music just as much as the soft minimalist stuff.
RB: Sequencing the record was a little tough. The song ‘The Thaw’ is another one that’s sort of changed a ton, and the first time we demoed it was way more soft, and then it became a louder, more rocky thing when we were getting ready for tour. I remember having a conversation in the studio where it was like, without this more rock version of the ‘Thaw’ on this record, the other heavier, more jittery rock songs start to feel way more like outliers. With this one, it felt a little bit more well-rounded. But I think it works well to just put them together – it’s a good little pocket.
RK: It’s also representative of what you’re going to see at the live show. We bring the rock setup, but we also bring acoustic guitars and play the soft stuff right after we do a nutty jam for 10 minutes straight. It’s just who we are at this point to have the heavy stuff mixed with the light stuff.
Both the title of the record and the song ‘Compromised Dirt’ invoke a strange kind of optimism amidst ugly, dirty collapse. Could you speak on that aspect of the record?
RK: There’s some pretty intense themes on the album dealing with death and addiction and sadness. But through any adversity, there needs to be a shimmer of hope, right? I think that’s where Mudglimmer came from, the sun reflecting in a wet part of the mud. What do you call that? [looks to Ramsey] You call it a mudglimmer.
Do you mind sharing one thing that inspires you about each other, be it musical or personal?
RB: Rand is probably the most open person I’ve ever met in my entire life. In all aspects of everything, just down to be open, and that is incredibly inspiring. Just will talk to anybody, will respect anybody, will learn about anything, will do anything. Which is awesome.
RK: Wow, thank you. You’re so kind. Oh, man. This guy knows so much about the musical world. He’s kind of an encyclopedia in that way. Also, I love the way he plays guitar. We were just playing this piece yesterday. It’s so beautiful and just inspiring as a musician. He just plays the guitar in a very different way than anybody else. And he’s also hilarious.
RB: One thing, one thing.
RK: He’s also so sweet. And he makes good oatmeal. That’s my one thing.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
The Slaps’ Mudglimmer is out now.