Pillowprince wants you to add heavy, compound lifts to your gym routine.
“We’re busy bitches,” songwriter and guitarist Olivia Lee said when we popped into Iggy’s Keltic together during their stop in NYC for New Colossus. “So [with compound lifts] you spend less time and you do more things.”
It’s true, the band has been quite busy. Between sets of lat pull downs, arm wrestling competitions, and cooking nutritionally dense meals on the road, the trio (Oliva, plus Silas Snyder on drums and Liza Stegall on bass) makes vibrant shoegaze together. Their debut EP, pretty, baby! dropped last spring on the L.A.-based label Dune Altar. Since then, the three have been playing shows, filming a euphorically kink-forward music video, and writing even more for an upcoming album.
A collection of four thoughtfully composed and constructed tracks, pretty, baby! boils over with a quiet rage shared by the band and the community drawn to their music.
“It’s not the first wave of rage that I write about,” Lee said. “It’s the second and the third waves as I think about how to mobilize people and bring a community together.”
The three look to their live shows as a place to enlist the listener into their anarchic coterie. Through care and empathy, they create a space where the audience can be held together in a tonal experience. There’s a shared power between Olivia, Silas, Liza, and the audience–a power that provides comfort and catharsis in the shadows of personal and global devastation.
On pretty, baby!’s final track, Olivia repeats the phrase “When are you gonna care about….?” You could take it as a meditation or a protest chant. Either way, it’s an ask from the band to their audience and each other to stay grounded despite the chaos imbued in our every waking moment. That grounding, in turn, is a foundational element to their shared resilience.
Both on and off the stage, Pillowprince is a project rooted in that resilience. The trio first met more than a decade ago in an instrument store. Olivia and Silas were coworkers, and Liza was a customer. As they’ve moved to different cities and phases of life, their friendship remained intact over the last twelve years. The camaraderie formed through a shared retail job can forge a bond that no amount of miles or time can break. To prove it, the three are finding themselves stronger than ever as they move into a new era as co-residents of the same city.
From strong roots, the band has grown into something lush and verdant at the center of an ecosystem of care and community. With every show, that ecosystem grows, their audiences joining a dense synaptic network, a superorganism made recognizable by its fuzzy guitar tones.
Listen to pretty, baby! on Bandcamp and keep up with Pillowprince on Instagram.