altopalo on Finding Inspiration, Their New Song, and Favorite Scenes from the Music Video
[UNPUBLISHED:] What is the inspiration behind your newest single “Altopalo”
[JESSE:] We wanted to make this album about us as a chosen family, and while creating the foundation of this song it always felt like the trudging of time & the evolution of a relationship, so naturally we found ourselves writing an overture for the album. The timespan of this song stretches from the first instances of us befriending each to our present-day relationship - there’s the infatuation phase where we just spent every possible second together saying and doing dumb shit and just growing together at exponential rates. Then we travel through some struggles with identities smearing and eclipsing one another. We distance ourselves from one another but ultimately we end up in the present moment where we can’t think of each other as anything but siblings. We wanted to be all tangled up in each other and unable/unwilling to extract ourselves and all we want to do is make art and play games with each other.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What do you want listeners to feel when they listen to your new song?
[RAHM:] Have you ever tried to breathe in your nose and out your mouth at the same time? Try it. Try it now. That’s the feeling.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the process like for making this song?
[DILLON:] Oh man, this was like the first song we worked on for this new album cycle. We had a lot we wanted to fix within ourselves and the creative process leading up to working on this next project, and I believe this was the perfect amalgamation of all of that work. I hinted at the fact that I wanted a little more live-sounding drums in the music, and was immensely inspired by the drum performance of “Lost” by Frank Ocean. The simplicity of that felt so good to me, so I told the guys after working on some other song, “Aye, can you just put the click at this tempo, and I’m just going to drum for a hot second.” So I just played the drums as you hear in the song. I just loved the beat and kept it going. Then I sat with the guys and we did some super simple mixing to it, and all of us were like “We are not changing anything on these drums, but let’s see what else we can add on.” And later that night everyone else added their own parts and the song you hear now was pretty much written in that one night. It was a great exercise in restraint and limitations but also opened the door to how we thought about this album being made moving forward!
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you think your sound has evolved from when you first started making music?
[MIKE:] When we first met, we had so much to learn about one another, aside from the socializing and chatting that new friends tend to do, we also shared the space of musical expression to learn about each other. A lot of our process at the center is still similar – we improvise together a lot, listen back to the things that happen, pick out the things we like, and set them aside for further development. I think the biggest difference now is how much we all have changed and grown as people, and ironically, despite how well we know each other in the history and grounding of our friendship. Our older music was also about more abstract concepts, and with this record, we took ourselves, our friendship, and all the range of the beautiful, complicated, sad, goofy, and familial parts of our story as the subject of what we’re making the music about.
[UNPUBLISHED:] The music video is super fun, do you have any favorite scenes you shot for it?
[MIKE:] Any of the shots where we got to really get silly were my favorite scenes. Especially the dancing, the goofball peanut gallery cheering on a passing wagon rider, and the slow-motion clips of three of us chasing one bandmate downhill as they ride the busted wagon with a goofy grin on their face.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the inspiration behind the video?
[DILLON:] Honestly there were so many opinions on how this music video should look. A lot of back and forth in phone calls, treatments, Zooms, etc. Not to mention, we were trying to film it in a very short window of time where we were all in Los Angeles for various rehearsals and shows, and we all had a busy schedule that we had to coordinate with our director. After all of that, I believe the best way to describe the inspiration of the video is from our location tag on Instagram in our post about the music video, “The Sisyphean Funhouse.” We wanted to portray individuality, struggle, and also togetherness in the home we have created for ourselves. The song is about that struggle and coming together as friends, and we wanted to portray that in the video as well.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What artists do you get inspiration from?
[JESSE:] Well I believe that everyone is an artist and an inspiration if you allow yourself to look the right way but that’s probably a shifty way to answer this question. We all individually listen to and make such different music, it’s pretty impossible to ignore the fact that we are constantly surprising & inspiring each other. Not only are we fueling each other’s fires, we are part of a much larger community of musicians and artists that really make their marks regardless of how difficult the music industry is right now. It’s been amazing to see our friends making continuously evolving art and making inviting and inspiring spaces for the rest of us to explore. I’ll name a few artists that have been giving us hope for the weirdos out there - Bartees Strange, Dora Jar, L’Rain, Kiah Victoria, Ade, Flanafi, Deerhoof, it’s hard to stop.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What artists are you currently listening to?
[ALTOPALO:] Helena Deland, Tomberlin, Sadurn, Saya Gray , Bernice, Chaka Khan, and James Brown.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have anything in the works, any future projects, or anything you’re excited about and want to tease?
[ALTOPALO:] Our album is called “frenemy” and is being released on September 23rd. Our next single is called “wya” and it’s a fully different vibe from the other singles that have already come out. Our new album has got some zany range to it, and the progression of the single rollout is really doing a lot to showcase that.
