Alexis Krauss and Derek E. Miller are not the kind of people you expect to talk about aging. Not because they’re especially young, but because Sleigh Bells have always operated at a volume where subtlety feels illegal. And yet, there they are—two grown adults talking about chaos, discipline, and what it means to still care about distortion pedals in a world where everything already feels overdriven.
“Texis is a throwback,” Miller says. “But not in a nostalgia way. More like, we remembered what the hell we liked about being in this band.”
What they liked, apparently, was being loud. After a string of releases that got progressively more layered, artful, and restrained—Kid Kruschev, Jessica Rabbit—Texis sounds like they ripped the glitter off the grenade and tossed it straight at your skull.
“‘Locust Laced’ was the first one that clicked,” Krauss says. “It felt like we had re-tuned ourselves. The guitars were nasty again. I was screaming again. I missed that.”
There’s a precision to the chaos, though. Sleigh Bells were never a noise band by accident. They’re architects of bombast. Miller talks about structuring feedback like a chorus, of stacking riffs like frosting on a poisoned cake. “There’s melody under everything,” he insists. “We’re not just making noise. We’re making hooky noise.”
And it’s true. “Locust Laced” is the kind of song that slaps you and then apologizes with a sugary vocal line. It’s the sound of someone kicking down your door while wearing a cheerleader outfit. You know, classic Sleigh Bells.
Except even the chaos is doing some emotional work now. “There’s a theme of self-destruction on this record,” Krauss says. “Of addiction—not just to substances, but to patterns, people, bad decisions.”
Miller agrees. “I was in a really dark place before we started making this,” he says. “Getting back to the studio was survival. I had to write my way out of it.”
If that sounds dramatic, well, so does the record. But that’s the point. Sleigh Bells were never here to chill you out. And in an era when most bands are whispering their feelings over acoustic guitars, Miller and Krauss have gone the other way—full-stack Marshall explosions, pop vocals with knives in them, and a kind of gleeful anti-subtlety that feels, ironically, very precise.
“Justine Go Genesis” might be the best example. It's unhinged. Unrelenting. A cartoon gladiator match between electro-punk and industrial glitter-core. (They didn’t call it that, but they probably should.) Krauss puts it this way: “We wanted to make something maximal. Something kind of ridiculous. Like… if Nine Inch Nails covered a Tammys song.”
That’s not a metaphor. Miller was actually listening to both at the time. “There’s a loop from a Tammys track that inspired one of the songs,” he says. “And I’ve always worshipped Trent Reznor. The textures, the menace, the control.”
Still, don’t mistake the references for reverence. Sleigh Bells don’t pay homage. They rob graves and set up their gear in the tomb. There’s a joy to how unprecious they are with their influences. Bubblegum and sludge, handclaps and horror. All of it has room.
Visually, they’ve always leaned hard into that tension. The Texis videos are no exception—surreal, campy, full of VHS nightmares and hypercolor violence.
“I think we’ve both come to love the theater of it,” Krauss says. “The exaggeration. The fantasy. It’s liberating to play with scale, especially when the music is so intense.”
And speaking of scale, Texis was originally supposed to be part of a much louder celebration: the shelved 10th anniversary tour for Treats, the band’s 2010 debut that blew out car speakers and started arguments in comment sections.
“We were gutted,” Miller says. “We had this whole plan. It was going to be chaos—in a good way. But we pivoted. We made a new record instead.”
That pivot ended up being therapy. And a reminder.
“I think for a while we were trying to prove something,” Krauss admits. “Like, we can be sophisticated. We can be subtle. We can grow. But what if growth is just remembering what made you feel alive in the first place?”
And what made Sleigh Bells feel alive was volume. Texture. Pop’s dark mirror. And the knowledge that sometimes the best way to say you’re not okay is to scream it through a broken amp while smiling.
“People ask if this is us going back,” Miller says. “It’s not. It’s us going forward louder.”
He grins. Krauss nods. Somewhere, a guitar explodes.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
