Louise Post talks about her debut solo album the way some people talk about long-lost relatives — familiar, unsettling, a little haunted, and somehow inevitable. After decades of defining alt-rock catharsis with Veruca Salt, she finally released a record under her own name, Sleepwalker, an album that arrived less like a career move and more like something that insisted on existing.
“These songs were making themselves known to me,” she tells me. She didn’t plan a solo album. She didn’t even plan a side-band. She was just writing — constantly — after Veruca Salt’s Ghost Notes reunion tour wrapped and parenthood, distance, and the general chaos of adult life made long-form touring impossible. “I live by the philosophy of go where the love is,” she says. “Swim downstream, not against the current.” The current led straight to Sleepwalker.
Some songs grew out of co-writing sessions, others came out sideways while she was building an entirely separate EP with another woman-led band (an EP that exists, is finished, and remains unreleased — tucked away like a glimmering secret she swears she’ll deal with later). But the Sleepwalker tracks “were clearly mine,” she says. “I didn’t want to segue into another band fronted by another woman — I needed to branch out, really keep it simple.”
What pushed her there, she admits, wasn’t just creative overflow. It was the double punch of the Trump years and the pandemic — that sliding sense of existential drift. “Some divine hand reached down and said, ‘Get to work,’” she says. “Here are the songs you’re supposed to be writing.” She rolls her eyes at how self-important that might sound, but also shrugs. “Even if it’s for five people — even if it’s just for you, Kyle — I have to do it.”
The album opens with “Pirates,” a ferocious, wide-armed anthem that feels like she stepped into another skin to sing it. Turns out she did. The song was inspired partly by her niece, who has muscular dystrophy, and partly by the historical figure her sister-in-law brought up while they were on a walk in Wisconsin: the most powerful pirate in history, a woman who ran a vast fleet under a man’s name because it was the only way the world would accept it. “She was ruthless,” Post says approvingly. “Rape was punishable by death. I was like, yes — that’s my kind of woman.” The song became a hybrid — her niece’s spirit, the pirate’s authority, and a little piece of Post stepping into her own command after years of band dynamics.
The title track, and the album’s overarching metaphor, comes from a much earlier version of herself. Post was a literal sleepwalker — the child who padded downstairs in the dark, banged single keys on the piano, terrified her siblings, or wandered the street in her underwear until the neighborhood watchman woke her. “My parents didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “It was just before the divorce. I’m pretty sure that had something to do with it.”
For the album cover, she returned to St. Louis and staged an adult recreation of her nighttime wanderings — then paired it with a gatefold photo of her niece in the same spot. “She favors me a lot,” Post says. “It felt right. Like completing a circle.”
Talking through Sleepwalker, she keeps returning to domestic spaces — kitchens, bedrooms, childhood homes, the invisible architecture inside families. She compares it to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, an album she reveres for its storms, oceans, mothers, and windows into private rooms. “I didn’t set out to make a personal record,” she insists, and then immediately contradicts herself. “But it’s full of windows into a home life. Into the present. Into marriages, relationships, challenges… the juicy stuff.”
Some of that “juicy stuff” is emotional apocalypse (“What About,” the album’s big, gorgeous heart-splitter), and some of it is pure pop architecture (“All Messed Up”). Post laughs about that one. “I didn’t set out to write pop, but I was listening to pop,” she says, rattling off the pandemic playlist that seeped into her bones: Melanie Martinez, girl in red, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Imagine Dragons, and — unexpectedly — Post Malone. “Those songs got me through the pandemic. They definitely tinged my writing.”
She even cops to a specific influence: Imagine Dragons’ “Follow You.” “For me, that song is perfection,” she says, unbothered by how proudly uncool that might sound to certain corners of her fanbase. “I tried to keep it real by following it with ‘Killer,’ but yeah — the pop seeped in.”
Still, the glue of the record is her voice — multitracked, layered, spectral enough at times that even I asked her if someone else was singing. “That’s all me,” she grins. On “Hollywood Hills,” longtime collaborator Maria Patterson adds harmony, but everywhere else it’s Post harmonizing with herself, the sleepwalker talking back to the kid at the piano.
By the end of our conversation, she’s already hinting at her next chapter — the unreleased EP, more songs in the vault, more ideas in the percolator. Sleepwalker feels less like a culmination and more like a doorway. Louise Post is still wandering, still listening to the echoes in the house, still walking toward something in the dark — only now she’s awake enough to write it all down.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
