Emily Massey laughs when she admits her guitarist binge-watched The OC while making Slow Pulp’s new record. “He’d watch it every day for months,” she says, shaking her head. “Death Cab, Phantom Planet—it’s all in there. There’s even a demo of ‘California’ that kind of became the blueprint for the record.” It tracks. Yard sounds like it was raised on mid-2000s radio—those big, bittersweet choruses that made you stare out a car window and feel like life was cinematic for three and a half minutes.
When we talk, she’s just gotten off tour, still glowing from the news that Slow Pulp will rejoin Death Cab for Cutie—this time for their joint Transatlanticism / Give Up victory lap. “It’s wild,” she says. “We grew up listening to them. Now we get to share the stage? That’s insane.”
It’s easy to hear that lineage in Yard: the introspective melancholy, the melodic precision, the casual heartbreak disguised as calm. But Massey hears it differently. “For us it’s more subtle,” she says. “Those early-2000s songs were the first music we found on our own, without our parents. They shaped how we write, even if it’s subconscious.”
If nostalgia built the foundation, Lucinda Williams helped furnish the place. While recording, the band holed up in a Wisconsin cabin and found a dusty copy of Essence on CD. “That record was the vibe,” Massey says. “Lucinda’s voice, her rawness—that stripped-down honesty stuck with me.” The influence is all over Yard, especially in its quieter corners. “Some songs just felt right when they stayed bare,” she says. “It’s about trusting the core emotion.”
If there’s a through-line to the album, it’s doubt—something Massey’s still learning to live with. “I’ve spent years feeling like I don’t deserve to call myself an artist,” she admits. “People say I look confident on stage, but a lot of the time it’s autopilot. You dissociate, you fake it till you believe it.”
That’s changing. “This record helped me work through so much of that,” she says. “Now, starting the next one, I feel… not fearless, but less afraid.”
Her honesty carries over to how the band writes. “We had a version of ‘Cramps’ completely finished,” she says. “Then the day before we turned in the album, we scrapped it and redid the whole thing. We just wanted it to sound like that Scar Tissue video—dusty desert, top down, sunburned.” She grins. “So yeah, we literally had that video on mute while recording.”
When she’s not on the road, Massey’s home in Chicago with a rescued beagle. “She doesn’t bark,” she says. “She was in a research lab, so maybe she’s still learning how to be a dog. But she’s happy now.” It’s hard not to hear the metaphor: rediscovering your voice after years of quiet.
By the end of our conversation, Massey circles back to the same theme that runs through Yard—imperfection as process. “Even the Beatles didn’t know what they were doing half the time,” she says. “You watch Get Back and it’s just them jamming till something feels right. That’s what we do. You mess around until it sounds like you.”
She pauses, smiling. “No one really knows what they’re doing when they start. The trick is pretending long enough that you accidentally make something good.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
