a chat with The Slaps
When I meet the band The Slaps, they are in the middle of an interesting situation.
The band—guitarist Rand Kelly, bassist Ramsey Bell, and drummer Josh Resing—usually hit the road in a scrappy style. Imagine the usual independent rock band touring activities: driving your own van, crashing at friends' places or even sleeping at campsites between gigs, hauling ass between venues, trying to win over a cranky sound guy in each new city. This is the lifestyle that The Slaps are used to, and what they've been doing since getting together as a band almost a decade ago, when childhood friends Kelly and Bell met Resing in college.
This is not their lifestyle when I meet them for an interview before a gig in Los Angeles. The gig is an interesting situation. The Slaps are in the middle of a short tour where they are opening for Finn Wolfhard, a young actor most widely known for starring in the Netflix show Stranger Things, but also a musician who recently released a solo album called Happy Birthday. And they're not just opening for Finn Wolfhard—after they wrap up their opening set, they come back onstage to play in Finn's backing band. They had two days to rehearse for this gig. Their first show was at The Lodge Room in northeast L.A. the previous night, and their second show is at the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and that's where I meet them.
I don't fully appreciate how interesting their situation is until we start our interview, which happens at a Mexican restaurant catty-corner to the cemetery. The band are grabbing a quick dinner before the show; the restaurant offers menu items like chicken soup and "wet burrito." After orders are placed, I ask about the tour lifestyle. Kelly notes the weirdness: "It's definitely a funny time to be talking about tour life because it's way different this time." Airbnbs have replaced campsites, and much of the daily decision-making that's a normal part of touring as an independent artist is no longer in the band's hands. Resing talks about how nice it is to travel with a sound engineer as part of Wolfhard's tour infrastructure: "It's taking a lot of stress out of this situation. Today we didn't have much time to sound check, and Maya [Feggo, the touring engineer] was like, I know what you guys needed last night, we'll just make some monitor adjustments. Which is just huge. Whereas with some guy who's never heard us, we'd have to totally re-sound check everything."
There's a distinctive vibe I pick up on between the three members of The Slaps, just about an hour before they are scheduled to take the stage. It's a preternatural calm, a sense of harmonious business-as-usual, even in an unfamiliar setting. I would imagine some of this calm comes from the tenor of their music, which relies on seamless inter-band perceptiveness. Their 2023 album Pathless is a live recording that captured the band in full improvisational mode, an approach inspired by a college course called Improv Scratch Orchestra. (In an interview with The Luna Collective, the band described the class as "discussing, expressing, problem solving, provoking, listening, questioning, concluding… all with music".) And their latest album Mudglimmer, a homespun rock album that draws from many diverse genre traditions, features lots of intricate compositions and jammy moments that suggest a near-telepathic level of communication.
Some of that calm also must come from The Slaps's consistent work ethic. The band have certainly not reached their current level of musical success by acting without intention. "Touring is work," Bell says. "It's hard work. It doesn't really matter if you're on a bus and you have everything done for you, or you're doing it yourself and playing houses every day. You have to clock in and take it seriously." When I ask what they like to do with any free time they have on tour, they mention visiting record stores. For some light vinyl shopping? "We spend time perusing, but we also do our own [retail] distribution," Resing says, "so we usually try and hit two or three record stores in all the cities we go to."
Even taking time to sit down and eat food from a real restaurant rather than a fast food place is a conscientious act of re-investment in their infrastructure. "We are all owners of our business as a band, so we have no problem spending the money we're making, and enjoying ourselves," Resing says. "It's not sustainable in music if you're not having fun with your friends—" "and not feeling good," Bell adds. "You're already giving up so much control to be out here. So it's like, let's be good to ourselves," Resing concludes.
It's call time for The Slaps, and they head back to the Masonic Lodge at an accelerated pace. I had gotten to the venue-slash-cemetery a while earlier to scope out the pre-doors scene. Peacocks were roaming the grounds, emitting mournful twilight hoots, and everywhere the 'Hollywood Forever' namesake was rendered in the form of entertainers' gravestones: comedians, directors, silent film stars. (The band said they'd gotten to see David Lynch's resting place before sound check, when they weren't grabbing some press photos.) A big line of people had been waiting patiently to enter, some young enough to require parental accompaniment.
Now everyone is inside. The crowd is enthusiastic for The Slaps, who take the stage and immediately reconstruct their calm energy. They play through their intricate, uncategorizable songs with warmth and skill. The sound quality is top notch, even with wall-to-wall carpeting—shout out to Maya. The crowd responds with plenty of warmth of their own, overindexing on the usual opener-to-headliner enthusiasm meter in my estimation. They really get cooking during the folky undulation of "Compromised Dirt," a song about man-made environmental decay: "We don't get that aerial view of disaster / This de-evolution is kicking our asses."
They wrap up, take a short break, and return to the stage with Mr. Wolfhard, plus another live band member: Gep Repasky, who also plays in the Atlanta band Lunar Vacation. Their casual opening band clothing has been replaced by storm gray Thom Browne uniform-style clothing, in a variety of silhouettes. (Bell wears a kilt, and Kelly wears knee-length shorts, like a more refined Angus Young.) Between the structured suiting, the dense atmosphere venue, the wild audience screams, and Finn Wolfhard's retro musical stylings, it feels like I'm watching the Beatles play the Cavern Club. It's pretty intense.
I love watching The Slaps transform from opening act to backing band. It's nice to see the way the members interact with each other, and how that changes with the addition of new elements—like watching a live demonstration of someone forging a blade, temperaments annealing in real time. Back at the restaurant, Kelly had mentioned a period of touring in 2022 that brought the band much closer: "I think about the chemistry that we built when we were on the road. It was two months straight, two weeks off, and then on for another month. I think that ingrained a lot of trust and positive chemistry between the three of us. So it stays with us at this point."
I find it thrilling that everyone who showed up to see a grown-up child star perform some right-down-the-middle power pop (Finn Wolfhard covered Big Star, nice!) also got to witness an opening set of charming but challenging alt-rock tunes. This is how you crack open the door to new fans—you provide some steady framework to hold onto, work real hard, and inevitably blow their minds. The Slaps have honed their method, and they are more than ready to meet this moment.
crucialthreat
Thanks, The Slaps! Listen to Mudglimmer and catch the band opening for Post Animal this November.
