You went to a cabin in Virginia to reconnect with each other and start writing Earthkeeper. What went into that decision?

Ashrita: We were touring a lot in 2022 and 2023. We were super, super busy and we were not home at all for pretty much two years. I think the last tour that we had was supporting Pussy Riot in December 2023, and after that, we just splintered off. We were doing our own thing. Paul was taking trips to Peru to visit his family. I was also taking trips to India to see some family. I hadn’t taken a trip in like five years, since before the pandemic. I feel like he also hadn’t gone to Peru in a while at that point. Did you go back to Benin, Myron?

Myron: I did not. I was moving during that period, I think. I remember doing a lot of apartment hunting and also looking for part-time jobs.

Ashrita: Yeah, it was like landing back on Earth after being gone for years. We were all really just doing our own thing. We had ideas that we wanted to work on, but it was really hard for us to not be distracted or feel like we were all creatively on the same page, like, “I feel like creating. I don’t feel like creating” kind of thing. So we decided to do the cabin trip in May 2024. We weren’t really even going to write. We were like, “Oh, we haven’t jammed and hung out in a while.” [laughs] We really took the opportunity to reconnect. The thing that connects us is making music together so that was a really good low-pressure, removed from the everyday life stuff opportunity to connect and write music together again.

We ended up writing a lot of ideas in that cabin. I still have the list [of ideas] in my notebook. It was the last day, and we were like, “Alright, we have to write all this shit down, otherwise we’re gonna forget it.” [laughs] So we wrote down a list. We were like, “We had like 18 ideas, that means that we can start writing an album.” It really did feel like starting from scratch.

Rebuilding everything.

Ashrita: Yeah, also because we were touring so much all that time and had all this life stuff passing, like relationships, family members, friends, and where you live, all that stuff changing and shifting. You’re just a different person. You can’t create necessarily in the same way that you were doing three years before that. We kinda had to get to know each other again as musicians.

Myron: It was also this point in an album cycle where there’s a lull with everything. We were all feeling some kind of way about ourselves and the project because of this normal point in between albums that artists experience where it’s like, “Do people still care? Do people care at all?”

Ashrita: [holds up notebook] I found it!

Myron: Oh my god, you did! Going to the cabin to reconnect, we didn’t really have an expectation of, “Ok, we’re going to get this, this, and this done.” It was more like Ashrita was saying, to realign ourselves and validate how we were each feeling and piece together what we wanted to do going forward. Basically being like, “Are we serious? Do we still want to be doing this?”

Ashrita: It was a big moment, yeah.

Myron: When we were jamming, we brought some ideas together, and that’s when we wrote “Freefall” and “Suspended”. It was a reminder of, “Oh yeah, we’re good at this and we enjoy doing this with each other.”

Ashrita: It was our first time being excited about something that we were all writing together in years.

Myron: Yeah. We were going on drives to go different places while we were at the cabin, and we were playing the songs on loop. Literally over and over.

Ashrita: We were playing our little ideas that we’d just come up with. It was like, “If I was playing this at home with the people I live with or with my loved ones, they’d be so sick of me right now,” but the three of us were all equally obsessed with these ideas. [laughs] It was nice to feel that again.

What Myron was saying was true, we were really like, “Ok, do we still wanna do this? Do we still wanna be in a band? Check in. What are our goals here now? Because they’re probably different from before. How do we move forward intentionally together in this moment that feels good for all of us? Are we still going to be a band? Do we want to put out a second record?” We decided to because we clicked. It was good proof of concept. Like, “Ok, this is good. We’re a band! We’re a band, guys!” [laughs]

Everything just fell back into place. Especially when you’re in nature and away from cities and all that.

Ashrita: Yeah, every day is really stressful as an adult. [laughs] It’s kinda crazy. It’s really distracting from being a person.

You don’t realize the extent of it until you’re out of it, and then you’re like, “Holy shit.”

Ashrita: Vacations are necessary; you need to leave. [laughs]

How do you feel your songwriting process evolved on Earthkeeper?

Ashrita: We jammed a lot more. I think on [our debut album] Love Me Forever, we were kind of like, “Ok, we have an idea, let’s go to the computer and build around it.” We kinda built that record on Logic. We would have the initial idea in our apartments because we didn’t have a consistent practice space and all that stuff. A lot of it was written during the pandemic when it first started. For this one, we were very like, “Ok, we’re going to jam out these ideas.” We wanted them to come really naturally. We were inspired by making something that would move your body, that you could feel in your body, and the only way to really feel that is playing it out loud and jamming it out. We wanted something that you really felt in your bones.

Myron: A lot of the stuff we were doing in the cabin were live demos because we had hooked up Paul’s guitar and a mic for Ashrita, and I had my little Yamaha EAD drum mic thing that can capture the whole kit. We had recordings of those jams.

Ashrita: Before, we didn’t have the capacity to do that. We didn’t have the tech.

Myron: Yeah, so now we have full demos of us playing stuff that’s coming to us in that moment. Then, when we listen back, we can pick apart parts that we like. For example, for “Evil Eye” we were jamming on an idea that Paul and I had jammed in 2023, I believe.

Ashrita: It was from when we were in the studio for [our 2023 EP] suraksha. I went home early because I was grieving.

Myron: It was literally just a short jam and then we brought it back and we were all just jamming on that. There’s no structure to that demo, but that’s what we pulled from to build “Evil Eye”. There’s a lot of vocal ideas that Ashrita was doing and I was throwing things out there. There’s fills that I’m doing in that jam that made it to the final version because I was like, “Yeah, that’s what I wanna play there. Even though I don’t know where that part is within the song, I know this specific section, if it makes it, is what I wanna do there." Like Ashrita was saying, it was a lot of live jams, and a lot of piecing things from different ideas together. “Anita Ride” takes an entire section from another demo that we had.

Ashrita: Yeah, it’s crazy looking at this. [Holds up their notebook with notes from the jams] I rated this one, “2/10, that’s how it feels, but it’s a good song.” It needed something else. It needed another demo that we wrote a year later. [laughs] We just put them together.

Myron: There was a lot of that.

Ashrita: A lot of puzzle pieces. Over here, I had an idea for “Love It Here” and I drew a little lightbulb and wrote “Idea: drum and bass?” But that idea ended up on “Evil Eye”.

That way, you can try everything in real time.

Myron: Exactly!

Ashrita: If something just comes out, you can have it on record. We didn’t have the capacity to do that before; we were kinda tied to the DAW and we didn’t have a live recording set-up. We finally got the capacity on this record. It was nice to capture those moments that we’d do in practice and then just have a really nice recording of it to have as a demo to actually hear what was going on. With voice memos, it’s really hard to parse out the different things that are happening and they don’t sound that good. It’s really hard to get the balance and everything right too, like you just hear drums. [laughs] It was nice to have the ability to take live demos. After that, I was like, “Guys, I’m not going to consider a song unless we live demo it.”

I stopped writing lyrics on my phone. Everything is in these journals; every single piece of the evolution and all the ideas. I didn’t erase anything and it’s all in pen. That was different for me, just writing everything down. I think it made the lyric writing process a lot different too.

Did you notice that by using a physical medium you had different ideas?

Ashrita: The main reason I wanted to do that is because when I go on my Notes app and I have a different idea for that same part I just wrote, I’ll just delete what I wrote before and I’ll write the new thing. Maybe I’ll copy and paste the original idea somewhere down in the notes and I’ll never look back at it again. But with writing it down, I’ll just cross it out and write on top of it so I can still see the words I crossed out. If I’m like, “I don’t know if I actually like the thing that I changed. What was it before?” I have it right there.

Sometimes I’ll start writing a poem and I’ll circle some lines like, “That sounds cool!” Then we’ll be in practice and I’ll go back to the thing I was writing. I have the lines that I circled and I have all of the stuff that I wrote around it, like the stuff that I was thinking about when I wrote those lines. That’s really what I pull from to write the rest of the song when we’re jamming out together.

Sometimes I’ll just vocalize some of these words and ideas, and that’s how “Suspended” came about. It was literally just a poem I had in my journal and Paul and Myron were jamming on this idea. I was like, [vocalizes the melody], and it became a song, which is cool because I feel like those are my actual thoughts. Those are actually things that I think about, not just things that I take out my phone to write when I feel like I have a good idea. I’m just always writing in here [holds up journal]. I feel like I’m able to identify and go back to a lot more of my organic and authentic ideas that come about when I’m not thinking about the song necessarily, but just existing.

I think it also gave me more of a sense of intimacy with my own thoughts. I guess that’s what the point of journaling is, therapeutically. I felt like I could really hone in on the meaning of a song a lot earlier that way because otherwise I’m just guessing, like, “I wrote these three lines in my phone, I don’t know where or when. I don’t know why.” [laughs] So when you’re going back to them, they’re just words, they’re not worlds. For this album, a lot of the songs were worlds because I would go back to them and there was a whole scene around what I was writing. I could visualize it as a place rather than it being a string of words that I wrote at some point in time.

I’ve gotten really into journaling. As an artist, it’s really helpful to be really in touch with your thoughts, no matter how weird or painful they are. Because when they’re weird and painful, you end up getting stuff that actually sounds really good. [laughs] “Patience”, I feel like that came from really weird and painful thoughts. “Don’t Fight” too.

You’re giving those thoughts an outlet, they’re not just festering.

Ashrita: Yeah. They have a whole world, something they can grow into and exist in. I think that’s why writing music is therapeutic, because you give your weird and painful thoughts a world and they don’t end up just eating you up, they get to live in that world of the song. That’s kinda cool. Then you get to just observe them. You know how they say in therapy, “Watch your thoughts go as clouds,” and that doesn’t make any sense. It makes a lot more sense to me when they’re songs. [laughs]

Did you have a song that was the most visual to write and work on? Did you have a song that was the most cathartic to write and work on?

Ashrita: When I think about the songs, I feel like they all have some kind of colour or something. I think “Blood” might’ve been the most visual one for me because it changes so much. The bridge is so quiet and you’re like, “Oh, you’re in the woods at night.” It was really fun working on that stuff with Brett [Romnes] as a producer because I feel like he was really with it. We were capturing the vibe of that part very well.


Myron: For me, I feel like the most visual was “Suspended” because of the way that song starts and just dynamically where it goes. Where it goes from this really tender part with really sweet vocals and swells and then just comes right back. There’s a reason we were so excited for it when we were writing it.

Ashrita: It was something we had never really done before.

Myron: Exactly. The way that it blooms and moves back and forth has this crazy energy. When I listen to it and when we were writing it, I just see this bloom of colours, specifically lavender and light blue, and some magenta. That progression came from an idea I had in 2023 from this completely other song that was kind of everywhere. It was like the back half of that idea. I had just learned how to play the first chord of “Suspended” and I was like, “This is so pretty! I could listen to this all day.” [laughs] So, when we actually fully worked on it and made that first hit of the song this huge, crazy sound with just strings, it really just blew my mind. It’s such a huge sound. [laughs] It was also very cathartic to build that one. Again, of how different in energy it is from anything we’ve ever written.

Ashrita: Yeah. With that one, the lyrics were about flying cross-country and just watching. I think that’s when I wrote the poem, when we were flying back from California to DC on the L.S. Dunes tour. It was a really beautiful day out and there were almost no clouds so you could see everything: the mountains, the Rockies, the caves, the forests, the rivers. It was really gorgeous. I think I was looking out the window the whole time, the whole six hours or whatever, because it was so pretty.

That comes back in the record a lot as “castles in the sky.” It came from the imagery of seeing the clouds in the sky while being in planes while we were touring. We almost named the record Castles in the Sky, that was on the shortlist of names. [laughs] Just seeing that all the time is so beautiful. It’s a gorgeous flight. I mean, it sucks, it’s really long, but it’s really pretty. [laughs]

I think there’s also a lot more imagery on this record because we saw so much. From going on tour for two years, there’s just so much more downloaded in my head. I’ve seen so much. I’m really grateful for that, being able to kind of see things in transit.

Keeping with the visuals, Ashrita, you created the cover art. What were you thinking about when you were working on it?

Ashrita: I was thinking about nature, honestly, and just representing how amazing and beautiful everything is. I think this was right around when we were recording that I was messing around with this idea and we didn’t have the title decided yet. The image in the background was originally all I had. It’s the 2012 NASA Hubble Deep Field image. It’s a picture of the Universe from Earth’s perspective. It’s the first picture where they were able to capture really well the phenomenon of redshifting, which is where our band name comes from. If you’ve seen the “therapist” music video, the captions in the bridge explain what Pinkshift means. [laughs] It was around the time we were thinking of also just calling this a self-titled record and this was an image that perfectly represented what we were trying to communicate because it has the redshifting in there. It would be like the record, you know. The feedback that I got from the band was that it needed a little bit more to it. So I started playing around with more images.

The hourglass figure that’s on the cover is actually a picture of a solar eclipse, also from NASA. I took that solar eclipse, made the centre hollow, and I twisted it up into what I thought looked like a wormhole. All of that white, wispy stuff you see are sun rays. When it warped, it ended up looking like this hourglass kind of thing, which I didn’t really see until I got feedback. [laughs]

The picture in the top part of the wormhole is a picture I took on my little Polaroid camera when we went to the Redwoods. It’s looking up in a clearing of trees. We were lying on this really big tree trunk for a really long time, it was really comfortable. It was like 10 feet tall. Those trees are huge and thick. It had fallen, so it was on its side and it seemed like it was like that for a while, because we were walking on top of it and it was so soft. When we laid down on it, we were looking up at a clearing of trees, and it just felt so cosmic. It was a very beautiful experience. I took that picture with my camera when we were lying there. I wanted it to represent the Earth and I felt like that was a really good spot for that. I wanted to communicate the idea that the Earth was the centre of this space that we’re looking at. So at the top, you have this picture of the beautiful Earth with the trees and [it looks like] there’s a hand reaching out. It was that feeling like, “Oh, this space is inviting me to lie here forever if I choose to. If I choose to become one with this space, I could.”

Putting it in that top half of the hourglass, it kind of felt like these are the sands that are just going forward with time. It’s constantly changing, it’s constantly moving, it’s constantly adapting to what humans are doing to it and to climate change and all of these horrible, horrible things that happen on Earth, like bombings. They contribute to the environment and all that stuff is like sand passing through time. It’ll all pass with time. What ends up being afterwards is empty because we can fill that up with whatever; it can be anything. We can’t really tell what that is.

The hand in there is a specific hand gesture from yoga and meditation. It’s also in dance. It’s called the gyan mudra and it’s supposed to represent an individual’s connection to universal consciousness. So when it’s holding the wormhole or the hourglass, it’s almost like, “This is our choice. We have autonomy in this space. This is us. We are in all of these spaces." We exist because of this, and we also affect our futures intensely, so intimately. The future of how this time goes is really up to us. It’s up to us as a collective, and as an individual connected to the collective, how we choose to move forward in this time of uncertainty, in this time of mass grief and injustice.

My perspective on this is that we have to look to nature to guide us through how to move forward when we are uncertain. It’s really intrinsic to the idea of Earthkeeper and how it came about because that’s what we did. Circling back, as a group, we were in nature and we were together and that’s how we came to how we were gonna move forward. I think a very essential idea of Earthkeeper is that our collective futures are all tied to each other and how we move forward is up to us as individuals and how we decide to relate to each other.

There were a lot of ideas for how we were gonna represent this record, both in the name and in the art. One of them was also this big astrological transit of Pluto entering Aquarius and how everything is changing and it’s prescribed and we have the choice of how we choose to come out of it. I think Earthkeeper is a really empowering record and it really empowers you to take hold of your own future. In the midst of all these systems failing, what does your future as a human being look like? These systems don’t define you. I think we’re all starting to realize that, as a collective, these systems are faulty, they haven’t worked for decades - maybe even hundreds of years - and they’re so far removed from nature that they will be our destruction unless we go back. So in that way, a big theme is also ancient wisdom and indigeneity. We carried these themes out lyrically and musically throughout the record. We have to rebuild. We have to seriously rebuild. How are we gonna do that? How are we gonna choose to do that together?

The hand is also chrome, so it indicates that we’re in a really, really big age of innovation and we are seriously looking at the future right now. We have the opportunity to really shape what the future looks like right now. There’s a lot to it. [laughs]

That’s why when you get the record, the packaging is also really intentional. At the back, you have this person falling through space with their work shoes on. It’s this feeling of, “I don’t know what the fuck is happening. I don’t know what’s going on.” It’s like freefall, but you’re falling through all of this beautiful stuff, like Earth and nature and space. What can you take from that? Because you’re always going to be falling. You fall into the centre of the packaging, which is the Redwoods and that’s where you land. In the insert, there’s a little glowing figure and it’s that guy who was free-falling, it’s you, it’s the Earthkeeper. You’re in the centre of all these trees and you’re looking up. It’s a whole world.

It was really fun to put together. I worked together with Mads Schubert. We’ve worked together on a lot of our previous stuff. Mads has done the layout for almost every single project that we’ve put out on vinyl. [laughs] We’ve been working with them since [our debut EP] Saccharine. I think the vinyl for Saccharine was their first vinyl layout project too, and now they do it for a bunch of people. It’s so cool! It was really fun to work with them on this; they have such good ideas. That’s the visual world that the record exists in.

“Blood” and “Love It Here” are connected by a shared lyric. What inspired that?

Ashrita: I think “there’s blood in the water, there’s blood in the trees,” was one of the first things written for this record. “Blood” was the first song written for this record, at least intentionally written for this record. I think that little poem was really captivating in the beginning and “Blood” is the song that a lot of songs came from. I was jamming the chords and “Reflection” came out of “Blood”. “Spiritseeker”, “Vacant”, “Something More” a little bit, and definitely “Patience” came out of “Blood”. “Blood” is like a seed song. Personally, I was addicted to playing “Blood” on the guitar, so a lot of times I would be playing “Blood” and then would fall into a new thing.

The shared lyric, “There’s blood in the water, there’s blood in the trees,” is a really integral idea to the record because we’re talking about the Earth and we’re also being very cognizant of what is being done to the Earth, what is being done to its people, the life on Earth. “There’s blood in the water / there’s blood in the trees / They’re stealing what they can until we’re dripping with disease”, was a lyric we were playing with a lot. When we were doing “Love It Here”, it just flowed really well. I felt like “Love It Here” was speaking to a different aspect of that lyric. I feel like “Blood” is an ancient song and “Love It Here” is a here-and-now song.

I wanted to speak to that relationship by leading with, “There’s blood in the water, there’s blood in the trees / I know I have magic here, I feel what you fear”. “Love It Here” has a different perspective than “Blood” does; it has that “we know what’s right” feeling, and it’s a little more of an inspiring song, I think. It’s like, “I know I’m so powerful, I want you to feel that with me. I want you to feel that power because you have that power too.” They kinda speak to similar ideas and that’s why that lyric is in both places.

Everyone’s connected, everything’s connected.

Ashrita: Yeah, I wasn’t like, “This is gonna be so cool! People are gonna be like, ‘Woah!’” That’s just what the song was. It was kinda cool. I remember showing it to my friend Jill, they’re in Pollyanna. Jill was like, “Dude, did you do this on purpose? This is crazy!” and I was like, “What are you talking about?” They had to explain it to me. [laughs] I literally didn’t realize that I’d used that lyric twice.

If you can’t come up with something or you’re stuck on something, just use an old lyric and if you want to change it later, change it later and if you don’t want to change it later, that’s just what it is and that’s fine. Not everything has to be a 100% new idea. I like that about records. When you’re working on a record, it’s basically just one big song. It’s like a movement.

To go back to what we were talking about with the album cover and how we have the choice about our future, what do you think we can do to rebuild better?

Ashrita: I feel like it’s in the record. It’s very much like put on your own oxygen mask before you go to help others. Check in with yourself, see what you need to feel fulfilled. It’s this idea that nobody is free until we are all free. What does that mean to you? Nobody is free until we are all free. What does freedom mean to you? What does liberation mean to you? Do you feel liberated? What’s holding you back from that? You can’t really help others feel liberated if you are not yourself liberated. I think this was something I was going through myself like, “How are you going to show up for other people if you, yourself, don’t even know how you feel?”

I feel like we’re entering a really weird time, obviously, and it’s really a time to reflect on what kind of future we want for ourselves and what we value and what we prioritize, because capitalism is going to kill us all and corporate greed is going to kill us all. If we’re all still in this mindset of scarcity, there’s so much to unlearn. There’s so much shit to unlearn. That’s where “Love It Here” starts, “You said that I would be okay, but you lied to me. This system isn’t gonna save us, so what are you gonna do instead?” I think it’s a really open-ended question and it’s open-ended on purpose because I think that humans have these intrinsic purposes like, why am I alive?

Everyone’s a little bit different. Everybody has their own purpose, everybody has their own thing that makes them buzz and makes them feel super motivated. Their own thing that they can really contribute to humanity. So, are you in touch with your own purpose? And how is your purpose going to help you and others? What’s your intrinsic purpose? Are you doing it? Most of us aren’t doing it, that’s the thing. That’s where we’re starting. Most of us aren’t doing things that align with our purpose because it doesn’t make money. We’re all doing things to make money and be productive and we’re all blaming ourselves for not being productive and not contributing and not making money and not being this person that everybody wants us to be, but who are you?

I feel like I had to do a lot of work to just be a musician and I had to reject the idea that the most meaningful thing that I’m going to do with my life is make a lot of money, get a job, and look good. [laughs] That wasn’t gonna be the meaning of my life. So what’s beyond that? How does that person show up for humanity? How does the best version of yourself show up in the world? I think that’s where we have to start.

That’s the beautiful thing about music because it’s so personal. We have this opportunity to create this project that can really speak to whoever is listening. I hope that this record inspires somebody to get out of the Matrix. I hope this record inspires somebody to pursue that intrinsic truth that is within their soul. I feel like one of the other things that’s big on this record is having an intense sense of love and what that means. Love is unconditional. Love, I think, can extend to anybody and everybody because we all have this shared experience of being alive. It’s a bad moment, but it’s nice because we can all recognize that we have this shared experience of being human and being disturbed. I don’t want us to ignore that. We have this shared experience of being human and that’s where we should start.

If you don’t feel like you’re in touch with your own sense of being intrinsically human, outside of these structures that we exist within, then you can’t show up to the party. You can’t show up to the party of how we’re going to change everything because you’re not human over here with us. You’ve gotta be yourself because that’s what the world needs, that’s what the collective needs. I feel like this record is really about finding that for yourself. It’s not about how we’re gonna change things on a systemic level because I have faith that if we can all come together, we can figure that out in a way that benefits all of us. I feel like the recognition that there’s abundance in the world is part of it, too. You have so much abundance in just what you have; it’s not about the stuff. You have so much abundance in where you are and in your little world. You don’t have to have all this shit to feel whole. I think it’s this feeling of finding peace.

Peace is a very charged word because peace, a lot of time, indicates that we are gonna ignore pain and we are gonna ignore ugly things, but peace, true peace, can recognize those things and speak to them. In “Love It Here”, we’re speaking to that. We’re speaking to what is disturbing our peace right now. If you are truly peaceful within yourself, then you can truly speak to and name and fight and have this sense of power that overrules all the things that disturb peace. When you think about activism, that’s all it is. You’re looking for everybody to be free and peaceful. There’s a lot of shit about peace that I think people have maybe gentrified, like peace is ignoring the issues, “Oh, we just wanna have a good time.” But we can be joyful in resistance to fascism, resistance to genocide. We can be joyful in that resistance, knowing that we are more powerful in our peace and that we will win. I think that’s where that idea comes from. You have to think about who it’s peaceful for. Is it for everyone?

Does your peace come at a cost to someone else?

Ashrita: Exactly, that’s not true peace. That’s ignorance. It’s about peace and truth. You have to find that, it’s really hard, but you’ve gotta find it. Nobody can find it for you. Maybe we can find it for you, maybe Pinkshift can find it for you. [laughs]

Listen to Earthkeeper.

Ashrita: Yeah, listen to Earthkeeper, out August 29. Pre-order the record now!

[laughter]

Ashrita: It’s so fucked up having to push your shit as a product. That’s the best way for us to get it out to people, so that’s what we’re gonna do and we have to survive. We’re trying our best and that’s enough. Just keep trying your best. That’s all you can really do.

Which part of Earthkeeper are you proudest of?

Myron: Obviously, I’m super proud of the entire thing as a whole. We really got together and this was a product of our creativity and our emotions. I’m really proud of the bridge in “Blood”. There’s many parts that I could play over and over, but that’s a part that I consistently play back whenever I’m listening to the song. It just takes you on such a crazy journey and I feel it every single time. Again, this was a song that we’d been working on for a while and it’s crazy to me that that’s the final product and end result of our efforts. I feel like we all kind of killed that. I feel like that’s an awesome, amazing part that I’m really proud of.

I’m also really proud of us actively taking steps to make sure that this album is the greatest it can be by making sure that we were ok within ourselves. For example, going to the cabin and having conversations about how we were feeling and trying to get on the same level. I feel like that’s something that can often just go ignored. There’s hella bands that go in the studio and they hate each other. They might come out with a crazy album but I’m really glad that for the entire process, we were all very cognizant of each other. I’m just really proud of ourselves for moving through all of the challenges that we were facing, especially early last year.

Ashrita: I feel like there’s a lot of moments on here that were like, “Wow, I can’t believe we did that shit!” There were so many times when we were in the studio and we’d finish a song and we were listening back to the completely unprocessed, unedited song and we were like, “This is the best song that we’ve ever written.” We felt like that the whole time. [laughs] Every single time we finished a song, it was like, “Oh my god, wait. We’re really good at this.” It was really nice to feel so in sync after, honestly, feeling completely out of sync and being able to get back there intentionally together. We could’ve gone into the studio hating each other, we totally could have done that, but each of us made the choice to show up for each other. I think that’s really special about this record. My favourite part? I don’t know. [laughs]

Myron: It’s hard. [laughs]

Ashrita: Every single song has so much to it. We did another interview that was a track-by-track, and it took two hours because every song’s just so meaningful and deep and unique. My favourite part? Man, I’m gonna say “Evil Eye” because it’s just so cool! I listen to that song and I’m like, “Wow, shit, we’re cool! That’s a cool song.” [laughs] I don’t necessarily feel “cool” all the time. I like that song, it makes me feel cool. [laughs] Myron, do you agree?

Myron: Yeah, I feel the same way.

Ashrita: It’s cool as fuck! It’s also not sad, so you can feel cool without being like, “Oh my god, thinking about my life.” [laughs] We don’t do that that often. I feel like I’m very bad at writing lyrics that are not introspective. “Evil Eye” is existential and introspective, but it’s in a dose. I’m also glad we were able to do something with drum and bass because I was loving drum and bass for the past couple years. I wanted something that’s a bit ‘90s Liquid drum and bass for the vibe on the drums. I’m glad we were able to do something different. Then the reggaeton thing, we did it in a way that people didn’t even notice it.

Myron: It was so fun! [laughs]

Ashrita: That part at the end where there’s a breakdown, it’s reggaeton, but it’s really subtle and well done, so it’s not super obvious. [laughs] It was so dance-y. I spoke Hindi on that one and that’s the only one where I’m speaking Hindi, so that’s cool. I worked on that line for a while because I’m not super fluent, even though I should be. [laughs] I have horrible versions of that line that are corny and don’t make any sense in my journals. We have a lot of different instruments on it too. You’re also playing the bongos.

Myron: Yeah, there’s bongos. There’s the Aztec Death Whistle. There’s a lot of cool stuff on that song, a lot of percussion stuff. I know Paul was playing with a lot of different pedals. There’s a Ricochet pedal that will go up a certain amount of octaves really fast, so it’s there in that groovy part right before the breakdown. It’s crazy, it’s awesome!

Ashrita: [does an impression of the pedal] Literally every complicated audio term can just be simplified in mouth sounds.

[laughter]

Ashrita: The scream right before the breakdown is the Aztec Death Whistle. There’s no scream there. That was really fun, especially with the history of it, because it was used in battle to scare the enemy. A bunch of people would come through the woods in the dark and just blow the whistle, and it sounded like a thousand screams to freak out the enemy. I thought that was cool to use that in a song. It’s funny because people probably think that’s me screaming or something. It’s a really good scream. It’s a bloodcurdling scream, but it’s from a whistle. I think Brett did some layering of it, reverb, and production. It’s all the whistle.

You’ll be touring the US and Toronto in the fall. What are you looking forward to about these shows?

Ashrita: I think Toronto is one of the shows I’m looking forward to the most. Toronto always goes crazy. I feel like we’ve always had the best show ever there.

Myron: I’m looking forward to people singing the songs, honestly.

Ashrita: Yes! We are intentionally touring a month after the record releases so everyone can learn all the words. Last time, when we released Love Me Forever, we released it the day after we started our headline tour, so nobody knew the record. For our first show, it wasn’t even out. [laughs]

I’m looking forward to doing our second headline tour ever. This feels like a really big deal, so I’m really excited for all these songs to exist in the real world and interact with people and stuff. There’s moments on “Spiritseeker” where I’m like, “Close your eyes and feel what I feel,” and I was literally imagining standing on a stage telling that to an audience of people. I’m really excited to see that for real. A lot of these songs were written with a crowd in mind, with people in mind. I feel like the album will be complete once we can play it for people. We’re really looking forward to the tour and we’re gonna have more stuff announced for next year. We’re gonna be touring again. We’re gonna be back up and running and couldn’t be more excited to be working again.

[laughter]

Ashrita: We’ve had a lot of time off at home, so it’ll be nice to be out there.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that either of you would like to add?

Ashrita: I’m excited for people to hear it, I’m excited for it to be out in the world. I’m excited to write new songs. I’m excited for new songs to come out that aren’t on Earthkeeper. We’re still working. We’re going to the studio next month for some time. We went into the studio in May and recorded some stuff that’s gonna be coming out sooner than you think.

We are musicians, we are a band. We had to take some time to figure that out. It’s a cool process, taking some time to find yourself after your first record, that sophomore slump. It’s hard. It’s like, “Who am I for real? I put that out, but are we a thing?” We’re a band and we’re totally back. [laughs]