Heavier, Darker, Louder: Good Sleepy talk the making of new album ‘Constant Humming’

Nearly 5 years after their last full-length release, Massachusetts-based emo outfit, Good Sleepy is stepping into a new chapter with the release of their new album, Constant Humming. 

Lead vocalist and bassist, Thomas Sullivan, and guitarist and backing vocalist Seth Gerard talked the long road to finishing the album, the darker lyricism and the deeply DIY recording process of the new album. 

Your new album, Constant Humming, is coming out on Feb. 13. This follows your last album release, nearly 5 years ago. How are you all feeling about this? Excited? Nervous? 

Seth 

I'm definitely super excited. I wish that it hadn't been so long since we put out an album. Obviously, it's been a while. Like our first album did come out when we were, you know, still really young. So I don't know, it feels different, feels good to finally get it out too, because we've been working on it for a really long time. I'm really excited for people to finally hear the whole thing. 

Thomas 

Yeah, me too. I'm on the same wave with you, Seth. There's always a little bit of anxiety about like what if people don't like it and stuff. Things have changed, you know, it's been so long since we put our last album, so influences and all that good stuff have kind of grown and changed with us. I'm super stoked for it to come out. We've had a few releases here and there, but I think this one's a really big step forward for us, so I'm stoked for you to hear it. 

Do you have any specific songs that you’re excited for fans to hear? 

Thomas 

I'm really excited for people to hear the last song of the album. It's called “Inception.” I think it's the longest song we've ever put out, it's got a lot going on. It's one of those songs that starts really soft and then builds and gets really loud and I like it a lot. There's like a lot of very good sleepy elements in it. A lot of things going on, so I'm really pumped for people to hear that one. I'm also stoked for that song. 

My favorite song in the album is probably “745.” I think it's just really relatable, catchy, it came from the heart when I was writing the lyrics for it, and I think it's some of our best work so far.

Seth 

I'm with you with “Inception.” There's another song called “Day to Day,” I'm super excited about that one. 

After listening to the album, it seems to be a little darker than your last. Did you have any specific inspiration, sonically or lyrically, going into creating it?

Seth 

I think sonically, just instrumentals and stuff, we definitely got into heavier music, listening to more hardcore stuff. So we wanted to keep some of that influence while still staying true to like our emo sound, like Twinkly riffs and all that. All of us were really stoked on Turnstile and stuff at the time of writing. We were really into the early Turnstile stuff getting into the hardcore scene. We wanted to try to somehow incorporate that into the record. So, I think that's where some of the darker sound comes from for sure. 

Thomas 

Yeah, like sonically too, Belmont was another huge influence when we were recording. We were on tour that summer and when we first started recording the album, we were just we fell in love with “Liminal.” That album was sick for us, so that kind of made its way onto the album too. 

But lyrically, I think it was also born out of kind of a darker place. There was just a lot more stuff to talk about because it's been so long since we put out a a full-length release and our first one first album we put out was only two years into us being a band, and we were younger and, you know, shit gets hard when you get older. 

Going more into the recording process, it took around 4 years for you to record this, and it seemed you were in a pretty isolated area while self-recording the album. Did the isolation shape the sound or mood of the record at all? 

Thomas 

I think it made us feed off of each other a lot more. I mean, I wouldn't say it was too isolated because we were collaborating with people, not necessarily when we were doing a lot of the DIY aspects, but we had a lot of people we were talking to and sending stuff back and forth and building off of their their ideas. Like Charlie Burkett, he was our producer for the album and he was super super helpful with even some song writing components. But yeah, just being, we recorded at back home which is a very small town, in a  kind of isolated house, and it was intimate. 

Sean 

Yeah locked in Thomas's basement for hours on end, just writing and recording…  It's always fun. I think it I think it definitely took influence into it. That definitely shapes the some of the sound for sure. 

Did you guys have any situations where you had to get creative while recording? 

Thomas 

Absolutely. Yeah, I think the entire process was pretty creative. I mean we've done stuff DIY in the past and it came out sounding pretty bad, so we didn't want that to happen again this time. I know that's a staple of a lot of DIY music and there can actually be some draw to it. It's kind of that low-fi kind of sound to it all, but I don't know. We're going for something a little bit more, like a bigger sound, something that we had imagined going into it with some of our newer influences and stuff. 

But yeah, we had to get creative. We did do the drums in the studio with our producer, so that was nice. We were in the studio but that was one day and we were recording the album for a really, really long time. Just part of the reason it took so long was because of how DIY the setup was, we were recording in the back of my basement, kind of in the cellar room. It wasn't too bad of a setup – nice, insulated, exposed ceilings, you know, pink foamy stuff on the ceiling. So that was good for the acoustics and but we had a very untraditional setup going where we just had the desk in the back room and this kind of closet setup going that we had just stuffed to the brim with pillows and mattresses and stuff for recording guitar. I actually recorded a lot of the vocals in this room that I'm in right now.

I had a vocal booth set up in my bedroom in my apartment which was a challenge and I have neighbors and stuff so people are hearing me scream at the top of my lungs in my my apartment. But yeah, stuff happens, things didn't always work out. We had to go back and redo stuff a few times for sure.

Sean 

Yeah, that's the thing with DIY recording when you only you don't have someone who does this full time. Thomas is a smart guy, like engineering, he's really good at that. We have Jack, our drummer, he's also really into the engineering stuff. But, you know, something could be really messed up and you just didn't realize it and you finished two songs recording guitar and you're like, ‘Oh, got to record it, re-record it because something was wrong,’ and you just didn't realize it. So that's another reason why it took so long too, just recording it and stuff. 

Going into the title: Constant Humming, you said that it’s the noise of unspoken feelings lingering in the back of your mind. When did you realize that it would be the title of the record?

Thomas

It was untitled for a long time. The entire time we were working on it, we were like, ‘This is going to be a self-titled album.’ But we kind of moved away with that when when I was writing lyrics and started spewing all this stuff out that I really wanted to get out. But it's because of that, the title track on the album is probably the single we put out, “ZZZ.” And it just kind of derived from there. There's like one part of it, it's like: ‘It's constant humming in my mind,’ and yeah. We kind of took it from there and rolled with it.

You mentioned “ZZZ,” and prior to the album release, you’ve released a few other singles: “Trap” and “Looming.” Why did you choose these singles to be released before the rest of the album? Did you have a vision for why they felt right to introduce this new era of Good Sleepy? 

Thomas

Yeah, for sure. And we did it in kind of a specific order too. Like “Trap” was ,we thought it was pretty familiar sounding to some of our older stuff, probably the most raw sounding track on the whole album, very traditional kind of emo sound. But we wanted to build off that, so we put out “Trap” because it's pretty heavy song too. It's pretty hard. 

So the next song we put out was “ZZZ.” And that was a more different direction for us. We've never really done a song like that. It was more almost like punk-leaning than anything emo, maybe kind of a hardcore sound to it.

That was different, so we wanted to put that song out after we had kind of made a point of saying it's not going to be … if you're into the Good Sleepy stuff you're not going to hate the album, you know, it's different but it's still good. And our last song, “Looming,” that was kind of just a band favorite, I think, so that one was kind of for us. We all really like that song, it's super catchy. 

How do you want Good Sleepy fans to feel when they sit and listen to the album in full? 

Thomas

I think it is an album that should be listened to from start to finish, but I also I think every album should be. I think it's a journey to go on and I hope people stick with us through it. It's different than our old stuff and I hope people recognize that too, because we've grown a lot since our last few releases and I think our audience has been well receptive to that. I mean honestly I just I had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun writing and recording it, and I hope people can relate to it and dig it like we did.

Sean 

Yeah, I think there's a a lot of waves of emotions. There's some really sad stuff on there and some slower songs. And then some super fast songs too, obviously that make you want to, I don't know, jump off stage or something. Something more fun like that. There's a lot going on and I feel like that'll really sit well with people and I want them to be excited about it too.

Constant Humming is out to listen to everywhere.