“The Travelling Wilburys just wanted to play with Roy Orbison. In some ways, we’re doing that too.”
Stephen Malkmus muses on his latest pursuit – an ensemble that’s a bit more than just a special new band: The Hard Quartet. Featuring the Pavement frontman alongside Emmett Kelly, Matt Sweeney and Jim White, the proudly leaderless line-up could be an AI-generated schematic of indie rock heavyweights. In reality, the results are even better than on paper.
Malkmus and Sweeney first had the idea of forming a group during the sessions for Malkmus’ 2020 solo album Traditional Techniques, where Sweeney was among the featured players, about a year before the pandemic. The consensus was immediate. Sweeney sent a text to White and Kelly on the spot, and both were instantly on board.
Without Jim White – one of the all-time great journeymen behind the kit – this would be a world-beating axis of artists with a keen instinct for collaboration. With him, it’s an almost scandalous proposition. Rather than cancelling each other out, the collective weight of their experience elevates fifteen songs steeped in sweet tones and pure-cut talent.
“I had some intuition about people’s inherent goodness in this band,” reflects Malkmus from his home in Oregon. “Not only in music but the way people are. There’s probably been some corny stuff like letting go of egos and listening to others. Also, there’s being prepared to throw out the preparation and all that hippie shit.”
In The Hard Quartet, equality is the driving force of their sound. Embracing power pop, psych, punk and folk, they each hold space for their bandmates, flipping seamlessly between lead vocals and instruments. “We all assumed that we would be the bass player when the idea of the band came together,” reveals Kelly, lauded for his work in The Cairo Gang and The Double, as well as with artists including Ty Segall, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and Natural Information Society, speaking from California.
Over the years, the quartet’s members have been like ships passing in the night. Malkmus and Sweeney – best known for his work in Skunk, Chavez and Superwolf – first met at NYC’s Max Fish after a Pavement show in 1993. In 1995, Sweeney and White played on separate floors at Boston’s Middle East club. Elsewhere, Kelly and White formed a duo in The Double, with Sweeney stepping in for Kelly on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2006, and Dirty Three toured with Pavement back in 1994. But it was a chance encounter at a small pier-side festival in NYC when Malkmus and Kelly discovered just how much they had in common, after the former spotted the latter’s belt buckle bearing the logo of French prog band Magma. Now, at last, they all but merge as one.
“It was just really comfortable,” says Kelly. “We had a good time the whole time. We would get together to play, and it was just easy. It didn’t seem like anyone was questioning where people were coming from, you know? It quickly settled into a good feel.”
As it zig-zags across 50 minutes, The Hard Quartet could be comfortably distilled to that “good feel.” Take recent single ‘Rio’s Song,’ an homage to street rock in the hot afternoon and clowning around with lifer friends in downtown New York City. With Sweeney on lead vocals, it underscores the notion that this band is a musical game of chairs where individual legacies are steadied by fresh inspiration. There’s a curious agelessness to it all, too. But was there any pressure, considering the mutual respect they all share?
“In a certain way, there was,” admits Malkmus. “It was subconscious, though. It instantly alleviated when something came out good. Of course, we’re all mature enough and [have been] in this game long enough. I was just so stoked. It’s no false modesty to say that these guys really can play guitar and shit at a high level. I do, too, but I’m more autodidactic. I’ve got my own style. But you’re getting blown away by what people are doing here.”
‘Our Hometown Boy,’ led by Kelly, shines early on the album with its channelling of The Byrds and Big Star. Other highlights include the Malkmus-fronted ‘Hey,’ the Slint-like grind of Sweeney’s ‘It Suits You’, and ‘Action for Military Boys,’ a shapeshifting peak all but guaranteed to be a future live centrepiece. Then there’s opener ‘Chrome Mess,’ a scorched, sludge-glam spectacle reminiscent of an amp-blasted Sparks. “Sludge-glam, I like that,” Malkmus laughs. “People have tried, but got it wrong – until us. With ‘Chrome Mess,’ it was all about jamming, finding a mood, then shredding it.”
It may feel fated, but the foursome’s synchronicity was never quite guaranteed. “You see if you connect with people on a different level when you’re playing with them,” Kelly explains. “If you do, then you can be your best at it. For me, at least, when we started playing, it felt cool just being in the same room. Then we started, and it was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is obviously cool.’ I felt that immediately.”
Not least as the sole Antipodean, and non-guitarist, Jim White deserves credit for setting the project apart from its deep-set roots in contemporary American indie rock. His presence as a roiling, thunderous anchor at the heart of these tracks offers more than just rhythmic support – he becomes a vital force steering the entire operation into uncharted waters.
“Jim is always going to come from a place you didn’t even know existed,” says Kelly, who briefly played with White alongside Will Oldham, aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “It’s the same with anyone you play with – it depends on how open the group is to where they’re coming from. With Will, the group always shifts around. Sometimes you gel better with others, and there are always multiple X factors. In this case, everyone geeked out on the idea of Jim showing up in his own way.”
The Hard Quartet manage to honour the old gods without falling into the pit of pastiche. With understated harmonies and, yes, a whole heap of guitar wizardry, they gesture towards a range of influences, but the brilliance is in their ultimate ambiguity. It’s a delicate balancing act they’ve honed over time, almost by instinct.
“For me, it’s about getting it wrong a little bit,” says Malkmus. “Like when I ripped off The Fall, everyone knew. On this record, there are a couple of instances where I maybe think of my heroes more in the vocals. Sometimes I’ll try to do an Alex Chilton-type thing. But it varies, either I do it consciously, and it’s obvious, or I don’t do it because I’m just making music, or I’m doing it, and it just doesn’t sound great because I can’t get it right.”
In between takes, the band kicked back and glued brains over Slade and Terry Stamp, the mouthpiece of proto-punk heroes Third World War. “They had a turntable at the studio for vibes,” reveals Malkmus. Mainly, the broader “good feel” rested on simply being together and shooting the breeze. “There’s a lot of hanging out in this band,” Malkmus continues. “Sometimes I imagine this is how hip hop records are made because there was a lot of weed and a lot of chilling. That’s the feeling I got from my friends who were engineers at hip hop sessions. So we really got to hang, joke and do old man stuff.”
Few bands have earned their old man stripes more than The Hard Quartet, who arrive at a moment following busy periods for all involved, not least Pavement’s latest reunion in 2022. One suspects that to create new music this natural and focused, one must be at peace with the bigger picture. By extension, maybe it’s time for Pavement fans to stop asking for new music?
“That’s a question that comes up, but I don’t know yet,” muses Malkmus. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the Pavement universe. There’s a movie being made and stuff. I’m psyched and blessed with what happened with Pavement and lucky as fuck that it still has traction, but it’s been kind of nice not having to talk about that and to just focus on this.” I mention that this record has given me, whose passwords have been variations of Pavement album titles since 2002, exactly what I would like along those lines, but more. “Yeah, right?” agrees Malkmus. “It’s got a spark.”
That spark reveals itself in various forms. While it’s one thing to contribute bass lines for a track or two, much of the real magic happens when Malkmus, Kelly and Sweeney flip between lead and backing vocals. “It was super confident,” says Malkmus of his bandmates. “It was pretty impressive seeing it in action. I have a good voice, but Emmett’s voice accentuates everything in a natural way. Matt also. I think of him as a guitar player because he makes a living doing session work sometimes, and he has [interview web series] Guitar Moves, but he was fearless. That’s part of the name – the Hard Quartet. It’s not like we’re hard, really. We’re just confident or something. That’s why we could stand a braggy name. We’re like, soft-hard.”
Referenced artists
Pavement
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Naturally, talk eventually turns to the strange, often supremely silly world of so-called supergroups. Unsurprisingly, Malkmus and Kelly are very much on the same page regarding the term. “It’s funny, I always get the implication that a supergroup is a thing to do for a second while we rest on our laurels, then we’ll go back to our actual life or something,” says the latter. “We’re just a normal group.”
In many ways, I suggest, The Hard Quartet are the anti-Them Crooked Vultures. “I forgot about them – nice call,” says Malkmus. “They just wanted to jam with John Paul Jones, which I really can’t deny them. If we were The Travelling Wilburys, I’d like to be Bob Dylan because everyone would be fucking afraid of me always. I bet you could get away with a lot with that.”
“Dylan’s fucking scary, man,” adds Kelly.
“But for real, I think the word ‘supergroup’ requires that everybody really, truly knows who you are,” says Malkmus. “Everyone’s a supergroup to someone, just about, even if it’s just your mum who’s into it. I think we all have the vibe that you don’t have to be successful to be super.”
The Hard Quartet’s self-titled debut album is released on 4 October via Matador
