After years of virtual band meetings and drumming up buzz online, Boston band Couch look set to take over the world with a debut album of polished, meticulously crafted pop bops and a sprawling 36-date tour. They spoke to Undertone about launching a band during the Covid years, their vulnerable new single, and the tricky task of making music with seven songwriters.
The pandemic did strange things to the music industry. On the one hand, we saw a fresh wave of what was giddily termed the 2020s’ “disco revival”. Jessie Ware, Róisín Murphy, Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa all released unequivocally dancefloor-primed records that perversely chimed with listeners trapped indoors all day, pining for a hedonistic escape and a return to the wonderfully unhygienic surroundings of a cramped and sweaty nightclub. On the other hand, the pandemic was a prompt for many artists to return to their roots with homespun, introspective album recorded with minimal equipment from home studios. Paul McCartney’s stripped-back McCartney III had the man himself play all the instruments, Charli xcx was in a reflective mood on how i’m feeling now, and Adrienne Lenker’s understated magnum opus songs was entirely recorded in a cabin in rural Massachusetts. As with seemingly many other aspects of society, such a radical change was only temporary: a few years after releasing her own folksy and minimalist albums folklore and evermore to critical acclaim, Taylor Swift is firmly back to her stadium-filling former self.
Couch, meanwhile, were biding their time, patiently plotting their route to stardom. Purveyors of soulful pop in the vein of Vulfpeck, Sammy Rae and Lake Street Dive, the seven-strong group specialise exactly the kind of free-spirited disco and funk tunes that topped the charts in 2020. For them, however, the pandemic (as well as attending various colleges across the States) meant it was three years of intermittent band meetups and FaceTime calls before the Bostonians finally took to the stage together for the first time.
That may sound tedious, but it was a blessing in disguise, keyboardist Danny Silverston tells me. “Once Covid hit, a lot of bands were like ‘man, what do we do now?’, but for us it was like ‘we actually kind of know what to do now’. We got to spend some really quality time together, and it set us up pretty effectively for our first ever tour, which was pretty much like a slam dunk.” Guitarist Zach Blankstein, who doubles as the band’s manager, agrees. “We had that remote incubation period where we got to share our music with people and start to feel some external excitement. Getting everyone [in the band] to make themselves available to go tour eventually was easy because we were all excited to go do it and felt like was a long time coming by that point.”
Silverston and Blankstein, as well as bassist Will Griffin, speak to me partway through a 16 hour drive back to Boston from Asheville, North Carolina, where they’ve just performed a charity show. The band may still be relatively new, but they’re no strangers to this sort of long-distance touring, and their first trip to the UK – an impressively full-throttle show which Undertone was lucky enough to catch – was over two years ago. For Griffin, touring and songwriting go hand in hand. “Something that feels best for us in the rehearsal space might feel totally different on stage. It opens up different opportunities to explore variations of arrangement styles and grooves.” In fact, Couch’s huge upcoming tour, which starts in November, was booked well before the new record was even fully written. Other times, though, it’s the finished song that comes first. “But they’re definitely very connected processes, no matter which order they happen,” Blankstein adds.
Perhaps it’s a sign of Couch’s easy-going, fluid approach to songwriting that, as Blankstein admits, the new album Big Talk isn’t even finished by the time of our interview. The band’s exceptional attention to detail, in particular with their knotty horn sections (see: Still Feeling You‘s wonderfully wiggly breakdown), no doubt slows down the writing process, but their emphasis on collaboration from all band members also partly explains the six year gap between their debut single and Big Talk. Whilst singer Tema Siegal takes the lead lyrically, musically the band takes a more democratic approach, taking turns as bandleaders and voting on creative choices. “On the one hand, I imagine it kind of slows us down,” Silverston says, “but it also means that the final product will really be Couch‘s debut, not like one or three individuals. It really feels like every single person in the band is infusing their tastes and sensibilities into the album.” It’s a key asset, Silverston says, that his bandmates don’t have identical, or even similar, musical tastes. “Jared [Gozinsky, drummer], for example, likes a lot of big band jazz stuff, which gets mixed with a few other band members who like more rock, heavy music. I think that difference is actually what makes songwriting so exciting, and where our growth can be seen the most.”
The first taste of this growth comes via the band’s slick new single What Were You Thinking, which winningly pits a tale of a romantic power imbalance against a sumptuous disco bass line and a silky smooth piano breakdown. The vulnerable lyrics and anthemic melodies make for an interesting contrast, I note to Blankstein. “Jeff [Pinsker-Smith, trumpeter] brought the demo that we all really liked and when Tema heard it she felt like it called for something a little angry,” he explains. “She had this story in her mind for a while […] and the energy she was feeling from the instrumental felt compatible with that story”. The result is a pop song that sounds simultaneously embittered and euphoric, matching Seigel’s snappy takedowns (“What were you thinking / Handling a heart of 20 years like that?”) with a sense that she’s emerged from the relationship with her sense of joy and self-confidence ultimately undimmed.
What Were You Thinking promises to be the highlight of Couch’s latest live offering, which will tour 36 cities across 11 countries from November to March. Fans can expect “most of, if not the entire new catalogue of music, plus some new arrangements of the older tunes that we’re really excited about,” says Blankstein. If it’s anything like their debut UK show in 2023 – which produced an electric atmosphere in Manchester’s Band on the Wall – it should be an memorable night of jubilant funk-pop singalongs. “We’re putting together a proper show to pay tribute to this album,” he concludes and, given the time and energy the whole band have put into Big Talk, there’s no doubt there’ll be plenty to love.
