Slippers

Slippers’ debut album is called So You Like Slippers?. It’s a cheeky title that feels akin to the kind of scrappy, winking power pop and garage rock that Slippers mastermind Madeline BB is both inspired by and a master of. But if there’s a nit to pick, it's with the question mark–because there’s really no question about it: you like Slippers. The songs are short but lasting, the sound is raw but punchy, the melodies seem to be precisely calibrated to immediately stick in your brain and stay there, but it all feels fun and effortless in the way that good guitar pop should. This is some of the most downright likable music you will hear this year. So maybe you don’t even know it yet, but you like Slippers.

In addition to being a longtime drummer who also performs in Le Pain and has previously played in Yucky Duster, BB’s other passion is animation, and the start of Slippers coincides with her time studying that trade in grad school at California Institute of the Arts. The band began in earnest in BB’s current home of Los Angeles but her love of animation and music go back to her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia. “Cartoon Network is based in Atlanta and it was a big part of my life growing up,” BB explains. “They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there–I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.”

Georgia’s music scene also made an impact, sowing the seeds for the kind of shambolic-yet-sharp songwriting that BB excels at. “Athens is of course the home of Elephant 6 so I got very into Apples in Stereo, of Montreal, Dressy Bessy, Beaulah–that sort of psychedelic pop thing. And growing up in Atlanta, I would see a lot of bands, like Balkans, Black Lips, and Carbonas, that were kind of blending punk and garage–music that had this very compulsive, quick approach.” The city’s connection to cartooning stuck with her too and it was this pursuit that inadvertently kicked off Slippers. “I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations, I had this song called ‘Monkey Over There’ that I’d written ages ago and then over the pandemic my boyfriend and I were doing this experiment where we’d try to just write as many songs as we could in a day. So I ended up with all these primitive songs and felt really compelled to try and record them quickly and roughly. I was very into that idea in general, just very quick build ups and quick rewards–super distilled songwriting.”

The result is So You Like Slippers?, 10 songs of endlessly loveable guitar pop that’s sure to fog up the horn-rimmed glasses of power poppers, rev up the engines of leather jacket-clad garage rockers, and salivate the taste buds of Pitchfork-reverent indie pop heads alike. The album kicks off with “XTC1000,” a cut of jittery jangle that sounds like the Goner Records and Sarah Records discographies boiled down into 104 seconds of joyful rock music. It’s quickly followed by the hazy strums of “Pretend World” and the baggy pop of “On The Line,” two songs that seem to imagine a collaboration between Dear Nora and Apples in Stereo. There’s an endearing looseness throughout So You Like Slippers? that belies the impressive songcraft at play, it’s even found in the lyrics where BB builds incisive observations into all of the indelible hooks.

The record often explores the idea that so many of the things in life that are supposed to feel natural and enriching can often become complicated and overwrought: friend group dynamics, romantic relationships, even making art. “I felt really adrift when I got out of art school,” BB says. “I was just kind of blocked about making art because everything was stuck in that intellectual setting. So a lot of my songs are sort of about feeling lost, feeling sad about losing the connection to making art.” Tracks like the swooning “Crowd Source,” speedy “Why Do It Well, “ and jangly “Nice Weather,” address these doubts and frustrations, the moments where life isn’t turning out how you expected. But fittingly, the direct and spontaneous process of making So You Like Slippers? seems to have been the antidote for this creative gridlock. “Sometimes I feel like when I try the hardest is when I fail the most,” BB explains. “I think up until recently I’ve often been trying to do things that I wasn’t totally inclined to do, but with this record I just wanted to go pure-Madeline and not worry about it being this polished thing.”

So by the time So You Like Slippers? wraps up with the lovely, tape-warped indie pop of “Awake Somehow” you’ll be more than convinced. You’ll understand that there’s no need for that inquiring bit of punctuation after all, and you’ll realize the only real question is how quickly can you hit repeat? Because, of course, you like Slippers.