OK Cool is the project of Chicago‘s Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist, who began writing and recording demos together in a state of pandemic-era ennui in the spring of 2020. Since then the duo have released two EPs (Anomia and Surrealist) and a double single (Songs From the Spare Room), all which have refined and developed their signature style that combines contemporary indie rock, noodly math rock guitars, shoegazey reverb and 90s throwback grunge elements.
fawn spans just seventeen minutes across eight tracks, but somehow packs more into this condensed runtime than most bands do in a forty-five minute album. Stiebris plays guitar and sings while Blomquist plays bass and a little extra guitar, and together they conjure a rich lineage of forebears, from contemporary bedroom pop to Midwest emo and feedback-soaked shoegaze, while still keeping things fresh and experimental.
Indeed, perhaps the most notable aspect of fawn is its instinctive nature. Practically none of the songs follow a traditional structure, finding unusual melodies and earworm hooks where you least expect them, short and sweet and gloriously immediate. “It’s our ode to the demo,” Stiebris explains. “There’s not much that changed about the songs from the first draft to the final master, besides the production quality. We even kept all song titles in lowercase, exactly how the demos were saved on my computer.”
Take second track ‘normal c’, one of the EP’s longest at almost three minutes, which begins with sedate mathy riffs before morphing into a blazing rock song complete with clattering drums and snarled vocals. Check out the video by Justin Sheehan and Brian Garbrecht of Roadhouse Productions below:
Talking of music videos, we can’t not mention Joe Baughman‘s stop-motion creation for ‘nissanweekends’. Featuring a depressed rabbit who lives in a cuckoo clock, forced to trudge out to its little balcony to announce the new hour, it embodies the song’s exploration of the irrational shameful feeling of being unproductive in our hectic world. “It can feel like a waste of time to not be productive when there’s so many plates I’m trying to balance at once,” Blomquist tells Stereogum. “Ultimately making it hard to ever relax without feeling like ‘if I lay down, the earth will open up and leave me.’”
As you might expect, closer ‘soaked in’ finishes in a blaze of glory, two minutes twenty seconds that play like an OK Cool mission statement. “This song was super fun to write and I think it might be one of the most representative of the project as a whole,” Stiebris describes. “It’s got a lot of goofy guitar lines and fun instrumental sections going on, and I get to do a lot of yelling which is always a plus.” Tracy Conoboy’s shadowy psychedelic video is the perfect illustration, capturing the track’s live energy and bittersweet balance of dark and light.
With fawn, OK Cool show that sometimes caution and careful planning are the enemies of creativity. Through instinct and experimentation, they have captured a lightning-in-a-bottle energy. It’s the sound of two people completely attuned to one another’s inventiveness, growing together as artists in real time. Which comes to explain the EP’s title. “It definitely did, and still mostly does, feel like we’re just finding our legs in all of this,” says Blomquist. “The idea of a baby deer learning to walk felt pretty appropriate for the title of the EP–it parallels the vulnerability that comes with taking on new experiences.”
fawn is out now via Take a Hike Records and you can get it from the OK Cool Bandcamp page.
Photo by Tracy Conoboy