“A tyre with a slow puncture needs constant effort and maintenance just to keep moving, but usually doesn’t get repaired or replaced until it’s too late,” explains Michael Rea, AKA Symbol Soup of his debut full-length Slow Puncture on Sad Club Records. “A running theme of the album is living with our own limitations or flaws—ideally through acceptance, other times through pure laziness. The metaphor also relates to the process of growing older, feeling that you’re imperceptibly losing something as time passes.”
The album spins off this idea in a number of directions. ‘Appetite‘ explores the conflicting pressures of modern living, “where the urge to live an exciting life is always present,” as we put it in a preview, “yet some dissatisfaction sits at the edge of every experience.” ‘Airglow‘ takes on the information age and ways we might lose ourselves in its constant deluge, ‘Gameshow’ a surreal melding of TV and reality, while ‘Overdressed‘ explores cynicism within social interactions and a desire to move beyond superficiality into something deeper. Then there’s ‘Tire’, the most obvious reference to the title, which returns to the puncture metaphor directly, searching for the hole through which life is escaping, as though to locate site of the damage might be to stem the sense of loss.
This mood is brought to life with a decidedly American aesthetic, following a lineage rising in the 90s from songwriters like Mark Linkous and persisting through a myriad of contemporaries from Alex G and Trace Mountains to Field Medic, Free Cake For Every Creature and Hovvdy. But one which draws parallels between the US and Rea’s hometown of Milton Keynes. A city with a short history inside a country with a long one, designed purely for modern living and possessing the strange balance between potential and hollowness of any ahistorical space.
We took the opportunity to speak with Rea about the record, touching upon its themes, imagery and inception.
Thanks for speaking to us, and congratulations on the release of Slow Puncture. How does it feel letting the record out into the world?
Thank you! It feels good, the record definitely reflects what I wanted Symbol Soup to be when I started, including the artwork and everything. Curious as to what people are gonna get from it too!
I guess the title is a good a place to start. There’s plenty of metaphorical baggage to unpack with Slow Puncture, some of which is especially pertinent. The sense of being chronically damaged, tending towards eventual ruin, yet nevertheless existing within a functioning state so that you can ignore the damage day to day. How does the image of a slow puncture figure in your view of the songs? Did you start with the title in mind?
Some of the songs, like ‘Gameshow’ and ‘Appetite’ are pretty old and predate the title, but the majority came after I had Slow Puncture in mind. I tried to have the arc of a puncture across the album, with the early songs being a bit more energetic, and the later songs in general being more subdued. The song ‘Tire’ is more explicitly about that theme, trying to pinpoint where that background sense of loss comes from. I also wrote a really long song called ‘Slow Puncture’ which didn’t make it onto the album!
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Can we talk a little about nostalgia? The record seems to sit at the strange juncture so many of us find ourselves in. Where the promises of the past didn’t quite manifest in the present, and the future feels like it could easily be filled with looking back on better, especially childhood, days—something manifest in the album art. Do you think Slow Puncture is a nostalgic album? Or an album working against nostalgia?
I think it’s very nostalgic yeah, and my preference for folky and fuzzy sounds definitely is because it feels like something lacking in my environment, rather than reflecting it. My sense is that the world is just a lot more complicated than any of us can get our head around, and so we’re necessarily taking part in a ‘make believe’ version of reality. So it’s kind of acknowledging that your situation won’t ever meaningfully mirror that over-simplified version of life we’re taught to work towards.
The balance between the real and the surreal is a striking feature of your work, be it the blurring of reality and the internet (‘Airglow’) or television (‘Gameshow’), or just in its playful style more generally. You’ve described ‘Appetite’ as “thematically… about feeling totally overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed at the same time,” which seems to capture this mood in some way. As though the world is both amazingly weird and numbingly dull simultaneously.
Exactly, every moment of reality is seen through our own lens. The experienced mundanity or mystery is a bit of a choice there. So you can know that the internet ‘cloud’ is physically a big room full of server boxes, but also confront the phenomenon of it, as this invisible mass of data between us, hanging in the air like pollution. Both perspectives are true!
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There’s an interesting duality of locales on the record, with the lived experience of English suburbia (in this case Milton Keynes) processed through a semi-fictious small-town Americana represented by the picturesque Pacific Northwest. Could you talk through these ideas a little more, and what these places mean to you and your work?
Milton Keynes does mirror those places visually. There’s the grid system and warehouses and Costco, and also a lot of beautiful wooded area. Because it’s only sixty years old there’s a lack of British cultural baggage there, so driving around it’s easy to imagine you’re anywhere. You’re conscious of being on the outskirts, I wasn’t aware of much of a scene while I was there, and that made me more interested in making recordings rather than things which would immediately go down well live. The imagined vision of the Pacific Northwest comes mostly from Twin Peaks and Mount Eerie I guess.
Can we talk a little about influences? There’s a clear link to the US indie/bedroom scenes of recent years? Who do you consider the biggest influences on the Symbol Soup sound?
Absolutely, the approach to songwriting and production that’s come about there just hits the spot for me. Some biggies are Spencer Radcliffe, Hovvdy, Jodi, Runnner, MJ Lenderman. And an extra biggie is Trace Mountains—Dave [Benton] mixed the album, and the song ‘Tire’ came out of a songwriting workshop he was doing in lockdown.
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Slow Puncture is out now via Sad Club Records and you get it from Bandcamp.
