Until now best known as the drummer in punk outfit Le Pain and as a previous member of Yucky Duster, Madeleine BB started new band Slippers as an outlet for her own songwriting while studying a post-grad course in animation at California Institute of the Arts. “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,” she describes. “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.” As the creative process might suggest, Slippers specialise in a sweet and moreish blend of power pop and garage rock, all served in bitesized chunks. Which makes debut album So You Like Slippers?, out now via Lame-O Records, something of a grab bag, a colourful pick ‘n mix of alt-pop flavours designed to be eaten ten at a time.
It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. “Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,” she says. “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.”
Many of the tracks on So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. “I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,” she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease. Take ‘Lock You Out’, a ostensibly sweet twee pop song that’s actually about the sour end of a relationship rather than the sugary beginning. “I’m not gonna lock you out, just gonna walk out for now,” BB sings, “I’m not gonna hear you out, your voice is way too loud. Maybe there’s no way, To make it all okay.”
Coming of age in and around Georgia’s music scene also played its part. Athens was one of the main bases of the Elephant 6 collective and its imaginative brand of psychedelic indie pop, and Atlanta was home to the likes of Black Lips and The Carbonas whose immediate, shot-in-the-arm style of garage-meets-punk left a lasting impression. This melange of influences is apparent almost instantly. Opener ‘XTC 1000’ has the bittersweet jangle of early 90s indie pop but with stabs of garage rock guitar and the propulsive galloping percussion of The Unicorns, while ‘On the Line’ rises from similarly scrappy pop, complete with deadpan if not downbeat vocals, into a joyfully noisy chorus. There’s humour too, like on the crunchy and buoyant ‘The Bus’ which compares a good-for-nothing significant other to the trials and tribulations of riding public transport.
Just like the bus you’re always late
Just like the bus you leave me trapped inside a room with strangers
Each song feels effortless and spontaneous, kicking doubt and apprehension to the curb in favour of unburdened creativity. “Sometimes I feel like when I try the hardest is when I fail the most,” as 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 You Like Slippers? is out now via Lame-O Records and available via the Slippers Bandcamp page.
