Photo by: Jaycee Rockhold

How The Light Felt, the sophomore effort from Smut, is a reckoning on a personal and creative level unlike anything which the Chicago-based quintet has contended with thus far. Born out of tragedy following the death of vocalist Tay Roebuck’s sister in 2017, she alongside guitarist Andrew Min, bassist and synthesist Bell Cenower, guitarist and synthesist Sam Ruschman, and drummer Aidan O’Connor have crafted a sonic document of deep grief through spells of dream-pop, alternative pop-rock and trip-hop that ultimately transcend the darkness and redefine what hope sounds like upon breaking through the other side.

+rcmndedlisten spoke with Tay Roebuck via e-mail about interpreting the personal through their art, the ‘90s gaze in today’s current music spectrum, and what comes next after this moment.

+rl: There’s the natural desire to want to describe Smut as a dream-pop band who meshes into the walls of ‘90s luminaries like the Sundays, Massive Attack, and early Cranberries, but there’s also an unassuming aggressiveness on tracks like “Janeway” and more unorthodox bedroom-styled production on closer “Unbroken Thought” that stop you in your tracks from doing so, and instead draw tangents to modern artists like Nothing and just nothing else really at all. How do you search for creative inspo in a scene that’s so familiar to the ear?

Tay Roebuck: The best thing about our band is that we all take inspiration from different places. Yes, we all have a love for ‘90s music, but that spans genres. If you think about bands from the ‘90s, they take a lot of inspirations from the ‘70s and bands from the ‘70s riff off the ‘50s. Music to us is a lot about finding the sounds you love and expanding on them. It’s what a lot of great bands do!

+rl: How the Light Felt is an album that is deceptively heavy (even more so than your 2017 punk-driven debut, End of Sam-Soon) despite how it feels on the surface, which in turn, puts a metaphorical focus on the album’s title itself. Personal grief and loss permeate throughout the listen, but tracks like “Soft Engine” and “After Silver Leaves” are soft, luminous, warm and comforting in a manner that makes each song sound like a breakthrough to the other side. Was the way you crafted your sound on this effort part of the healing process?

TR: To be honest, when writing the lyrics for this album, I wasn’t intending anything. I was going through something raw and getting it out of me in the way. I had learned to process my emotions by writing. I didn’t want to quit the band, but I couldn’t really keep writing and performing the way I did before. We were making aggressive songs with abstract lyrics and to do that after my sister’s death felt impossible. So the natural solution was to change how I performed and to change what I wrote about. Only after it was done and sent away to be pressed and sold did I feel the reckoning of having written it. Imagine selling the worst thing that ever happened to you to an audience. It was something I was fully unprepared for and still struggle with. I wouldn’t say it’s been exactly healing in the long run in that sense.

+rl: At the same time, How the Light Felt could easily be interpreted as an album about love and the sensation of falling in love through its veiled sunlight by turning its lyricism toward it with a longing romanticism. Did the dichotomy between two profoundly different emotions meeting in the center come across to you during the songwriting, or was that a beautiful accident?

TR: The sound itself was crafted by all members of the band. The content of the album lyric-wise is very much my life and experiences, but the instrumentation itself is the growth of four other people and me. The comforting sounds to me can almost be read as the symbiotic relationship Smut has. They were and are the comfort and support that lifts my heavy experiences and that gives levity to the outside audience. I think they add hope to the songs that I wouldn’t be able to give on my own.

In this moment, this album also sounds like the Smut’s fullest realization yet, and should be appreciated for that. From here, do you start to creatively look to where the path leads next, or have the experiences lived throughout this listen redefined your perspective on that process as well?

TR: I think we as a group are ready to move on to the next thing, which will hopefully be an evolution of How the Light Felt into a more energetic sound. Now that we’ve cried it out and seen the positive effect the album seems to be having, I think we are all ready to get out there and fuck it up. I’m personally setting my sights on this next album to speak more broadly to the injustices happening in our country. I’ve thought about myself enough for the time being. We are itching to speak to the people, make ‘em dance, and maybe inspire them.

Smut’s How the Light Felt is available now on Bayonet Records.