Photo by Ely Dominguez

Time is on the side of Still Ruins, and they’ve used every moment of it to their advantage. The Oakland band, which began to take shape a decade ago, is a curious case of slowly but surely which goes against the state of today’s fast-tracked creative approach, now just releasing their first effort, their eponymous self-titled extended play, arriving this Friday on Smoking Room (Hotline TNT, They Are Gutting a Body of Water.) It’s telling how patience has been to their benefit. Led by the haunted balladeering of vocalist Frankie Soto alongside Jose Medina and Cyrus VandenBerghe, the trio have carefully crafted and crystallized a form of dreamy pop-rock echoing ’80s new wave, synthy pop and R&B through the frame of memories that feel within an arm’s length reach. There isn’t a blemish to be found on the surface of any of it, and the emotions run deep into its veins.

+rcmndedlisten connected with all three members of the band to discuss writing modern music that glimpses into the past, the perfectionist nature their writing process, and what the future holds for a band that is finally ready to step out of the shadows.

+rl: At the start of every New Year and carrying on into the dead of winter, there’s this recurring habit for the season’s new releases to revolve around dreary post-punk that can’t help but mine tired tropes. You don’t shy away from the fact that your sound is indebted to what has become before it, especially in the realm of dreamy ’80s indie-pop and new wave punk, but your debut EP sparkles its way out of certain familiarity. What’s your approach to transcending the timeline in what you’re creating now? 

Frankie Soto: We definitely took notes from the great bands before us on what to do and what not to do when it came to the songwriting. We as a band are trying to find the sweet spot in the middle of trying not to sound too dark and not too light but still taking a very forward “pop” approach.

Cyrus VandenBerghe: Just write what comes naturally and don’t worry about trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s impossible to not be informed by what has come before, so why worry? Also having three different personalities and tastes contributing to the music hopefully helps give it some sort of singular character.

+rl: For what it’s worth, which ghosts of yesterday do you hope listeners hear bleeding into your music?

FS: When we were putting these songs with the lyrics together for the first time in 2019, I had just seen China Crisis play at an old jazz venue in Oakland called Yoshi’s. I was working on the lyrics and melody for “Silhouette” and tried to replicate what Gary Daly would have done if he was writing the verse. Dave Gahan and Paddy Mcaloon were also a huge inspiration when writing these songs/melodies as well.

Jose Medina: I like to think that the basis and spirit of the guitar tone work from those such as Bob Bradshaw, Michael Landau, Steve Lukather, and many of those 80’s LA session players lives somewhere in our music. Perhaps it isn’t an immediate connection to listeners, but the way they manipulated chorus was a creative foundation for me.

+rl: There’s pristine perfectionism echoing in Still Ruins’ sound as well that separates it as pure sincerity rather than a mere homage. Every facet of a track like “Until Then” or the EP’s latest single, “Of Devotion”, is so sharp and ornate in its glassy guitar and synth-pop textures that it sounds like it was chiseled delicately from ice unlike some of the chintzy-sounding retro-fitted pop-rock we hear filling arena seats these days. How would you describe your degree of meticulation in your songwriting process? 

FS: The three of us will go through multiple versions of a song until it really feels set in stone. I’ve even had to go back into the studio multiple times to re-record a chorus or verse because I just wasn’t happy with it while writing this EP. Some of the credit on how our EP came out is definitely owed to Chris King from Moon Palace Productions though. All the projects that guy has touched have all sounded great. 

JM: I think in part it has to do with an affinity we’ve had with a lot of the production of 80’s R&B and new wave, as well as a love for the large tri-chorus tones that came out of the fridge-size guitar rack systems of that decade. An obsession with wide-sounding composition in music. We’ve loved albums like New Edition’s “Heart Break”, Alexander O’Neal’s “Hearsay”, and Tears for Fears “Songs from the Big Chair”, so we’ve tried to approach our interpretation of contemporary synth-pop with those same stereo-phonic elements of writing and piecing a song together.

CV: These songs have gone through many iterations through several years — tones, lyrics and arrangements were all tweaked up until mixing time.

+rl: The word “enigmatic” has been used to describe your presence in the independent scene, but with this being your first proper release, do you imagine we’ll be seeing Still Ruins unobscured more so in the wild now that the secret’s out?

FS: I feel like we’ve been a band for a really long time already because it was a thing Jose and I have talked about doing for so long. We first wrote “Perfect Blue” in 2014 and finally put together a proper version in 2018. “Silhouette” was written shortly after that. In November of 2019, I went to Chicago to visit Justin from Craft Spells and he helped me record the first demos of those two songs. Cyrus joined the band in 2020. Fast forward to where we are now and are already halfway done writing our first LP because we started writing the album at the same time of the EP. So you’ll definitely be seeing us coming from out of the shadows more. 

Still Ruins’ Still Ruins will be released January 12th on Smoking Room / Cercle Social Record.