The House releases its debut LP on Friday, Feb. 28, via the Les Bonbons Electriques label, an imprint of The Record Machine.
Titled “Soft Stuff,” the collection is a masterwork within the chamber pop genre with songs such as “Hearth” offering rich but accessible layers that call to mind the work of composer Arthur Russell and singer-songwriters such as Feist.
The titular piece is an intersection of soul-inflected vocals and a musical setting that summons comparisons to the work of melodically minded 20th century composers. “Birds,” meanwhile, marries the group’s warm emotional sensibilities with brief flashes of foreboding buoyed by dreamlike musical sensibilities that resist easy resolution. That dreamlike quality carries on through the record as a whole and invites immediate and frequent repeat listens as the full nature of the compositions slowly reveal themselves.
The trio -- consisting of Caleb Curry-Miller, Will Morris and Nathan Harrison -- initially played together in 2016, under the name Finer Spirit. In 2020, it released music as The House and by the end of the following year commenced work on “Soft Stuff.” Commitments to other projects and life demands made progress on the record slow but ultimately worth the wait.
There won’t be a Wichita release show, at least not yet. While Curry-Miller remains in the city, Harrison relocated to Kansas City and Morris now lives in Nashville. Still, the longtime friends remain committed to the music they’ve made together so far and what they might make in the future.
All three recently spoke with KMUW via Zoom.
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
One thing that’s evident in the songs are these rich layers. Did the studio afford you the chance to add some of those elements beyond the initial compositions?
Will Morris: The process was often [that] Cale would come to us with either a fully written song or a demo and going in the studio allowed us to think about the songs more from an orchestral arranger type of mindset, where we could come in and try to write music that would either underscore the lyric and the melody or subvert it. I like that part a lot; I like bouncing off of someone else’s idea. So, Cale providing the seeds for all these songs was helpful in that way.
Nathan Harrison: I don’t think any of us had spent that much consistent time in a controlled environment, being able to record things, not in our noisy houses. We were able to spend a lot of time being really particular. We had access to three pianos, two grand pianos and a baby grand piano. [We could explore] different mic placements and be really meticulous, take our time with that.
I feel like one of the differences between the last EP and this record is that there’s a [greater] attention to detail. We knew that we wanted something that sounded good and was gentle and was delicate to the ear. I think we were able to take our time. The last project was done over a couple weeks, moving very quickly. Other people were engineering.
You mentioned earlier recording at home, and I was thinking about musicians I’ve talked to who have described that experience of working at the house: “OK, I’ve got to unplug the refrigerator. I’ve got this much time before my roommate comes home. I hope that a scooter with a blown out muffler doesn’t blow by in the middle of a great take.”
Caleb Curry-Miller: We still did a lot of that on this project, too. In some ways we tried to lean [into that]. Like on “Hearth,” you can a fire crackling and there are floorboards creaking. We tried to put in some ambient, environmental sounds, partly because it already sounds like those spaces. It was really helpful for the last half of the album to have a more treated space.
Tell me about the arc of the record. Was this something that was meticulously thought out beforehand?
CCM: The songs were not all written in the same batch, but I do feel like once we started putting them together, we were pretty intentional about the flow.
WM: We knew that we needed a closing track. We knew the opening track for a while and had a few others sprinkled in, so we had some structure to work around when we were finishing the rest of the songs. We had certain pillars in place that we could build around.
This music is soon going to be out in the world. You’ve been living with it for a long time and now other people get to experience it.
CCM: I’m excited to have it out. We’ve had some great feedback already on the singles. It’s a little anticlimactic [because] Nathan and Will moved as soon as we finished this thing, just to put a cherry on top. They’re not here [in Wichita], but I’m excited to have it out, nonetheless.
WM: I typically get pretty anxious about releasing songs but having friends around who are artists in their own right and who we admire sharing their praise of the songs has given me some more confidence and has made this release a lot easier than some of the past ones. That shared confidence has been healthy.
