I’m not sure when I first picked up In the Book of Bad Ideas, the 2023 album from Ohio’s Smug Brothers, but the album made a huge impression on me from the outset. It abounds with the sort of off-kilter indie rock that’s both viscerally satisfying and singularly compelling. In advance of a tour that will bring them to Brooklyn (Young Ethel’s on November 9!), I spoke with singer-guitarist Kyle Melton about the band’s new EP, Another Bar Behind the Night, their penchant for collage, and the works of Italo Calvino.
You had a terrific album come out last year. How long has this EP been in the works? Was it always the plan to release this so soon after the last LP?
I’ve been recording the group since 2017 or 2018, and so we’re always in a perpetual state of working on new material, without a specific goal in mind other than “let’s do an album” or “we should think about what the EP is.” There’s always stuff in the pot that we’re working on, right? With the last album last year, In the Book of Bad Ideas, the EP that came out just before that — Emerald Lemonade — was all part of the same session. We said, “Let’s do an EP, because it’s been a minute since the last album came out. Let’s do an EP to preface the album.” We kind of did it that way and I think it worked out pretty well.
With this new one, we started tracking material — Don [Thrasher] and I — here at my house in the summer of 2022. We were wrapping up mixing and all that kind of stuff. We thought, “We’re setting out on a new adventure. There will probably be an album coming out of this. There will probably be an EP coming out of this. Who knows where everything is going to land? We’ll sort it out as we go.”
So really the recordings for this EP go back to summer 2022 before In the Book of Bad Ideas was even out. We’re always in progress in some direction on some level. Don and I typically get together for like a day; my wife is very gracious and she and my son will go to her dad’s out in southwestern Ohio. Don and I’ll get together and record. I’ll usually give him 10 demos and go, “We’ll see how far we get today.”
It used to be, he would show up and I’d show him the song on the spot. We’re lucky to have gotten anything out of that. So now to give him demos in advance so he can kind of come in prepared has been very helpful, very fruitful. We did four or five sessions for what ended up on that EP and then what’s going to end up being on the album we’re wrapping up now for next year.
One big shift from In the Book of Bad Ideas to Another Bar Behind the Night is that the songs on the new EP are a lot are pretty concise. I think the entire EP is about 10 minutes long. Was that something that you were conscious of as you were putting the EP together?
I mean, we’ve always had those short songs. That’s been part of our DNA since the earliest stuff. We still haven’t beaten the shortest song which was on Echo Complex: “Stock Madison.” I think that one doesn’t even hit the 30-second mark. I always remember Greg Ginn from Black Flag being asked, “Why are your songs so short?” He said, “That’s how long the inspiration lasts.”
It wasn’t an intentional thing to make this EP so short. We wanted to have something this past spring to follow up In the Book of Bad Ideas. That was kind of a surprising success for us by our level of expectations. I mean, we’re not a huge band, but we hope to get a little bit better every time, right? And so last year, the response to that was very favorable for us. We were very surprised that people were picking it up, people were putting on playlists. We got a really good response on streams and stores; we were thrilled that people wanted to talk about it. We didn’t want to lose that momentum.
It really kind of came down to what are the strong songs we have that are ready to go and what can we make, you know? There were a couple of songs that didn’t end up on the EP that’ll probably end up on the album that just didn’t make as much sense.
It’s six songs in ten minutes. It’s definitely a bit of a blur, but we’re always of the mindset of keeping people wanting more. Flip that tape and hit it again!
I have to ask: the first song on the EP mentions javelinas. I’m curious because I have a lot of friends from Arizona: You are a band based in Ohio, so I’m curious: how does the Southwest make its way to Ohio?
It’s funny. I just like the word “javelina.” I’m always writing stuff down; good words or good images. We were doing the video for this; it’s a bit of an homage to Dayton through the lens of Wes Anderson films. We were talking about Wes Anderson stuff and in The Royal Tenenbaums, which is one of my favorite films, there’s a scene where Gene Hackman is looking for the thing that was on the wall, which is a head of a javelina and he asks, “Where’s my javelina? Oh, the javelina’s in the closet.”
My brain just somehow synapsed that into “Javelina Nowhere.” I wrote it down real fast and used it as a title for a song that didn’t have a title. The title doesn’t really have much to do with the lyrics and that’s okay. I enjoy that.
Did I see correctly that there was a lineup change between In the Book of Bad Ideas and Another Bar Behind the Night?
Yeah, we have a new guitarist, Ryan Shaffer. He joined as we were wrapping up work on In the Book of Bad Ideas. Our guitar player, Scott Tribble, who had been with us from late 2017 to late 2021, in the middle of recording In the Book of Bad Ideas, he told us he’d gotten a new job and didn’t have any more time. So he’s only on part of that album; a lot of a lot of that record is just me on guitar
How has adding Ryan into the mix changed the band?
Well, we were able to do more shows, that’s a good thing. You know, he’s a Dayton guy. I’m from Dayton originally; I live in Columbus now. And our bass player Kyle Sowash, he’s been in Columbus for years and was in Dayton for a good long while. He knows all the Dayton people and everything. There’s a lot of that shared camaraderie
Ryan’s big contribution on the EP was the lead guitar there on “Shedding Polymer.” I think it’s brilliant. I never would have written that in a million years and it’s exactly what needed to happen.
Across your discography, you’ve used collage artwork on many of your records, which gives them a pretty consistent look. Was that something you’ve done consciously?
Yeah, it’s always been there since the first album. Darryl Robbins, the guitar player who I started working with as Smug Brothers, had that funny image of a computer machine that just looked completely crazy. He took a little bit more of the modern twist of repurposing sort of stock images and then Don Thrasher did several of the collages.
I mean, it’s just stuff that we like. We’re obviously huge Guided by Voices fans. We’re not Bob [Pollard]-level collage master and that’s all right, but we like that look and we’ve used it a lot over the years. We’ve collaborated with a lot of collage people over the years. Louis Zeija did a collage for us for On the Way to the Punchline.
It just it just always feels right to us. I enjoy doing it. Don always has stuff he’s working on and we’ve collaborated on a couple as well. It somehow just is like the right look most of the time.
Is there anything else you’ve been reading or watching or listening to that you’ve been enjoying lately that you want to recommend?
The new Shellac is great. Obviously Albini was a huge loss, you can’t even put that one in words. Do you know the band Omni?
I do!
Their album Souvenir has been really good. I like that. I’ve been listening to that a lot this year. I’m trying to catch up reading Italo Calvino’s books. I just got The Castle of Crossed Destinies. I just finished a book today, and thought, “Okay, now I can go read this new Calvino.”
The last thing I read of his was The Complete Cosmicomics. I really need to head back into his bibliography, and soon.
Have you read Invisible Cities or Mr. Palomar?
I have read Invisible Cities. I haven’t read Mr. Palomar.
Mr. Palomar is really good. It’s sort of understated, but it’s really good. And If on a winter’s night a traveler — have you read that one>
A good friend of mine gave me a copy of that years ago and said that she thought I might like it — and she was absolutely correct, the structure blew my mind.
I just reread that last year. It’s so good.
I’ve been in the middle of a long-term process of organizing my bookshelves, and it’s been very satisfying to be able to group multiple books by the same author together again.
That’s always fun, when you see something you forgot you had. I finally got my record collection sorted, and I’m trying to get through my CDs and tapes. I’ll keep looking at my bookshelves and thinking, “I need to do this this winter.” We moved into this house that we’re in now in summer 2021 and I was super stressed out. We just basically threw everything in the house real fast. I’m slowly working my way back through it: “What is in here? What is in this room?”
It’s trying to work through all that stuff and figure out what we actually have and what the things are that we don’t need, but I’m sure that’s a years-long process.
Photo: Hillary Jones
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