(EDITOR’S NOTES — Two years after its debut release, Urge Surfer — the side project of lead guitarist Jordan Smith and frontwoman Chelsea O. of the Buffalo band Stress Dolls — will be dropping its follow-up EP on Friday titled ‘Alphabet Archive,’ which you can pre-order HERE. Urge Surfer will also be hosting a sneak-peak listening party for the record tonight at 7 p.m. and you can RSVP HERE for that event. Born during the isolation of the pandemic pause, Urge Surfer and its synth-driven electro-pop songs cut a path far from the indie-rock sensibilities of Stress Dolls. Initially, we planned on taking a different approach in writing about ‘Alphabet Archive’ — an extremely interesting and very cool work. But after our interview with Jordan and Chelsea, it became clear no one could explain Urge Surfer’s music, and its existence, better than these two thoughtful artists. Please read our story below and jump on this new album. — Photo by Zach Anderson and provided by band.)
Tore through the ozone and tickled the surface
I’m always so high, but I’m not sure it’s worth it
Slow as molasses, the days are receding
And I am still here, but am I even breathing?
—Ozone (from ‘Alphabet Archive’)
1120 PRESS: Thank you for speaking with us and congratulations on the new album! How do you feel now that its release is about to hit?
Jordan: It’s always an exciting and anxiety-inducing moment when you release your art into the world. Getting to know Chelsea, playing guitar in Stress Dolls, having the downtime during the pandemic to wrap my head around how modular synthesis works and how I could use it for personal expression, as well as grappling with my mental health, were all major contributing factors in how Urge Surfer — and subsequently, how Alphabet Archive — came to be.
Chelsea: I'm absolutely excited, and I also feel really lucky that I've had the chance to release new music with two different projects within months of each other. Alphabet Archive, and Urge Surfer in general, is so different from Queen of No from Stress Dolls. It's great to have two different outlets where I have the chance to experiment and express myself in various ways.
I'm also really proud of Jordan. At the end of the day, she's the reason this project came together in the first place, and I think this EP illustrates how far she's come as a producer and artist over the past two years. With (our debut) REACH we were figuring things out. But I think the creation of Alphabet Archive saw us having a foothold in what we were going for and being able to experiment off that baseline. Ultimately, it allowed for even more creative freedom.
Jordan: I’m really fucking proud of it, and us, for centering fun as a goal for the project, but also vulnerability as an unspoken ethos. Plus, we were lucky enough to have Huntley Miller, who has worked with incredible artists like Sylvan Esso, Lizzo and Bon Iver, master the record for us. I couldn’t be prouder of how it sounds, considering we recorded everything in my little home studio.
1120: Do you feel Urge Surfer allows you both to explore a musical direction you otherwise might not be able to with Stress Dolls?
Jordan: Though there is obviously personnel overlap, they are just radically different projects that serve different parts of my creative self. I’ve been playing guitar for more than 20 years, but Stress Dolls gave me a new outlet to play in a band setting again. I didn’t realize how much I had missed playing live and the feeling of freedom that comes with playing at volume with other people you love. Urge Surfer, on the other hand, is something I mostly do alone at home, and remotely with Chelsea. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time together, but we’ve found that we are most creatively adventurous when left to experiment without the limitations of time or the inherent pressures of composition before an audience, even if that audience is your creative collaborator. Urge Surfer is a more personal outlet.
Chelsea: Urge Surfer helped me immensely in figuring out ways to be more vulnerable with my voice, which I think made, and continues to make, me a better singer. That's translated over to Stress Dolls for sure, a project where I was blowing out my vocal cords for years attempting to find my voice. Sonically speaking, Urge Surfer has definitely opened up my mind as well to other options for sounds that may or may not be used on future SD recordings. In the past, I've written songs that I imagined having electronic elements, but I had no clue how to bring them to life. Jordan has made me aware of many more instruments and production tools. Who knows where it will go?
1120: How do you two approach this project while being in Stress Dolls? Is it just ‘write as you go’ whenever your schedule allows, or is there a point at which you decide: ‘Ok, this is the right place, right time, for another Urge Surfer record?'
Chelsea: I think we've made it a point for this project to not be stressful: we don't have imposed deadlines outside of when we choose to release music. We don’t have definitive plans to make it a live act, or expectations beyond creating together and seeing where it goes. For me, that's a welcome change. It's not that Stress Dolls isn't fun. I wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't. But from Day 1, that project has been my primary focus and is something I've consciously pushed very hard. The way we approach Urge Surfer, always living in that pure joy that creation brings, has helped a lot.
Jordan: As Chelsea said, the goal is actually to de-stress. Music-making for me is essentially the only thing that shuts my busy brain off. It’s something I view as a necessary part of my daily routine that helps me come down from the anxieties of the day. So, when it comes to composition, there is almost no schedule or goal ever in mind. It’s all about what feels good. Which is ironic, as our project name — Urge Surfer — is really a medical term about employing thought processes to ride out negative feelings induced by OCD. But it’s true: music-making has become a mental health tool for me that I try to employ every day.
1120: Is there anything you can tell us about the songs on this album in terms of the subject matter you’re exploring or a theme you wanted to put across for the record?
Chelsea: I think that Jordan can answer this question more eloquently than I can.
Jordan: I don’t think either of us had any particular specifics in mind when writing this record. But after it was done, I think it felt kind of obvious that for me personally, I was very much grappling with all the different facets of what it means and feels like to transition, and because of that, the broader concepts of language and memory itself seemed to bubble to the surface. Urge Surfer began as a creative project around the same time that I began transitioning, and Chelsea was one of the first people I came out to. So, naturally the project has become intertwined with this experience for me.
That said, this record was so much more lyrically collaborative than the last. Some songs Chelsea wrote, some songs I wrote, and some are a mixture of different pieces that felt right all mashed together, and that feels really special to me. As vulnerable as some of the lyrics I wrote are, Chelsea was just as vulnerable in hers. I cried when sitting in the room as she recorded the vocals on Ozone. That song in particular really hits hard for me.
I’m so, so, so proud and grateful to be able to keep making music with her. It’s been not only a lot of fun, but a really heartrending and therapeutic experience, and I hope we get to keep doing it for a long, long time.
Comments