Artwork by D.H. Strother
Every week, we’re here to remind you of the local artists we love and think you oughta know.
Sometimes, the best way to understand something is to understand its creation. You don’t need to know that the music Sweeping Promises makes—moody, atmospheric post-punk—is the product of time spent in an underground concrete bunker, but it makes the music all the moodier and atmospheric if you do. The duo at the heart of Sweeping Promises, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug, wrote and recorded the first tracks of their immaculate debut album, Hunger for a Way Out, in the bowels of a converted Harvard laboratory that has served as their studio space. Nothing but a tense, powerful post-punk album could have resulted from such circumstances.
The songs came together quickly, with Schnug on drums and Mondal on bass, singing the lyrics on the spot. The first song on the album was written in about 20 minutes, and by the end of the night they had all of Side A of Hunger worked out. The songs were recorded using a “patented single mic technique.” Any additional mics they tried to use just picked up more reverb coming off of the concrete walls, so they opted for a dead-simple approach for a cleaner recording and to get out of the songs’ way as they were being created. Schnug, a Harvard PhD, is writing his dissertation on the history of atmosphere and ambiance in film and visual media. He became obsessed with the idea of “single stream music.” “It’s art that is about one thing,” he explains. “No complexity, just one thing, what you see is what you get. It’s all part of one texture,” he says. The result is a gauzy sound that’s imbued with brutalist ambiance befitting a basement. “The whole record sounds like a piece of fabric,” Mondal says.
She and Schnug both cite an interest in the music of the 80s as informative to the Sweeping Promises sound. “When you listen to early 80s post-punk there’s this matte quality,” Mondal says. As people who spend a lot of time thinking about the significance of recorded music, I asked the two about a renewed youth interest in the palette of post-punk through the viral success of Belarusian band Молчат Дома (Molchat Doma). Schnug claims the “haunted quality of Soviet music” strikes a chord with the TikTok audience. This, combined with the post-punk’s immediacy, make it uniquely positioned to take hold with Leftist Doomer TikTokkers. “There’s an ontology to Molchat Doma that bespeaks capitalist ruins, but you can understand it in the first seconds,” he says. Mondal concurs: “Post punk is dourness that you can dance to.”
Though Gen-Z has no shortage of nihilistic music genres, the artificial maximalism of hyperpop makes it a natural foil to post-punk’s cold simplicity. Schnug postulates that hyperpop is “Pop that takes pop music to its terrible destination: letting the medium use you rather than the inverse. It’s a very brutal sincerity.” Mondal hits on the abrasive sonic quality of hyperpop. “The digitality is very much a part of it,” she says.
Now months after their record’s release, Mondal and Schnug have left Boston—their home of eight years— for Austin, Texas. They continue to work on their second Sweeping Promises record, but Mondal says the change in scenery is making for a different experience. She describes the process of writing Hunger for a Way Out as almost frantic, claiming she and Schnug “felt like [they] were on stolen time” at the studio space—you can hear it in her motorik bass-playing and her athletic vocals. But if Hunger is being cooped up in a dark room, how will the band fare as they step out into the light?
Hunger for a Way Out carries a subterranean spirit. It reeks of isolation and, though written before the pandemic, has grown to embody lockdown following its August release. Its title takes on new meaning as the public looks back on 12 months of disrupted life. But with an end finally in sight, a way out seems close at hand.