“Math rock,” songwriter and composer Cody Fitzgerald defines as if from textbook memory: “rock music where there are very intensely orchestrated time signature shifts that focus on interesting rhythmic patterns.”

Fitzgerald’s work with Stolen Jars is piece-wise like this, starting as a solo project in high school in Montclair, New Jersey, adding in vocalist Molly Grund as graduation approached, and stumbling upon four more live band members in college. Warm layering atop guitar line after guitar line and it’s no surprise their latest album art features a pile of collected shells burying the record’s name: Kept.

As recent college graduates, Grund and Fitzgerald are coming of age in new ways that require looking back. Echoed by Kept‘s dense yet light quality, Stolen Jars have taken on the task of reconstructing memories, part-by-part, through music. Inspired by Sufjan Stevens and resembling Slow Club, Grund and Fitzgerald sum up their own math-folk blend that uniquely fits with any hometown car ride taken for old time’s sake.

Ahead of their show July 1st at Obrien’s, we caught up with the duo, got acquainted over phone, and chatted about the Montclair music scene and why memory is so important. Read up on below!

Allston Pudding: Since this is our first time talking, would you mind introducing yourselves?

Cody Fitzgerald: Yeah. So we’re both from Montclair, New Jersey, and we met in high school. I currently live in Brooklyn. I play guitar and sing.

Molly Grund: My name’s Molly, and I sing. I just graduated school so I’m home for the summer trying to figure out what the next move is for me. I’ll likely be in New York too.

AP: What’s the story of how Stolen Jars came to be?

CF: So, basically I started writing music for bands in high school. Eventually I was writing and had my friend Magdalena Bermudez, who lives in Boston, singing on the first album with me. When we started playing live shows, Molly was one of the people I wanted to join us for those. Then, I wanted to her to become more involved. Molly’s an amazing singer, and we just continued it that way.

AP: Kept is a very layered album. Where do you usually start with writing?

MG: Cody usually starts with a riff, and we’ll build off of that. Correct me if I’m wrong Cody, but it’s very much made in parts. Building on top, it’s usually a “here’s this section now, and here’s this after that.”

CF: Yeah I usually like to construct a song into its biggest version of itself, and then I’ll ask “what do I hear next?” So, I kind of write the songs linearly. Most of the time there’s not a verse-chorus structure to them. I just think about what’s the best thing I can make of the section after this one.

AP: If you had a thesis for the album, what would it be?

CF: I think the album is a pretty nostalgic album. It’s a lot about memory and past relationships and rebuilding memories and finding meaning in rebuilding them.

MG: And I think it came out of an interesting time. The whole album was basically written around our first times leaving home and starting to adjust to new places. So, to me, that sense of nostalgia totally makes sense looking backward on that time of change from the present moment in both of our lives. It was over a long span of time because I remember recording songs back through my sophomore year of college, back in 2013 and 2014.

AP: This may seem a little naïve, but when I think of music from New Jersey my mind goes to pop punk, The Front Bottoms, very different from your sound. How influenced do you feel by where you’re from?

CF: I’d say we’re completely influence by where we’re from. The music scene in Montclair growing up was so amazing and so vibrant. When we were growing up, there was a lot of math rock and post-rock being played in Montclair. There were always shows to go to, and there were always opportunities for high school and middle school bands to actually play real shows.

It was a great place to grow up and be surrounded by amazing musicians, bands like Pinegrove, Forth Wanderers, Gifts and so on. There are so many bands right now from our hometown that are continuing to make amazing, amazing music.

MG: I think the thing we really like about being from here is just how we feel a lot of connection to Montclair and the music scene in this area. I’m not sure if we’re so connected to the music scene generally in New Jersey. It’s more specific.

AP: What does your live set look like? The music is so full on record. Do you try to match that during shows or do you take allegiance with the space?

MG: Yeah, it sounds really different. I think with fewer parts we’ve worked to try and make our sound feel bigger, in a way.

CF: I feel like on the album I tried to make compositions, and when we’re playing I really just want it to be a rock band having a good show, well composed but also just playing a set. We used to use a lot of looping when we were first starting out, and that kind of stopped it from seeming as wise or as powerful. I think the band we have now, Grant Meyer, Conor McGuigan and Matt Marsico, they are why it sounds so good. They’ve really shaped the music and will probably play parts in shaping the next album and how it gets recorded.

AP: As for your artwork, it’s interesting how you had a couple singles represented by pictures of a shell or two, which appear later in Kept’s cover. Could you tell me more about why you chose to do that?

MG: Well, Cody had taken this picture these shells from a beach. Where was the beach Cody?

CF: In Providence.

MG: In Providence. And we both thought it would become a very good image for this album just because, for us, it represented a lot of the same themes that we were exploring in this collection of songs. We actually had a final album cover before we had any of the single covers so we always knew that was going to be the end result. Then, in thinking about how we were going to put out these singles, and also thinking about how the album is constructed and each song is constructed, it made sense to begin by working in parts as we went along for each single.

AP: Lastly, what do you hope people are doing while listening to your songs? 

MG: I like to hope people are very actively listening just because the songs are so dense. I feel like there’s so much to pull out from them so I hope people are listening carefully and digging through to see what they can pull out.

CF: I definitely agree with that. Also, my favorite thing about music and part of the reason I originally wanted to make music is that it has an incredibly intense ability to put you back in a specific time and place. So, I really hope people are listening to this album in a way where they feel intensely enough that they’ll imagine this exact space again when they listen to it in a year’s time.

Stolen Jars play O’Brien’s Pub July 1st (TONIGHT) along with Calico Blue, and Photocomfort. Doors are at 8 p.m. 21+.