Silversun Pickups’ first album in four years finds the quartet in a bit of a mid-life tizzy. Thankfully, it’s not enough to drag down the proceedings, especially with Grammy-winning producer Butch Vig (Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Against Me!) at the helm. Tenterhooks (New Machine) is a big, brooding beast of a guitar-rock album, with plenty of frayed beauty lurking in its lumbering depths.
The Los Angeles band’s seventh LP began as a random assortment of voice memos, riffs and fragments saved on the fly by vocalist/guitarist Brian Aubert during a 2024 tour. An initial studio session was cut short when Vig hit the road with Garbage. Aubert, meanwhile, suffered a perforated eardrum that required a seven-day stay in the hospital and a blood transfusion due to stomach complications from ibuprofen use. The band eventually regrouped to finish Tenterhooks. It’s Silversun Pickups’ third LP with Vig as producer.
His hearing restored, Aubert is healthy, happy and back on tour with SSPU. He breaks down the new album for MAGNET.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “New Wave”
“It was the first song we recorded, and it set the template. I used to be in love with huge guitar swells, and I’ve fallen back in love with them—just in my older brain. ‘New Wave’ is a reference to feeling like, ‘This thing is going to hit me.’ You’re either going to get in the ocean or lay in the sand. You’re not sure when it’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen. How do you prepare for it?”
2) “The Wreckage”
“I saw this as a ‘bass song’ in the vein of the Cure or Jane’s Addiction. I wanted Nikki (Monninger) to have a signature bass line. I played it for her, she played along, and I began singing. The big guitars and the piano give it space to breathe. The lyric ‘You get what you give’ is so true. You meet people, and you live in a world that reflects what you put in.”
3) “Au Revoir Reservoir”
“There was already a lot of aggression and loudness, so we thought it would be cool to paint with some other paints. I’m glad ‘Au Revoir Reservoir’ is on the record. It opens everything up a little more. It’s a different color.”
4) “Wakey Wakey”
“We wanted a stream-of-consciousness, chunky track that sounds like this unruly little ball. It’s clearly designed to be for your ‘album ears’ only. If you listen to the entire LP more than twice, this is literally for you. I was doing this noisy thing during soundcheck, and I quickly asked my front-of-house engineer to record it. That’s how it started. To me, it’s the ‘Nikki and (drummer) Christopher (Guanlao) jam.’ They just show up.”
5) “Witness Mark”
“I knew I wanted to end this one with a very guitar lick-y overtone—almost Wilco-like. In a way, I’ve been having a love affair with guitar I haven’t had in a while. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I’m less afraid to express myself through a lot of notes, solos and other parts. In terms of the title, there are little marks on clocks and watches called witness marks. These show clockmakers what previous repairmen had done. They essentially look for the witness marks to see if somebody added something in 1922 or whatever year.”
6) “Thorns And All”
“We decided we were going to have a certain language or vocabulary with the guitars and bass. We chose to do analog keys. There’s no more soft synth stuff. We’d never done horns before, because we’d simply never thought to. We got some super players for this. The guitar take is the first version. You can hear all the little flubs and things, which I love. It’s fun in a weird way. The lyrics describe a changing relationship by using the image of a bird trapped in your house. It’s happened to me—I felt bad for the bird. All the doors were open, and the bird didn’t want to be there.”
7) “Long Gone”
“I wanted to do an acoustic song, but not a ‘slow song.’ It had to be really kicking, and I was thinking of Johnny Marr or a Western-style Ennio Morricone vibe. The sentiment is: ‘Don’t worry. This isn’t going to end badly because I’ll be gone before that.’ I’m not necessarily speaking about an event. I’m speaking about an inherent emotion, and it feels very melancholic and beautiful.”
8) “Running Out Of Sounds”
“You can hear me fumbling with the phone, and it fits really well. Somebody told me, ‘You can write a song called “Running Out Of Sounds” because you’re telling everyone you’re running out of ideas.’ I’d never write about songwriting, though. It’s a reference to losing the ability to communicate. The horn players brought it to a new level. It’s their finale, and you can almost see them leaving the party.”
9) “Interrobang”
“I had this riff in my brain for the whole tour last year. I’d play it constantly. Our old producer, Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, had shown me the actual interrobang, which is a piece of punctuation nobody ever uses. It’s a question mark with a line down the middle: ‽. I always felt like it was an incredible title. For the chorus, I was thinking of Alice In Chains, who I love so much. It’s like if Lindsey (Erin Jordan) from Snail Mail was watching the Alice In Chains MTV Unplugged.”
10) “Hot-Wired”
“It’s the closing-credits moment. It ends quickly, like it started. We’re done, but we’re not going out sad. We’re still talking about things, but there’s optimism.”
See Silverspun Pickups live.
