Gladie: ‘Being in a band is the ultimate relationship’
Augusta Koch makes Gladie's songs about survival sound sweaty and sweet. On the Jeff Rosenstock-produced 'No Need To Be Lonely', it's sharper than ever.
Two days into recording Gladie’s third album No Need To Be Lonely, there was a problem: their rental house stunk. Like, literally.
“When we got back from the studio, it just smelled like sewage,” frontwoman Augusta Koch tells me over Zoom from her home in Philadelphia. “We couldn’t figure it out.”
The band were in the midst of a whirlwind week, decamping to Oakland to record with producer Jeff Rosenstock and engineer Jack Shirley. It was the first time Gladie had entrusted an outside collaborator behind the boards, meaning the band were making an album far from home and on a tight schedule.
They’d paid up for a proper short-term rental: a nice three-bedroom home with high white walls and big windows overlooking a main road. It bills itself as an “oasis”. What they were living through was not.
“We’d be trying to cook dinner, and we were like, ‘Oh no, the house smells like sewage’, and we couldn’t get in touch with the hosts. So we just would come home and open all the windows and use fans,” Koch says. “But it added to the charm. We spent a lot of time on the porch.”1
For those familiar with Gladie, Koch’s re-telling of the story, down to the silver lining, is on-brand. Much of Gladie’s oeuvre is taking unfortunate situations and drawing something galvanising out of it. When Gladie first began in 2018 as a collaborator between Koch and her partner Matt Schimfelig (formerly of Three Man Cannon), it came in the twilight of Koch’s first major band Cayetana. For Koch, beginning in the afterglow of a band that broke out into relative stardom meant re-discovering herself with the eyes of her community trained upon her.
“There was a long time where I was like, ‘Oh my God, is my grave gonna say ‘ex-member of Cayetana’?’” she admits. “It’s hard because, constantly, people resonate with Cayetana. And I love that. It’s such a big part of my life, but that was also so long ago, and I have to believe that my best days are ahead of me, or my best song isn’t written, otherwise what’s the point?”
No Need To Be Lonely has some of the best songs Koch has ever written (so far, at least). The album concentrates and clarifies Gladie’s trademark power punk. It is a record with sharp turns of phrase that stick to your brain: “You said you like my hair long/I cut it off” Koch says dryly on ‘Talk Past Each Other’, or “Complaining about the traffic when I’m part of it/Looking for the problem when I’m the one who started it” on the rollicking hook of lead single ‘Car Alarm’.
If Gladie’s sophomore effort Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out was propelled by the sheer eruption of emotions that followed Koch’s journey to sobriety, No Need To Be Lonely is an album that shines in its emotional balance. As Koch tells me, part of getting sober meant being less of a people-pleaser, and learning how to deal with people who didn’t like that while managing with her own mental health.
“I think ultimately all of my records, anything I work on, will always be about survival, as well as being a person that has suicidal thoughts and has always struggled with that,” she says. “I want to understand why that happens and know that it happens to other people.
“I feel like, if there was going to be a synopsis of a lot of the songs I write, it’s staying alive in a world where that can be really hard. But I also don’t want to get too heavy, because it’s also like, we’re just having fun.”
That dual notion presents itself best on ‘Car Alarm’, one of my favourite songs Gladie have ever released. It coalesces all of the band’s biggest strengths into one compact song: Koch’s songwriting drops you straight on the scene (“Among the buzz of this strip mall hell/Blue hum of the liquor store, it’s hard to envision more”) into a vivid picture of backsliding mental health, all wrapped up in a ridiculously fun hook and some guitar riffs that absolutely shred. In essence, it’s a song that was destined to be produced by Jeff Rosenstock.
“Jeff and I have known each other for a really long time, but definitely became really close in the past few years,” Koch says (she sometimes sells merch for Death Rosenstock when they tour her part of town). “We share demos with each other, like a lot of people do, and he just called me and Matt one day and was like, ‘I want to do this with you guys’.”
I ask Koch whether all the new faces made the album more challenging to record. In less than a decade, Gladie has gone from the intimate project of Koch and Schimfelig to a five-piece with Rosenstock and his long-time engineer Jack Shirley in the mix. But Koch lavishes praise all round: incoming bassist Evan Demianczyk is the band’s “missing piece”, longtime collaborator Liz Parsons is “a big part of the record”, Rosenstock is a “really good friend” and Shirley is “so sweet”.
Friendship is central to Gladie. After over 15 years in music, Koch has a strong sense of what success means to her. Gladie is a DIY indie band whose members have jobs like teaching and running a vegan doughnut store (Dottie’s Donuts, if anyone’s passing through Philly). In a capitalist creative environment that feels more hostile to artists than ever, most in Koch’s position would be well served to think about goals beyond going platinum or headlining Coachella.
“Joe Strummer has that line where he says, ‘Without people, you’re nothing’ and I really believe that,” she says. “Being in a band is like the ultimate relationship, like, there’s nothing like it, because you’re creatively vulnerable, you’re sharing your lives with people. You’re sacrificing together. You’re experiencing super highs and super lows and you’re learning how to have difficult conversations. I think of that as irreplaceable.”
“I talk about what I’ll do when I don’t do music in the way that I am now, and it’s sometimes scary because I haven’t invested in a career that would lead to financial stability. But I also didn’t have a job I hated for most of my life. I’ve been able to do beautiful things and having a creative life has always been my dream, and I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do it, and that I still get to it.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment that Koch has been able to translate into beautiful music. Love, platonic and romantic, has been a tenet of Gladie since 2020’s Safe Sins (‘When You Leave the Sun’, ‘Soda’, ‘For a Friend’).2 No Need To Be Lonely is awash with affection, even from the record’s title.
However, amid the bold declarations to cherish and love, perhaps the most moving moment of No Need To Be Lonely is buried as an Easter Egg of sorts, on the song ‘Future Spring’. The song credits nine additional vocalists, but there’s no obviously loud section of gang vocals. Koch nods towards one brief refrain about a minute into the song in which a swathe of voices repeat the line “Hey, you’re invited and we’re glad you’re here”.
“Have you ever heard the band Dismemberment Plan?” she asks. “They have this song called ‘You Are Invited’, and it’s about inclusion and the like. When Evan and I started hanging out a lot through Gladie, we talked a lot about how much we love Dismemberment Plan and the concept of that song. And when I started touring with Jeff, that line from the song was one of his first tattoos,” she says.
“Kelly and Allegra from Cayetana are in it, and some of the sidekicks, the people who have meant a lot to us. My good friend Ava [Fitzpatrick] and my friend’s kid are on it. There’s actually a baby on the song. There’s a really cute clip that we filmed from recording where it’s like, ‘turn up the baby!’.”
Gladie is a band whose heart is interwoven into the music they make, too gritty to never lose its authenticity but tight enough to always sound pleasant on the ears. Hearing Koch speak of what drives her only adds to the weight of the music on No Need To Be Lonely, especially if you’re like me and trying not to drown amid news that makes you feel very bleak about the state of the world.
Expanding on the one line gang vocal on ‘Future Spring’, Koch says:
“It’s one of those little things for us, because especially with music, it’s hard to do this. It’s a huge sacrifice that financially fucking ruins you. And everybody works so hard. But the gift that I think I’ve taken away from it is like the people I’ve met, I have friends that are all over, and to have all these people on that song is just very subtly being like, ‘You’re a part of this thing’. Music is a community for the fans and the artists.”
‘No Need To Be Lonely’ is out March 20 via Get Better Records. Pre-order on Bandcamp or Qobuz, or pre-save on Apple Music.
Still gave them four stars.
Koch, like myself and friend of Bad Scene Little Simz, was radicalised by bell hooks' 'All About Love' (I know this book has haters and I will fight them in the comments, with love).