Purity Ring Are Still in Another Dimension

Paolo Ragusa
·15 min read

The post Purity Ring Are Still in Another Dimension appeared first on Consequence.

Purity Ring are currently weightless. After over 10 years and three brilliant LPs released via 4AD, the alt pop duo of Megan James and Corin Roddick are gearing up to put out their first EP, Graves, on their own record label, The Fellowship.

Though they’ve conceptually moved into a new era beyond their three-album trilogy — 2012’s Shrines, 2015’s Another Eternity, and 2020’s WOMB — the Graves EP (out this Friday, June 3rd) is still a quintessential Purity Ring release. Hazy, brooding synths rise and fall, Megan James’ effortless pop hooks are clean and crystalline, and Corin Roddick’s drum sounds are as dynamic and glitchy as ever.

But luckily for Purity Ring, the duo is relishing in the opportunity to release something outside of the cycle they’ve created for themselves. They are always extremely deliberate about their release schedule, taking five years in between Another Eternity and WOMB to make sure they felt as confident as possible in their material.

Graves, then, finds Purity Ring “stepping out” of the trilogy mindset and creating with more immediacy and less preciousness. “It feels more liberating to put out music in this way,” James tells Consequence. “There’s this added pressure to pay attention to all the tiny details, but with this EP, we’re kind of relieved of that.”

Having their own record label is certainly a huge part of the new equation, but Purity Ring don’t plan on completely ditching their work flow for a more streaming-oriented approach. “I think our process is very much more concerned with putting out music that we think is good and finished rather than staying on top and being present and making sure we’re on a playlist every week or whatever,” says James about their output frequency. In other words, “just the good shit will last.”

It’s fitting that Purity Ring have championed an independent spirit throughout their decade-long career — after all, this is a band that visits us every few years from a completely different stratosphere of pop to remind us of what the future can sound like. Each Purity Ring song harbors a specific kind of mystery and lore that gets richer with every release; and though the macabre lyrics of Shrines are less prevalent on Graves, they never lose that otherworldly, alternate reality aura.

Though Graves is the newest release that Purity Ring are boasting, they still didn’t quite get the opportunity to tour in support of WOMB. Kicking off their tour last weekend at California’s Lightning in a Bottle Festival, Purity Ring have an extensive run of shows scheduled across North America this summer.

However, now that so much time has passed since WOMB‘s release, Roddick has a bit of a different attitude. “It feels strange now finally being able to tour and obviously we’re playing a lot of the songs from WOMB,” he says, “but at this point, that album came out two years ago now, so it doesn’t feel like the WOMB tour at all.”

Indeed, Purity Ring are dusting off tracks from all three albums and the new Graves EP for their 2022 shows. The EP’s vibrant tracks will surely translate well into a live setting; after all, both WOMB and Graves find Purity Ring exploring a very active and developed sound, blending in the polished sheen of contemporary pop with their left-of-center impulses. Songs like “Unlucky” and the EP’s title track are powerful pop gems, demonstrating that even 10 years later, Purity Ring still have that magic, mysterious touch.

Though their “Land Voyage 2022” tour is well underway, both Megan James and Corin Roddick are urging fans to wear masks at their upcoming shows. “We have a lot of anxiety about COVID on this tour because we don’t want to have to cancel again, ever,” says James, referencing the fact that WOMB‘s support tour was delayed and postponed so many times that it has now morphed into the upcoming Land Voyage 2022 tour.

It’s undoubtedly a challenging time to be a touring musician, but even with the pandemic’s constraints, Purity Ring couldn’t be more excited to be back on the road.

Ahead of the release of the Graves EP, Consequence chatted with James and Roddick about new music, getting back on the road, launching their new label The Fellowship, and more. Check out the Q&A below.

You’re just a couple weeks away from the release of Graves. Does anything feel different this time around since it’s not a full album?

Megan James: It does feel different — not just because it’s an EP, but really because it’s something we’ve never done before. We’ve put out three albums and we’re pretty comfortable making music and putting it out, but usually, we’re slow. With this EP, it feels like we’re not doing the slow thing! It just feels more chill. Usually, we put so much into an album because we love albums, and it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to, but we hope that at least the people who know us and love us are listening to our songs as albums because that’s our intention. I’m excited.

This is your first official release on your new label, The Fellowship. Were you guys always looking to start your own label?

James: Yeah! Well, we always could — though when you’re on a label, you contractually have to give them albums, and that’s one of the many, many reasons that we’ve done albums, but we also wanted to. But yeah, we’ve also always loved 4AD, but in the backs of our minds, I think we’ve always wanted to be an independent band and self-release. So we had to start the label in order to self-release. That’s the point really, but yeah — maybe one day we do more with the label and we can put out other music too if we’re so inclined, but it feels like a new era.

We’re stepping out of this period of time that I kind of saw mentally as the three albums, it felt like a trilogy or something, even though they all feel very different to me. We’re stepping out of this period of time that we knew we’d be in until now. And I think that allows us to feel like we can do something like an EP where we don’t have to make this piece of art that feels perfect, which is an album.

You released WOMB in April of 2020. What was it like putting out that album in such a period of uncertainty?

James: I mean, could you imagine if we waited until now? And the pandemic isn’t even over, what if we waited until now to put it out? It’d be destroying me inside. Waiting on an album for three years? When we finished it, we considered waiting, but we thought, “It’s ready. What are we going to wait for?” You know, everything was so unknown, it didn’t feel like we should wait, it felt like we should put it out. Also, it’s called “Womb,” and everyone was staying home, so it was like, “Maybe it’ll fit!”

Corin Roddick: It had been five years already since our last album so it was like, “Well at this point, we got to put it out, there’s no way we could sit on this thing for another year.”

James: Yeah, it didn’t feel appropriate. But I’m glad we did. That’s another thing that this EP sort of serves as; we’ve changed the name of the tour, it’s not “Tour de Womb” anymore, it’s “Land Voyage 2022.” We’re kind of letting go of this idea that we had to tour that record, because we had to push the tour so many times and it’s kind of emotionally draining to have this sort of thing hanging over our heads every six months, like “let’s push it again, let’s push it again,” and yeah, we have to let it be.

It came out with terrible timing, but I think it was the right thing to do anyway, and that’s okay — we have to let that go and move on and keep putting out music because that’s what we do. We can always write a song and put it out, we don’t need to wait.

Roddick: So much of [our new music] was created with that in mind. But yeah, I guess it’s kind of a halfway point between all of the stuff we did for that era and moving into the next zone beyond the first trilogy.

If there is one, what would be the thread between the songs on WOMB and the songs on the new Graves EP?

James: I have never thought about that. It’s like another world… I don’t know!

Roddick: Some parts of some of those songs were ideas that were being worked on around the same time as the songs on WOMB. And then one song, the actual song “Graves,” predates WOMB by a few years as well.

James: “Graves” was one of the first songs we wrote for Another Eternity, I think.

You’ve said about that track (“Graves”) that it has been “haunting us for eight straight years so we’re very glad to let it be heard.” Can you elaborate a little on that?

James: Yeah, we made it and it didn’t feel like it fit on the record, it was like too… I think we were scared of it or something. We always really liked it but it was like, “I don’t know what we should do with that, it’s not right,” and then poor Corin…

Roddick: We thought that the piano was too cheesy but then over time, something that seemed really cheesy just starts to sound good.

James: Yeah, and we loved it. We knew it was good but it’s like… it’s funny how time, and I don’t think it’s just us, I think the landscape of music has changed so much. Now, that song makes more sense to put out. I don’t think I would feel the same things about it, had we put it out eight years ago, and, you know, we already had “Bodyache” and “Begin Again,” and we didn’t feel like we needed it. But now, it’s like… it was okay to let it go for the time being. But yeah, poor Corin…

Roddick: I never let it go, maybe that’s part of the “haunting.”

James: He just kept trying to make a version of it that would work, with wildly different sounds. There’s an ambient, slow version without the piano at all and there’s like these serious chorus drop versions… I mean there are still drops, but like…

Roddick: There are acoustic versions, yeah, there’re at least four or five kind of fully fleshed-out alternate versions of that song. And they sound wildly different.

James: And for every one we were like, “Nah, it doesn’t sound quite right either,” and then, like, two years ago, Corin played one of the original versions for me.

Roddick: It was the original version.

James: Was it the original? Sometimes I’ll go over and Corin will be like, “What do you think of this?” And he’ll play old and new things, and I’ll be like, “I like it, I don’t like it, whatever.” But yeah he played the original version and I was like, “That’s amazing, we gotta put that out soon.”

You both have been around for a while now, but I’ve always admired that you took so much time between releases. Have you felt that not succumbing to the brutal release cadence that most artists are forced to follow in the streaming era these days is helpful?

Roddick: Yeah, that’s a difficult question to answer. I think we definitely have tried our best to be deliberate and take the time that we need to work on the next project. But at the same time, we always talk about, “Oh, it would be so great to just be finishing songs and to be putting them out like while they’re still fresh and exciting to us,” rather than it sitting there for a few years while we get other songs together for an album.

So we definitely have wanted to do more of that, but it’s… tough to balance. I think the way we naturally write things is quite slow, like the way that things come together. And I think as much as we try to be fast and try to be more open about putting out songs quickly and that kind of thing, it just usually ends up taking us much longer than we think it’s going to take, most of the time.

James: Yeah, I know what you mean, with how streaming has changed the way that people put out music, and I think that is deliberate on behalf of the tech companies. And I think it sucks! I feel very strongly about this, there’s a lot more mediocre music, I think, because of it.

Maybe I’m stuck in the past or something, but I feel like the good music is what will still be around, the good shit will stand out in ten more years when there’s a lot of things floating around because everyone’s putting out so much music. And some of it’s good too! Like I don’t mean to say people putting out music fast is bad, like some people can work really fast and it’s amazing.

Roddick: Yeah, it’s just never been us, though.

James: Yeah, that’s definitely not us. Our flow lends itself to what I believe about putting out music anyway.

Roddick: Yeah, like some people are amazingly prolific and they’re really good at getting stuff together quickly and presenting it, but at the same time, I think what Megan was saying, there’s sort of this encouraged, sort of disposable value.

James: It’s so gross!

Roddick: Yeah, I’m torn between how exciting it is to have finished a song one month and put it out the next month. That’s awesome because you don’t usually get to do that kind of thing, or we didn’t get to do that thing very much. But at the same time, the way streaming has gone, it definitely really encourages that people are trying to get on… it sort of affects the way that music is made to try to get on this playlist, or that playlist and then it’s only intended for what fits for that month or that trend.

James: Yeah, it ends up not being about the music.

Roddick: Yeah, but that being said, I think we always want to be putting music out in different ways, too. We don’t always want to be the band that takes five years to make an album, we want to do other things as well. Making a song and putting it out sounds really nice, but like, I don’t think we’re going to be putting out a new song every two weeks to get on the latest playlists.

How are you feeling about hitting the road again?

James: We played a couple of festivals back in September last year and I feel more ready for tour than we’ve ever been. So I think it’ll be okay. We’ve had a lot of rehearsal time and we thought a little further ahead this time around, so we are more prepared — and maybe just as prepared as we always were — but yeah, we feel ready.

Roddick: Yeah, I think this is the first time — normally when we go on tour, I have this like dreadful feeling that…

James: That everything is going to go horribly wrong! [Laughs]

Roddick: Yeah, or that the show that I had in mind is only 60% there and then we kind of figure it out as we go. But this is the first time where like going into tour, I’m like “I think we did it.” I think we really put the show together that we envisioned and refined it. Which was almost a blessing, I think that only happened because the tour got canceled and rescheduled so many times, that we had been working on the show for that much longer.

James: Yeah, we’ve been working on this show alone for over a year.

Corin, are you still going to have those light fixtures synced with MIDI sounds the way you’ve done in previous tours?

Roddick: Similar concept, but it’s going to be implemented in a completely different way.

James: Yeah we got the — what’s it called? The tabernacle?

Roddick: I don’t know what it’s called!

James: It looks like a big organ, it’s really cool.

Roddick: Yeah, we’re still very much going with the real-time reactive visuals to the music as we’re playing it, but it’s expanded into different other types of realms, and I think it’s definitely our best take at it yet. So I’m pretty excited about it!

Editor’s note: You can purchase tickets to Purity RIng’s 2022 tour here.

Purity Ring Are Still in Another Dimension
Paolo Ragusa

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