I sat down with this Snocaps album first in my office last month and then again two weeks later, in the dark dive of the Silver Lake Lounge, surrounded by some people I knew and some people I didn’t. Micro-celebrities, friends, and industry who’s-whos packed into a thumb-sized room to hear Katie and Allison Crutchfield rap with indie superproducer Brad Cook about their secret reunion. Ensconced in drinks and drapes, the twin sisters revealed the origins of Snocaps (Allison is a mighty fan of the Sno Caps candy, and a casual consumption of them at the Vista Theatre last winter confirmed the band’s identity) and celebrated recording these thirteen songs together in a matter of days in April. They told us how the music was written (separately but sometimes in response to each other) and that it was arranged by only them, Cook, and MJ Lenderman. Hell, they even played some of the new music and promised to, at future shows, perform P.S. Eliot material again. And, yeah, their voices sounded as good together as they did in 2009.
While press materials have already revealed that Snocaps will be “put on ice for the foreseeable future” after the Crutchfields tour together later this year, this ain’t some Saint Cloud regurgitation or some debut hemmed together by a couple of unproven twenty-somethings. We’re older; Katie and Allison are older, 36 now. Snocaps captures the growing pains, in bouncy, sometimes-country-fried, sometimes-punky, sometimes-elegiac songs. Broadly, the album is about the nostalgia of past mistakes turning into sage advice about aging. Specifically, it’s about cars driving down numbered roads, restless pride, loud bars, muses, being thorny girlfriends, addiction, big dreams, and toxic friendships. This is what well-rooted and courageous music sounds like.
The sisters split the tracklist almost evenly: Allison penned seven songs, Katie six; Cook’s hands are on all thirteen, and Lenderman appears everywhere but the closer, “Coast II,” strumming and drumming like he did before Boat Songs and Manning Fireworks greased him into indie-rock stardom. Allison especially plunges deep into her grieving, well-worn vocabulary—often candidly so: the relationship deteriorating in “Heathcliff” pitches itself into five-lane traffic; “You In Rehab” leaves room for gratitude during recovery (“The access I have to my heart obstructs / Can’t imagine you getting better, but I never give up”); “Avalanche” turns a new crush into a dicey gamble (“His mythology’s like a vitamin / Keeps you strong, babe”); “Over Our Heads” confronts displacement (“I got no hometown, I got no home state anymore / I tell you, leaving is the only way / But when nothing is scared, no one is safe”); and “Coast” recalls a friendship ending on a car ride (“Give me shit while you can’t see straight / I got the pedal on the floor, or I’m slamming on the breaks / I could never just coast”). Those Swearin’ records and Tourist in This Town were so damn good a decade ago; Allison’s heart-on-her-sleeve refrains on Snocaps are the portals taking me back there.
Katie’s got a few stories to tell, too. If newfound sobriety helped guide her out of self-inflicted harm and into clarity on Tigers Blood, then Snocaps acts as her welcome mat to love, embossed with lines like “Opaque in my heart’s break / I leave space there for you to fill it.” But remember: this is Katie Crutchfield we’re talking about. She writes songs like Alabama plays football, attacking her contributions with a messiness that’s headstrong (“If I leave you tomorrow, I’m a comet, I am Heaven / I’m a wave crashing, I’m on my own”), deeply affecting (“Am I healing in the shade / This shadow’s with me everyday / It obscures everything I say / I’m pure of heart, this darkness ricochets”) and probably, in some cases, a bit of a literary overshare (“I delight in the spectrum of my yearning”).
“Wasteland” welcomes a hailstorm of danger: “I’m running hot on empty, firing off some willful bottomline / Gave it everything I had, I am hazmat, I am radioactive / Caustic car wreck, off the rails and rude and ruining your life.” “Doom” ought to be one of the biggest damn things Katie’s ever done. Because her writing is so trenchant (“We may fall back into fiction / Know I always do / Make stale of me / No one’s immune”), a splashy arrangement would sound out of turn here, which is why Lenderman’s guitar pageantry comes with just the right amount of humidity. The opening of “Hide” sends me back to Cerulean Salt’s “You’re Damaged,” until Lenderman’s chords freshly curl around all this talk of a love “stuck in the back door of my faded memory.” The last two Waxahatchee records used electric guitars merely as set dressings, but Snocaps foregrounds Lenderman’s louder contributions without turning them into decorations. And, on a project full of very good decisions, I’d say that’s among the best ones. Another good decision: putting a duo of barroom rockers—“Cherry Hard Candy” and “Avalanche”—between “Hide” and its equally devastating counterpart, “Doom.” This record is all guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. Even the simpler ballads sound gigantic.
Cook’s room-tone production has worked wonders for Katie’s diction in the 2020s (see: “Lone Star Lake” and “Fire”) and continues here (see: “Wasteland” and “Cherry Hard Candy”). But what’s most impressive is how good Allison sounds in that same environment for the first time, her singing taking its most-distinctive shapes on “Avalanche” and “Brand New City,” the latter’s riffs and harmonies fluent in P.S. Eliot’s looser indie-rock language. Allison’s musicality has always served Katie well and, after adopting a Lucinda Williams streak of poise on Saint Cloud, it’s refreshing to hear her become fully uncorked on “Over Our Heads”—an 8-foot tall pop-rock song dotted with cursive riffs and a crack of twang. I have no doubt that Katie found a musical soulmate in Lenderman when they made Tigers Blood near the Texas-Mexico border two years ago (I mean, “Right Back To It” is still the duet of the decade, yeah?), but Snocaps proves that her best collaborator is the one she sang with first.
This album flourishes in the dying art of surprise, a practice almost totally absent in current indie spaces. With a predatory music business that coerces artists into such long and uninspiring release cycles, the Crutchfields giving away these songs on their own terms and without so much as a foreword of fanfare feels like a risk, even for somebody like Katie, whose legacy with Waxahatchee alone (six great albums, one of them Grammy-nominated) all but guarantees her art getting attention, no matter who it gets made with or how it gets released. Even then, it’s a gift that Snocaps exists. It’s a gift that these twin sisters are still fascinated enough by each other’s ideas to untangle them for everyone else, especially this many years after their first band, the Ackleys, got all of Birmingham buzzing. No singles, no music videos, no interviews, no problem: Katie and Allison have brought us a world of good-sounding miracles. [ANTI-]
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
