Chicago indie pop band Varsity celebrates a year’s worth of monthly new songs with album ‘Souvenirs’
Chicago’s premier indie-pop band Varsity celebrates a year’s worth of monthly singles with new album Souvenirs
After writing, recording, mixing, mastering, and releasing a song a month in 2023, they gave the songs a proper home with an album. As vocalist Stef Smith told The Chicago Reader, they embarked on this creative experiment to prioritize having fun and keep things fresh in lieu of a traditional album cycle.
Varsity has been the premier indie-pop band in Chicago for the past decade. Known for songs like “So Sad, So Sad” (with 20 million streams on Spotify and counting) and often compared to Alvvays, they’ve been experimenting more with not only their sound but also songwriting process in the past year. They wrote, recorded, mixed, mastered, and released a song a month every month in 2023, and they just compiled their year’s worth of music with their fourth album Souvenirs today.
After releasing several singles and three albums prior to Souvenirs, they wanted to do something different after releasing their last album Fine Forever off of Run For Cover during the the very height of lockdown in 2020 since the pandemic derailed their plans. But lockdown also gave them the structure and opportunity to prioritize songwriting. As vocalist Stef Smith told the Chicago Reader this week, “We were just wanting to have fun again.”
The new album was recommended by The FADER, Hypebeast, Indieheads, and more. The quintet chose to title this collection and celebration of these 12 songs Souvenirs after their last single in December to emphasize how a song can capture and crystalize a moment. Guitarist and songwriter Patrick Stanton said, “Each song represents a moment in time from the year past. Not only what music we were listening to and were inspired by, but where each one of us was at emotionally.”
Pitchfork wrote of the band before, “The Chicago quintet sounds like a sun-drenched daydream” while NPR Music previously wrote their songwriting is “a catchy slice of indie-pop.” Still embracing their warm indie-pop, they’ve also took inspiration from the classics of indie and rock this time around — citing Blur, Wilco, Paul McCartney’s Ram, and 70s music like Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan as influences for this suite of songs.
You can find the new album here on Spotify, here on Apple, or here on YouTube.
Stanton said, “At the beginning of each month, we’d get together and workshop some ideas and run with what we felt was the strongest one at the time. We would write the song together in our practice space, play it through a couple times, and then hit record.” Stef Smith told the Reader they had five or six song ideas ready when the new year began last year but they had to create a song from scratch for the last half of 2023, letting them learn to let go of their perfectionism as the months went on.
As a break from the traditional album cycle, they wanted to also use this different release as an opportunity to experiment more with their songwriting and sound. They usually used one artist or band as an inspiration for a given song, ranging from Crumb on “Reference Point” to Paul McCartney’s home-recording opus Ram on “Bought the Farm” or Blur’s “Coffee & TV” on “Devil’s Tangerine.”
They brought in their longtime collaborators Ben Lumsdaine (Durand Jones, Barrie) and Michael MacDonald (Mia Joy, Tasha, Tenci) to help them with mixing. Their own member Dylan Weschler eventually took on mixing duties, with the last several songs done all in house except for mastering, paving the way for Varsity’s DIY and home-recording direction in the future.
Souvenirs celebrates a year’s worth of music and Varsity will be celebrating the release tomorrow night with a local show at Schubas.
Biography
Varsity have built an impressive catalog in the past decade, becoming Chicago’s lead indie-pop band in the process. But after releasing 2015’s self-titled debut, 2018’s Parallel Person, a run of singles collected on 2019’s The Basement Takes, and 2020’s Fine Forever, the band sought a new approach for their fourth full-length, Souvenirs.
Vocalist/keyboardist Stef Smith, guitarists Dylan Weschler and Patrick Stanton, bassist Paul Stolz, and drummer Jake Stolz set out to not only release but also record a new album less conventionally. With their 2023 experiment to share a song a month throughout last year, they knew they could take more creative risks and take on different influences or sounds while recording.
They’re still working in indie and pop tradition — one that recalls groups like Fleetwood Mac, Rilo Kiley, and Alvvays — Varsity has taken the recognizable pieces of their sound and reached across sonic boundaries to reframe the genre in their own image.
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