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For more than a half century, underground music revolutionaries have taken a whack at the mundane mainstream like a piñata. England punks spat "NO FUTURE'' at germ-free adolescents. Ohio new wavers devolutionized mankind with whips. Athens art school students chomped at hero worship. MetroCard-carrying riot grrrls rebirthed the bomp with a gasoline gut. In 2020, Sweeping Promises read our pandemic minds with Hunger for a Way Out. In 2023, they return with a new message: Good Living Is Coming For You. At first glance, this nouveau wave slogan offers hope wrapped around relief. At first listen, we realize this may actually be a warning. Darker still, a threat.
A band famous for their unfussy, monolithic anthems, Sweeping Promises elegantly ravage us again with another future classic. They return as a fist of velvet rose petals roaring inside a compact wrecking ball. Gone is the Boston brutalist ambience of their subterranean concrete laboratory and the revelatory single mic recording technique. In its place, a retired and resplendent nude painting studio in Lawrence, Kansas, bathed in light with high ceilings and hardwood floors. Guided once again by their surrounding architecture, a reverb-rich space remains the defining element at the heart of their highly stylized sound. A watery ghost from the golden age of art-punk now wields sharper knives and more microphones.
If the mood of HFAWO was hungry, GLICFY is RAVENOUS. In 2023, appetite is addressed in new ways: Power struggles are aired in “Eraser,” restraints are broken in “You Shatter,” anguished exclamations sting in “Good Living Is Coming for You.” The taboo subject of aging is (s)heroically dragged out into the open. Every line is delivered with such joyous, soaring layers that each punch lands like a chef’s kiss.
Sweeping Promises are Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug. A chance meeting in Arkansas led to a decade of playing in an eclectic assortment of projects together. Their relentless practice made perfect. Bass playing Lira is an emotive bolt of thunderous energy with the iconic blast of a girl group rolled into one robust throat. Caufield is an intentional guitar player and drummer. No note or hit is extraneous. Together they are meticulous sound engineers, using space as a key ingredient to their distinct sound. Controlling every aspect of their craft, from the first note they write together, all the way through to the final mastering process, each record is an unspoiled fingerprint unique to their dynamic chemistry.
Written before the pandemic, Hunger for a Way Out was released on Feel It Records in the summer of 2020. These songs drip with the anxious urgency of a commanding live performance yet their gauzy production transports us like the fading memory of a favorite song. This distorted sense of time resonated with thousands of quarantined listeners who turned the album into a life-saving floatation device and most beloved album of the year. This is when Feel It Records (North America) and Sub Pop (everywhere else) joined forces to divide/unite and conquer; beginning with the 2021 single “Pain Without a Touch” and now carrying through to Good Living
Is Coming For You.
The pandemic went on to trigger an absurd chain of events for Sweeping Promises. Under financial strain, Mondal and Schnug uprooted their lives. They surrendered their studio in Cambridge to take refuge with family in Texas. They completed over 50 demos between their Austin bathroom and a Marfa abode, but feeling unsatisfied, they sought another fresh start. When a disused church in Ohio proved too difficult to rehab, they ultimately found lasting inspiration in Kansas. With their home and studio all under one roof, life is music and music is life.
Good Living Is Coming For You ultimately reflects being thrust into a severely unpredictable world. A capsized boat isn’t entirely bad. In fact, it can be the necessary push toward finding solid ground.
Our take: Sweeping Promises first record, Hunger for a Way Out, was a certified underground phenomenon, its summer 2020 release date perfectly timed for sweeping away and/or wallowing in the depths of pandemic blues. The follow-up, Good Living Is Coming for You, arrives three years later with sky-high expectations amidst a very different social context, but Sweeping Promises still sounds great. When I first listened to Good Living, I was surprised to hear it’s even rawer than its predecessor, reveling in its home recorded-ness in a way that reminds of vintage Guided by Voices. However, with Sweeping Promises it’s not so much about the sound as the songs, which are uniformly fantastic. Vocalist Lira Mondal has a fantastic voice, not only tuneful but also dripping with personality and charisma. She’s also a hell of a bass player. As memorable as the vocal melodies are, the bass lines often fight for attention with them, and they give these tracks a solid, danceable foundation that multiplies their infectiousness. The guitars and drums, by contrast, stick to the background and emphasize the songs’ core rhythms, and I think they’re smart to stay out of Lira’s way, while extra production touches like synth and horns add some auditory spice. As I’ve listened to Good Living over the past few months, I’m consistently reminded of 90s indie rock… not so much because of the record’s lo-fi sound, but because of Sweeping Promises’ charisma and ambition. In a world of half-baked throwbacks, the way they’ve staked out their own instantly identifiable sound and populated it with great and always unique songs makes them stand head and shoulders above the pack.