Backstage with Slow Fiction

By the time Slow Fiction played “bottle episode” at Cleveland’s Grog Shop in late August, they’d completely won me over. Their singer Julia Vassallo was vulnerable and unhurried, recalling addiction, misunderstanding, and unraveling in a low cool. The rest of the band — guitarists Paul Knepple and Joseph Skimmons, bassist Ryan Duffin, and drummer Akiva Henig — became another voice, contrasting her tone with a swirl of dense, hazy noise.

All last month, the NYC five-piece opened for Swervedriver’s Raise 35th anniversary tour, presented by BrooklynVegan, where they played songs from their recent album, dollhouse. Made with Sonny DiPerri (My Bloody Valentine, DIIV), dollhouse is an intimate, surging collection that confronts identity and transformation, taking different shapes across Brooklyn, upstate New York, and San Francisco. “My favorite time is when we’re sitting around and playing together, and there’s a really cool vibe going on in the room — and this happened especially when we were writing dollhouse,” Vassallo said in a recent interview. “Sonically and atmospherically, [there was] something very interesting going on, and it would just imbue [the music] with a very certain sort of feeling.”

That environment allowed them to balance unease with moments of revelation, operating like a living organism. The lyrics are raw and real (Vassallo is a celebrated poet who grew up reading Jane Austen), whereas her bandmates organize around her observations, amassing tension in waves. The result is magnetic — the rippled cries halfway through “what the night told me”; the slow-burning excellence of “mouthpiece”; but perhaps none more so than the six-minute closer, “turning down flowers,” that stretches out any sense of resolution before giving way to a stunning breakthrough (“I’m not left to be forgotten/If I’m not, if I’m not anyone at all”). Get a behind-the-scenes look at the tour below, which just ended with a hometown show at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Jimmy Quinn