Nude Pop back in Spokane after tour, stint of farm work
It’s been quite a year for Nude Pop.
About this time last year most of the members of the Spokane dream-pop quartet – originally known as Nude – had just graduated from Whitworth University and had sparked a buzz for winning a Seattle band battle.
Fast forward to now: The local indie rock band returned this week from a two-month tour across North America with respected post-rock duo El Ten Eleven. Nude Pop will play a show Saturday at Club 412.
Touring with El Ten was a surreal experience for Nude Pop.
They played well to appreciative audiences who bought merchandise and traded high fives after shows.
They slept in motels when they could afford it, and sometimes fans would invite them home and let them crash on the floor. They slept in, or on top of, the van – a lot. They were hassled by cops for sleeping on the van in grocery store parking lots.
They ate a lot of rice and lentils.
They broke even. Just barely.
During a two-week gap in the tour they ended up stranded in Vermont, where they found a Craigslist job working on a farm.
“They gave us a place to stay, they fed us, and we worked on the farm,” said Nude Pop guitarist Jeff Bass. “We were living in a cabin with no running water or electricity for two weeks, working our butts off, feeding the goats and tilling the field.”
Now that the band is back from tour, and having shared its new EP with all of North America and parts of Canada, Nude Pop is ready to share the “Splintered Selves EP” with its hometown audience.
“Splintered Selves” was recorded mostly in Seattle with Kickstarter money until El Ten Eleven contacted Nude Pop with interest in putting it out on their Fake Records label. Nude was on El Ten’s radar after playing an impressive opening set for them at The Red Room last year.
Nude Pop sent El Ten an advanced copy, and El Ten flew them to Los Angeles to refine the album with engineer Chris Cheney, whose next project was with Fergie on “The Great Gatsby” soundtrack.
Shortly after finishing remixing “Splintered Selves,” Nude hit the road with El Ten. They didn’t actually get their hands on hard copies of the record they could sell until they got as far as Florida.
The EP is a blend of dreamy garage rock and cerebral pop with undertones of shoegaze and psychedelia, framing themes of feelings of isolation and living against relationships. It contains four songs from the first batch of material written by Nude, which consists of Bass, bassist Jackson Cate, drummer Cody Thompson and guitarist/singer Nathan Mead.
After the Volume show, the band will go on a bit of a hiatus before relocating to Seattle, Cate said.
“We’ve been gone since the end of March, and being back in the area after tour and the album coming out while we’re on the road feel great,” Cate said. “At the end of this crazy journey, being back in Spokane and having the CD with us feels really right.”