Los Angeles Band Chatterton on Their Whimsical EP ‘Tiny Empires’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY ALEAH ANTONIO ☆
Photo by Madison Wood
I KNOW THE BOYS OF CHATTERTON FROM A HOUSE SHOW — I remember standing in line (yes, for a house show) before a tiny backyard in Hollywood. Viral shoegaze band Julie was slotted to play a secret show that they announced the day of, and Chatterton happened to be one of the openers.
“That was a weird show,” Brock Pierce, the founding member of Chatterton, tells me. He and his counterpart, Logan Scrivner, call me from their respective places in Oxnard and Los Angeles. “Logan was on tour filling in for a friend’s band and almost everybody was out of town. I had to recruit a bunch of friends to fill in the band… How many times [do you] get the chance to play a secret house show with Julie? I was like, fuck, I got to make this work,” Pierce said. “Last minute shows like that where you’re not fully comfortable on stage… you’re always on edge about something going wrong.”
He tells me that they’ve tightened up a bit since then. After that show, Chatterton released their sophomore album Fields of This via 7th Heaven Recordings (POiSON GiRL FRiEND, Kitty Craft) in March 2024. They took time to play live shows and fix up their sound during their break. That winter, they would travel to Ojai to professionally record their new EP, Tiny Empires, out today.
Tiny Empires unfolds like a storybook. Its instrumental opener “Source 2” is softly adorned with the marimba and whimsical flutes. Their moody, Duster-like sound still finds itself on tracks like “Bite Down” and lead single “Blouse,” but its classical elements make it powdery and light (Scrivner has glockenspiel, mellotron, and organ credits on this 5-track EP). Inspired by children’s book aesthetics and Hall & Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette, Tiny Empire is a refreshing departure from their sophomore album, one that drew comparisons to Modest Mouse and Pavements by critics from Pitchfork and Uproxx.
“[Tiny Empires] felt like an odds-and-ends collection a little bit,” says Scrivner. “Those songs seem to be the best stepping stone from our last release into what else we have recorded. These are newer tracks, but…”
“...They don’t feel too indicative of the direction we’re going,” Pierce finishes. “We liked them enough where they felt like, what you said, a stepping stone between Fields of This and the new stuff.”
Before Scrivner joined Chatterton, Pierce released his own lo-fi, slowcore tracks under Chatterton that he admittedly doesn’t count in the band’s discography. Projects like Hey, Sorry and Social Jet Lag are still streaming on their Bandcamp, but are ones that Pierce says “should never have been posted online.”
“As a 17 year old they should have taken the mic from me. I just don’t think at 17 I was… Again, it was a growing pain, but I wish my growing pains weren’t archived on the internet,” he says. “I can still listen to Fields of This and not feel embarrassed by [it]... For the most part, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. I think it’s a solid album. I just think that the songs were so old that I don’t feel like it was indicative of the band in that moment by the time I came out.”
What’s next, then? “I think it’s going to be more of a bigger sound. We’re working with more session musicians who play different woodwinds and brass instruments, so kind of a larger sound. I feel like the EP worked in a sense where it’s like a larger sound. I think the next one is just a little heavier. Longer, too,” says Pierce.
The boys say that they want to save their efforts for a proper tour once their new album crosses the finish line. In the meantime, fans are left with Tiny Empires, a stepping stone to savor while we wait for what they have in store for us.
Photo by Madison Wood
