LA-based duo Songs for Sabotage bring with them many years of experience in the New York music scene and in multiple bands and genres. They are releasing their sophomore LP, Clean Trauma, on March 13th, 2024. It represents a significant sound shift in comparison to their previous album, Night of Joy, moving into electronic and dance elements while holding onto more organic underpinnings. For Swedish-born songwriter Lina Sophie and multi-instrumentalist and Producer Richey Rose, it also represents a deep dive in terms of songwriting, reaching back into their youthful experiences to confront the origins of their outsider status and identity.
Combining those things, the heavier themes with the danceable music, became a challenge for the duo, but it’s one they allow instinct to direct, writing, composing, and even recording in ways that felt most natural to them. One of the intermediary stages was playing a lot of the tracks live to shape them before recording, allowing Lina Sophie to develop really specific vocal lines. In terms of sound design, they found themselves moving away from purely guitar-driven compositions into synth territory, adding substantially to the mood and vibe of the tracks. I spoke with Lina Sophie and Richey Rose about the many new twists and turns in their music that they discovered while making Clean Trauma.
Hannah Means-Shannon: It seems like this collection has a different conceptual basis for you than your last one, focusing on more personal stories.
Lina Sophie: What the album is reflecting is our adolescence. That’s something that we talked about.
Richey Rose: I think these songs are a lot more personal in terms of subject matter. We pulled from a lot of childhood, or teenage experiences for both of us. We wrote the bulk of them in 2022 and played the songs live for a while. That helped develop them. Then we started to seriously record them in 2023.
Given that the songs are more personal, the leap to playing them live as part of their development is even braver!
Lina: It was really good because it was a little bit of trial and error to hash things out live. We wanted to be a little vulnerable in that matter. We both grew up in small towns, feeling teenage angst, and feeling like outsiders, but that almost became…
Richey: …An identity.
Lina: Exactly. We were always joking around about “good clean fun” that became “clean trauma” because all the songs became about trauma. [Laughs]
Richey: Looking back, we began to realize, “Oh, that was traumatic!” [Laughs] And maybe that is the reason that I’m the way I am right now.
Lina: It’s an introspective journey, in a sense, and maybe that’s a door that we hadn’t opened and looked through before.
Richey: I feel like playing them live is more cathartic, maybe, than some of the songs from our first album, which is more Pop Rock. Also, on a lot of these songs, Lina is performing as a vocalist also. We’ve always both been instrumentalists, but now when we play live, Lina does more vocals.
Lina: It’s a new experience. I used to be a little bit more hiding behind an instrument. It’s exposing and different. But I really liked it, I realized, as well, because you can perform and deliver songs in different ways vocally. I think that helped open the floodgates of songwriting for me.
Having performed some of this music, when it came to recording the vocals, do you think they have more of a live feel for that reason? I got that sense.
Lina: Definitely. Before, when we wrote songs, we would almost instantly record them. Whereas here, we had that time to develop and get to know the songs and how I wanted to deliver the vocals. I crafted that, really. In an emotional way, I was able to better deliver the lyrics, I think.
Richey: A lot of the vocal recordings were done in one take or one shot. We typically would do things line by line, perfecting everything. That can lead to a great-sounding recording, but you can lose some of the emotion. But Lina would sing a whole phrase or the whole song this time, and there was a rawness or a realness to that, so we would keep it as-is.
Lina: On “Sorry”, there’s a lot of the demo vocals on that, actually.
Richey: We liked it better. It captured something.
Lina: I feel like the recording process was really pretty smooth once we sat down to do it because we had hashed the songs out live and we knew where we wanted to go with them.
Richey: It was a lot less methodical because we had already done all the methodical stuff!
Lina: When Richey and I record, we do have some personality clashes. [Laughs] You get into a space where emotions run high, and you have your take on things. It gets a little heated sometimes, but in a good way. Actually, disagreements always result in a better result, because we’ve talked it through. [Laughs]
It’s refreshing to hear that, because it’s so real. Working with other people artistically is hard. I think the deeper that you’re digging for ideas, the more likely that is to happen, and this time you were really shaking things up. I was wondering if you knew that the sound would be a bit different for this album.
Richey: It was an organic approach, I would say. We usually just sit down with an acoustic guitar and a bass, I would say, before we do the sound design for it. This time, we wrote the song “Sorry” in early 2022. I just sat down to do something and made a little instrumental demo, with no intentions. Lina stumbled upon it a couple days later and said, “I love this. I wrote some lyrics to it. I laid down some scratch vocals.”
She played it for me one night, and I almost cried. I said, “I love this!” The sound design of that song and the vibe of that song dictated a lot of what we moved forward with. It was all done with this one little synthesizer I’ve had since 2017.
Lina: When we started performing some of these songs, they were very guitar-based, but because of what happened with “Sorry”, Richey sat down and translated some of those guitar-based songs into a more synthy kind of vibe to match. We were really into where that was going.
Richey: We were inspired.
I love it when there’s an origin story for the vibe of the album. It sounds like “Sorry” was that turn in the road. Synths are so evocative of the 80s, particularly to us now. Had you done stuff with synths before?
Richey: Kind of in the way of an afterthought or an extra texture. I come from a very guitar-based thought process when it comes to songwriting. I love so much music that is synth-based, but this was the first time that I intentionally made it a major part of the sound design rather than an atmospheric addition. It was like, “No, this is the entire feel of the song itself.” I even took guitar riffs and translated them to a synth to use as a lead line. It’s not my first instinct.
Lina: When we first moved to LA, Richey had been working a lot in Logic and then he began to switch to Ableton. That was a program that made me want to experiment because it was very user-friendly to me. Synths pads in there was the first time when I began to think, “This is fun.” It’s an amazing program for someone like me who’s not a Producer.
Richey: It’s a great songwriting tool.
I actually think that synths are quite emotional, like a lot of music from the 80s, and I think that’s part of why people are still attracted to them. Also, a lot of the films of that period were very heart-on-your-sleeve and that’s why people still like them.
Richey: Big time. All the John Hughes movies from the 80s, like Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, all use New Order and Book of Love, and artists like that. It creates a theme among the moves with that iconic sound. It’s familiar and nostalgic.
Lina: I think people do feel that warmth from them.
There’s a kind of daring, emotional stand from a lot of that music. I think people took risks. I also feel like your album conveys a lot of emotion, but what I personally found interesting about your album is that there’s a balance between a kind of organic and electronic feeling. I saw that you both had Punk backgrounds, so I thought it’s natural that you still have organic elements.
Richey: That makes me feel good that you picked up on that! Yeah, we do both definitely come from a more Punk Rock and Garage Rock background, starting bands in garages as teenagers. It’s hard to get that across when you’re trying to make a specific type of recording. I tend to aim for perfection and sometimes that reduces the emotional quality of it. It is important for us to try to make it organic, as much as possible.
Lina: For us, it was organic making this record because it was very much about what came out of us. It was what we were feeling. There wasn’t a preconceived notion of what it had to be, no, “It has to be this genre. It has to have heavy guitars.” It was honestly very experimental and true to what we were feeling. It felt very free to do it this way. It was natural. We wrote what we like. We wrote for ourselves.
“Fortress” is one of your singles and videos. The ideas of that song really gave me a sense of the rest of the album because it’s about an internal retreat, but in the song, that also gets disrupted and isn’t a safe space.
Richey: “Fortress” is one that was pulled from experiences that make you feel small, and make you want to hide away forever and not deal with the pain. The feedback that I’ve gotten in my life is that I’m not a big fan of conflict or confrontation and that’s when I hide away. But if you spend your whole life hiding away from your problems and not facing them, then everything will slip through your hands. Your whole life will.
Lina: You have to take charge of your life if you want things to happen for you. I think a lot of people throw caution to the wind in many ways, but when it comes to their own life, they are not taking the reigns.
Richey: It feels comfortable to be in the fortress.
Lina: Right, you can hide from all the things that are uncomfortable in life, but that will never make you grow, ultimately.
That’s really profound. There’s a tension between extroversion and introversion, in America particularly, and an over-emphasis on extraversion, I think. Everything needs to be very public all the time. I’m sure self-promotion as artists comes into that. But with this song, we can see that we do need some introversion, but you actually critique that, too. You’re saying that if that goes too far, your outer opportunities will slip away from you. I think that’s true. It’s an argument against staying in the fortress.
Lina: Exactly. I’m Swedish, and my Dad always said this to me in Swedish, but I’ll try to translate: “It’s better to pick up the bow and arrow and have it break than to never even try to shoot the arrow.” So, “Just try,” basically, “It’s better to try and fail than not to try.”
I wanted to mention “Pills”. I love the layered vocals on that one. It’s very atmospheric with a slower pace, but it feels like a dance song, like a lot of the songs on the album.
Lina: It’s like dancing at 3AM. Home from the club!
Richey: It was written more like a Rock song when we first worked on it. I guess the temp dropped a bit. It’s an electronic ballad. We brought that to our friend Matt Norman, who also worked on “Fortress”, and he has all this amazing analog equipment. He brought out some saturation and sonic qualities that we couldn’t just get from digital processing.
It has that kind of bright haziness to it, of the end of the night, as you say. But what also goes with 3AM is brutal honesty. The lyrics are a bit like that.
Lina: Yes! [Laughs] That is true.
The lyrics are really calling out this other person, this other situation, “Never had my back when you knew you should.”
Lina: It’s about fake friendship, exactly.
I was wondering, “How would people feel dancing to this song?” But there’s something that is freeing about speaking the truth and reflecting on our experiences. A lot of people have had that experience in life and maybe need to get to that moment of calling it out.
Lina: I can see that as a 3AM dance when you’re getting a little real. It’s almost like sobering up a little bit there.
The video is moody and very rich in colors.
Lina: The idea was that it’s a bitter pill to swallow to realize these things, so there are these four rooms are representing four different drugs. One’s the MDMA, one’s the heroin room, one’s the weed room, and it refers to these realizations. This looking at friendships and realizing that these people in your life are maybe not actually there for you.
HMS: That’s very clever. That really points out that the realization is the hard part, not just the original experience. It’s hard to admit that you were treated as lesser by someone else.
Richey: Exactly.
Lina: We go deep! [Laughs]
