An Interview with Bow & Spear
- BuzzSlayers
- Jul 27, 2025
- 10 min read
The awaited new album release from Bow & Spear is finally here, and it's pretty damn awesome.
The album is called Everything Melts, and it just has such an effective way of combining all of these soundscapes that I grew up listening to under the heavy rock umbrella, which is something I find to be quite a rarity, so when I come across something like this, it hits me pretty hard.
These guys take the best parts of post-rock, grunge, and shoegaze, blending them seamlessly throughout this massive 10-track record, and this is an album you want to listen to from start to finish, all in one shot.
There are more than a few surprises around its corners, and the energy levels throughout the record are insane.
I go through this record, I get some nostalgic Vibes because again, this stuff sounds like that underground Style mid to late 90s super heavy rock and grunge aesthetic that beckons those kinds of bands you would find by reading about them in a magazine or hearing a track on some random underground local radio station that played good stuff.
It gives me that old school, I'm going to download the song off of Napster or LimeWire sort of vibe, and it's just something that, for me, makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
The record starts with "Honey Drip", which already gives you their inventive side.
What they do here is create this addictive melody with an augmented sort of guitar riff, and the vocals end up following that, so you get a strange but alluring sort of hook stuck in your head forever.
It's like super old school grunge, and again, this is part of their pack of influences that you're going to hear throughout the record.
As a matter of fact, this is an amazing song to introduce the record with because it does showcase some of those staples the band gives throughout the full album.
Now, I'll say it once more, this is a record you listen to all the way through.
Listening to one or two tracks may give you a little idea of what you might expect, but won't give you the spectrum of what the full album has to offer.
There are loads of sonic layers coming through at all times, strange and almost awkward hooks that bounce around in your brain for hours on end, and this crazy fluctuation of energy levels that makes the whole record feel almost like you just watched a live performance.
The vocals definitely follow that grungy theme with a vintage sort of '90s swagger, but also great melodies all around, and it works amazingly because the way the vocalist does his thing balances out with the rambunctious tonality of the music at times.
My favorite tracks on this record, "XOXO", features some unique guitar work and almost mathy riffs played on a clean guitar and overlapped with shoegaze style, fuzz, and grit distortions that really create a particular atmosphere.
I like this one a lot because it blends these two different elements together super well, and the vocals are through the roof on this one.
This song reminds me of bands like Local H vocally. Even a little bit musically as well.
The drumming on this track and pretty much all of them really build the songs into what they become. Everyone is sort of leaning on this immense drum performance, and it brings that heavy-handed drive to a lot of the songs.
"Slink" is another track that kind of blew me away because it does hit such a great aesthetic with massive heaviness through and through. When I talk about how the record feels like a live performance, this is one of the songs that gives me that vibe.
The closing track on the record, called "Beetle", is an immense and vast song that spans just over 7 Minutes in length, featuring all these great bendy and wailing guitars, great progression and arrangement, and it just feels engulfing.
The full album is just over 40 minutes in length, and it's well worth your time to just dive into this thing.
If you are any kind of fan of grunge, shoegaze, post-rock, anything heavy, inventive, a little avant-garde, through the roof, electric energy, and has Sonic tonality that pushes boundaries, feels nostalgic, and can feel spacious and engulfing at the same time, this entire album is 100% for you.
After going through this record, we decided to talk with the band. I wanted to know where this record came from, how it was recorded, and what may be coming next for the band.
Here's what went down.
Buzz Slayers: Let's talk about Everything Melts! This record certainly has a way of hitting this 90's alt-rock feel but also brings in a slew of other approaches at times! Where did this LP come from?
There's two answers to this question: musically and lyrically.
Musically, you nailed it with mid 90s alternative rock. I got into music in 3rd grade (this was in 1996 I think) when an older cousin let me listen to Chicago's alternative rock radio station with him in the basement at a family party. This event irreversibly changed my life (arguably ruining it, perhaps) by reconfiguring my life in the pursuit of making something myself that made me feel as good as what I heard coming out of those speakers. This is without a doubt the closest I've come as a songwriter and recording artist to doing that - Everything Melts is basically the kind of record I wished people were making when I was high school or college but which was hopelessly, hopelessly uncool and out of vogue in the 2000s. Grunge was the cultural no man's land of happening long ago enough to not be timely but not so long ago to not seem retro-cool yet.
Lyrically, it's a more complex story. A lot of the lyrics of the record explore different kinds of sadness ranging from romantic relationships to the banality and dread of life in the shadow of late capitalism. I guess you could call it a break up album if you wanted to condense it down to a single line but I think that undercuts the range of experiences described on the album, as well as the multiple sources of anguish and alienation, as well as just how weird the form of expression of that anguish is. Anyway, a very heavy record, both in subject matter and sound.
Buzz Slayers: I'm hearing a few different styles to this record! Who are some of your biggest musical influences?
To greater or lesser extent, Nirvana has been the North Star that's provided direction for pretty much everything I've ever written, and that's true here too. Recording and mixing the record took 5 years and it's not an overstatement to say I'm a different person now than I was when we started (everyone in the band is, I think). There are so many weird one off things on the record though - like when I wrote the chorus part of xoxo, I remember being like "oh cool, this reminds me of Omni, I wonder if I'm writing a post punk songs" and then inevitably it'd kind of eventually find its way back to being a grunge/punk thing with shoegaze guitars like most of what Bow & Spear writes. Like most artists, I scavenge a lot of little things from a lot of disparate places and reassemble them in my own way, probably too many to list out here. I've gone through too many periods of being interested in different songwriters over that period to really have a clean answer for you, but I think the main influences are Nirvana, Ovlov, Hum, and Deftones.
Buzz Slayers: Did you record this at a home setup, or at a big studio?
We recorded and mixed the whole thing ourselves. We started recording this in the summer of 2020 (I think I wrote the first song all the way back in 2018, though) and we were home recording out of necessity because Covid prevented us from doing a traditional studio experience. This was a blessing and a curse - everything we'd released prior to 2020 was constrained heavily by the costs associated with booking studio time, and I consistently felt aggrieved that I was stuck with whatever takes and tones I'd had the time to record when we went in. Home recording solved this, but the pro of being able to rerecord everything as many times as it takes to get it perfect comes with the con of being able to rerecord everything as many times as it takes to get it perfect. I recorded every guitar on the record a minimum of three times (sometimes many, many more times) to make sure the tones were right and the performances were sharp, and stacked a lot of guitars on top of each other. Tyler (lead guitar) mixed the record himself, and we'd iterate between me recording vocals or guitars, him mixing, and then us deciding together if what we got was usable or if we needed to scrap it and track more. We spent half a decade iterating in that way. I really do think we're recording a beautiful sounding album and I know for a fact this is the best sounding we could possibly get something we recorded ourselves, but it's really hard to overstate the effort we exerted to do this. We worked so, so hard on this. It's so funny to think that our first record, Into (which came out in 2015), took two weekends to record and everyone in the band was fall-down drunk by the end of each of our four studio days.
Buzz Slayers: How did this all start for you as a band?
The band started eons ago when I (David, guitar/vox) moved back to Chicago from Hawaii between semesters and put up a Craigslist ad to see if I could get a band going for the summer. John (drums) answered it and we had next to nothing in common musically but we liked getting drunk together. That was 13 years ago. A lot of people came and went between then and now but the band was built on a foundation of hanging out more than shared vision, which resulted in some of the earlier releases feeling pretty all over the place. It really wasn't until I took over as the singular songwriter in the band when Into came out that we started having anything you could describe as a voice or a recognizable style, and it wasn't until Tyler joined the band for the Into release tour that we figured out how to approach composition and arrangement in a way that sounded distinctively like us.
Buzz Slayers: Are you performing live right now?
Yes! If you live in Chicago, please come to our release show at the Empty Bottle on August 4 with Djunah and Sprite. If you don't live in Chicago, come to Chicago for our show. Thanks.
Buzz Slayers: Now that this is out, what's next for you?
Middle age, I guess. Maybe I'll get into gardening.
Buzz Slayers: Who's in your headphones right now?
I like listening to anything dreamy. To me, the best shoegaze is very transportative and makes me feel like I'm getting a window into a world where guitars can make you feel like strange and magical things are happening all around you. I'm thinking about bands like Kraus or A Sunny Day in Glasgow especially here, and my girlfriend just got me into Goon which I think resonates similarly for me. Beyond that, I have Dead Meadow on permanent repeat for similar reasons, although I go to them for more of a psychedelic high fantasy energy rather than a "oh my god, the walls are melting and the laws of physics just stopped working" energy I get out of shoegaze.
Buzz Slayers: What would you tell people they can expect on this release?
We put a lot of thought into album craft on this one, and my feeling is it shows. I get bored by albums that hit the same note over and over and I get confused by albums where the songwriting is too varied to feel cohesive, and I think one of the ways the album works is by having a lot of different types of songs and different vibes without feeling disjointed or unfocused. The A side runs from grungy pop hooks to noise rock, whereas the B side has a more brooding, slower, and somber shoegaze tone that people who really like Hum might connect with. I think if you take the whole thing together, it takes you on a journey, and if one part of the album isn't working for you, I'd just try skipping a track or two ahead. There's a lot of different vocal styles, approaches to arrangements and layering, and a lot of unusual lyrics.
I'd also recommend checking out the lyrics. Some songs are pretty straightforward lyrically but I pushed myself to write unusual lyrics that work as poetry and eschew conventional narration and referentiality and go into some really weird and surreal places. I think people into that kind of thing will have an interesting time.
Buzz Slayers: Before we go, what would you like to express to fans of the music?
Tell your friends about our band! We're artists first and marketers never and I've lacked any sense of conviction when it comes to advertising our art because of how genuinely sleazy the whole enterprise of marketing feels to me. As a result, we've really always relied on letting our art speak for itself and hoping the right people would hear it and be moved by it. As a result, we really count on the people who "get" what we're doing to spread the word, send their friends the songs they like, and connect with the world we build in our songs enough that they feel moved to interpret it, relate to it, and discuss how they relate to it with others. Community is everything when it comes to this kind of thing - we came up in Chicago's DIY scene where making art that was compelling enough to warrant talking about spread by word of mouth was the only strategy for growing your band that didn't make you look like a striver or a careerist. At this point I'm too entrenched in that way of thinking to try and figure out how to make dumb little sketches or memes for social media to trick you into listening to our music.
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