“Sand is really difficult to walk in, and it’s kind of aimless. Whenever you’re walking on the beach it’s like you’re waiting for your food to ready or something like that. It gets to a point where you slow down, you look at each other and say, ‘You just wanna walk back?’ If you’re at the beach, you should get in the water, and walk on the sidewalk,” laughs Super Doppler guitarist Harry Slater, who, with the rest of the Super Doppler outfit, was recently on the west coast touring to support their groovetastic new album Moonlight Anthems. “It was our first time on the west coast. The Mojave Desert was pretty strange for us,” he says with a laugh. “We went from the Midwest, to the plains, to the Rockies, and over to the desert. Every time we’d fall asleep and wake up, it looked like we were on a different planet.”
Born from high school jam sessions at co-founders and twin brothers Cole and Neal Friedman’s house, Super Doppler has come a long way from those days, and their new record is solid proof. Recorded in April 2016 and released this June, Moonlight Anthems follows the band’s first album, a self-titled effort made in 2015 when the group went by the name Major and the Monbacks. “Our first album was way overdue,” recalls Slater. “We basically just went into the studio, played a live show to no audience, and hit the record button. We’d tossed around lots of outlandish recording ideas we had, but accepted the fact that we weren’t going to be able to do them, and that we’d save the ideas for the next album, if we ever got around to it. It was always this mythical goal point for us,” he continues. “Not too long after we released the first album, we were ready to do it again, with a whole batch of new songs. We wanted it to flow from start to finish and not just be a collection of songs, meant to listen to in order, and we wanted an ample amount of time to experiment in the studio, throw mud at the wall to see what would stick,” he adds. “That’s exactly what we did.”
Moonlight Anthem is 12 songs of 70s-infused rollicking, classic rock-icana; even after a cursory listen, it’s obvious that Super Doppler, self-described suburban kids raised on a steady diet of The Beatles and The Beach Boys, had a blast in the studio. “All these 60s and 70s bands—they perfected the craft and we wanted to do what they did. Our music has a retro vibe to it. We’re not out to be cutting edge,” explains Slater. “We’re just playing what we know.”
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