The Convenience Debut Where Prince and Indie-Psych Collide
The Convenience was a mysterious project before this year. Two lo-fi indie pop tunes in 2018, then silence, leaving listeners to wonder if The Convenience was a brief home-recording experiment or an active project prepping long and hard for next release.
Last May, they confirmed the latter to be true with the single "Kiss Me In Heaven." Nothing could've screamed "We're back and reinvented" more, with its dancier tempo, lusher arrangement, sparklier production, and a very sticky pop tune at the core of it all. Their more hushed December single, "Fake Roses," kept a foot in indie pop while digging deeper into slippery, bubbly electronica. Both songs will feature on their debut album, Accelerator, due out October 22.
The Convenience are a New Orleans duo, with Duncan Troast on most of the instruments and Nick Corson on production. Both Loyola instrumentalists, the two had been active in the city's indie corners for years. Most notably they both wound up as supporting musicians for Video Age, and Corson drummed with and designed art for Lawn. Those credentials make The Convenience sound like an outgrowth of New Orleans' recent indie pop moment, but Troast and Corson’s palette spans far past the bounds of indie-pop.
"We talked a lot about building an alternate sonic universe for these songs to live in", Corson says. "Where we could lean into certain synthetic and orchestral textures without shame."
Building a surreal atmosphere and igniting pop bliss are separate challenges that Corson and Troast see as going hand in hand. Their sunny guitars and splashy, sheen-y, occasionally squelchy synths are dopamine fuel on top of giving the music an on-another-planet strut. During their time between releases, the duo discovered how to translate their fantasy neon-lit metropolis into music, and remain punchy and catchy all the same. Think Prince through a video arcade.
"Pop is just the form that appeals to me most", Corson says, "and I think at its best it always has a sort of otherworldly quality. The best artists, whether it's Timbaland or Kate Bush, challenge you to step into their sound world, and there can often be a period of adjustment to their vision which I think is so magical."
