Once you delve into their catalog, Aquarian Blood can be hard to pin down. Their 2017 debut LP on Goner was a rollicking, riff-heavy burst of punk guitar and synth noise centered on the hearty screams of co-founder Laurel Horrell. And while there were more minimalist flavors present, such as the moody “Won’t Forget to Die,” few were prepared for the sea change that came with their sophomore release. A Love That Leads to War was an abrupt, acoustic about-face that featured co-founder JB Horell’s delicate picking on a nylon string classical guitar, blended with low-key drum machines and hand percussion, spooky synths, and haunted, primitive melodies in a quieter vein.
And yet the world the Horrells created was no fairy folk land of unicorns and tarot card poetry. These were dark missives from an underground life filled with trauma and desire, and the sheer sound of the home recordings captured what might happen if German sonic artists Can reinterpreted the Incredible String Band. It was intimate and compelling, and, with Covid striking only months after the album’s release, oddly prescient. During lockdown, I wore the album out. And, it turned out, there was more where that came from. In 2022, the band released Bending the Golden Hour, also on Goner, and earlier this year Black & Wyatt Records dropped Counting Backwards Again. Throw in the 2020 EP Decoys, and it’s clear that this acoustic chapter of the band’s career has been fruitful. Indeed, the three LPs and associated material hang together so well, I called on JB recently to lend some perspective to this impressive body of work, and what the future may hold.
Memphis Flyer: I’ve really been digging Counting Backwards Again since it came out in April. And it strikes me that you could call the last three full-lengths a trilogy. They hang together that well.
JB Horrell: Yeah, I agree with that. All the music on those three records was created in the same period of time, between 2019 and 2022. And it’s interesting because there are songs on this third [acoustic] record that predate songs on the first record, and songs on the first record that post-date songs on the third record. There’s this specific body of music that’s broken up over three albums, and all of the songs encapsulate everything that was going on. And it feels good. Three is a good round number.
Is there a narrative through-line to the albums, or is it more oblique than that?
I didn’t choose the songs for the two before this third one. Zac [Ives, of Goner Records,] was a huge catalyst in the entire shift in the band’s approach and sound. Our drummer had broken his arm, so in the down time we were doing this kind of acoustic thing for fun. [We told Zac], “I guess it’s still Aquarian Blood, whatever.” And he was very encouraging. He said, “Well, you guys should try playing a show like that.”
And then Zac more or less curated the first albums, correct?
Yeah. We gave him 23 tracks for the first record, and that ended up being 15 songs. Then there were 32 tracks we gave him for Bending the Golden Hour, and he picked 15 again. So for the Black & Wyatt record, we had 17 left, and I pared it down to the 12 that felt to us, in a very personal way, like the ones that completed that whole trip. That was a really brutal period for all of us, with Covid going on, everybody sort of disconnected, and a lot of personal stuff going on, like losing people close to us in terrible ways. So all that felt like it was of a time and of a process. It was cathartic, a process of grieving and sort of trying to figure out the way forward.
And the band was expanding through those years, as you embraced the wider sonic palette.
Yeah, it had gotten up to seven people. But coming into 2024, it kind of felt like we had cleaned out the closet to make room for new stuff. We knew that there was this imminent change about to take place, and we knew the band was going to downsize to five people, total. I wanted everybody involved in the new lineup to have a lot more of a hand in writing and arranging the songs.
So, since the release of Counting Backwards Again, there’s been another sea change in Aquarian Blood’s sound?
Yeah. We knew that we were ready to turn the page. We had a whole batch of brand-new songs. So we started completely from scratch last winter, with Keith Cooper on guitar, Michael Peery on keyboards, and Jeremy Speakes on drums. Then we took it on the road in June, and it was interesting to be touring, playing nothing that was ever released. I wasn’t sure what to expect about that. We had never played a show with that lineup before the tour! All of it seems counterintuitive, but the opportunity was there, so we jumped at it, and the tour couldn’t have gone any better.
Playing 17 shows in 18 days really locked it in. So, since we’ve been home, we’ve been hitting the studio quite a bit, and the recordings are just stacking up. Our intuition was right. We’ve got this group of people together, taking it somewhere else. The Lucky 7 Brass Band just put horns on some stuff last week. And Krista Wroten and Ethan Baker play violin on it. So the whole thing has become very collaborative. And it feels really good to get out of my head and out of my recording room at home and go out and collaborate again.
Aquarian Blood will play with Vorhex Angel (with members of Jeff the Brotherhood) at B-Side on Friday, November 1st, at 9 p.m.
