By Gabby McIlhinney
Atta Boy has been a band since its members were, in our collective own words, “wee teens,” and in that time they’ve built a small, devoted discography around a comforting, aching blend of pop Americana. Fans of a certain age (mine, apparently) know theam best through Saccharine, the album that soundtracked a lot of pandemic bedrooms and hasn’t left rotation since. The band doesn’t move fast, as new music from Atta Boy tends to resurface like sediment, stirring back to the surface every so often, and well formed upon arrival. Their newest album, Silt, just came out, and the tour behind it brought Dashel on keys, Freddie on guitar, Eden on vocals and guitar, and Louis on drums, into the WKDU studio, crammed onto whatever chairs we could find for their first radio interview ever.
I have to disclose something here, because it would be dishonest not to: I am a fan, a real one. I’ve covered “Saccharine” the only times I’ve ever played live, once in a bar and once at a house show, and it’s been on my Spotify Wrapped every year since I was a sophomore in high school, back when COVID first hit. So this visit was personal.
As for how the set itself felt from the other side of the mic, the answer was “strange, in a good way.”
“I think it’s just adjusting to every room,” Eden said, comparing it to walking into any new venue. Louis had a funnier problem. He spent the first half of the set convinced one of his monitor dials was cutting the whole band, when it turned out to just be my voice he turned down the entire time. Dashel summed up the real trap of playing a space like the station, “You get used to playing in a space like that for rehearsals or studio but then you forget, oh no, people are listening out there right now, rather than we’ll be able to fix it later.”
The next day, they stuck around Philly for a free show at Spruce Street Harbor Park as part of the Live and Local concert series. It was their first time playing the city in a couple of years, heat wave notwithstanding. “Stoked, except for the heat,” Eden said, “but that’s just what happens when you play in the summer.” The set leaned heavily toward the new record, since these were functionally release shows, with a handful of older favorites mixed in. Eden was upfront ahead of time that the balance skewed new on purpose, even knowing that’s not always what longtime fans are hoping for: “We can tend to neglect older songs.” Give it a few years, and Silt will be the one people are begging to hear.
The album’s title came together almost by accident. The band went back and forth for a while on what to call the record before landing on Silt, which turned into more of a metaphor than anything. Dashel described it as the image of dirt on the bottom of a body of water getting kicked up, that cloudiness standing in for the uncertainty of a much longer production cycle than they’re used to, the patience of waiting for it to settle, the clarity which follows, and the cycle starting over again the next time something gets stirred up. Eden had already named one of the songs “Silt” before the album had a title at all, so once the metaphor clicked, there was nowhere else for the record to go. “It kind of just fell into place,” Dashel said.
Ask about the details tucked into the record and you get the sense this is a band that thinks in feelings before technique. Freddie’s favorite hidden touch is in “Full Cloud,” where the verses run two separate drum kits panned into each ear before the chorus swells them into a single, normally panned kit. On “Pale Blue Sky,” he and Dashel recorded piano through a reverb pedal and kept only the wet signal, no dry tone at all, chasing a specific feeling the band had already agreed felt like floating down a lazy river. Louis’s drums chug along underneath it, then drop into half-time right where the current seems to slow down. “There’s lots of little nuggets hidden throughout all the songs,” Freddie said.
That level of patience is new territory for Atta Boy, and it traces back to Freddie’s original demos, which were only ever meant to be sketches before the band decided to build the actual record out of them. Where past albums came together in and out of the studio in two weeks, Silt took closer to two years. Dashel credits some of that to simply getting older and some of it to being on the road together more, since the four of them don’t live in the same city anymore. More time together on tour, he said, means a closer bond, which means stronger songwriting once they’re back in a room writing.
People tend to file Atta Boy under indie pop or indie folk and leave it there, but the band’s current listening is a lot wider than that. Riding in the van together for the first extended stretch since high school, they’ve been passing around MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Alex G, Slow Pulp, and Big Thief, alongside the occasional detour into their own teenage favorites. They’ve also, somewhat masochistically, assigned themselves homework: each member is building an individual playlist spanning their entire musical memory, from earliest childhood song up through high school graduation, capped at two and a half hours. Louis’s is currently sitting at seven hours and refusing to shrink. “It’s a really interesting journey to go through,” he said, “but revisiting those has been kind of brain breaking.” Eden’s own detour has been toward Sheryl Crow and Amyl and the Sniffers, a pull toward something grittier that shaped a real question on this record: how far can you push a new influence before it stops sounding like Atta Boy at all?
What comes after this tour wraps is unwritten. The band is candid that they don’t have plans locked in yet beyond finishing the run, though there’s an open appetite to dig through old, never-released songs that got cut from previous albums and see if any of them deserve a second life. Louis floated the idea of a full “cutting room floor” record built entirely from those leftovers (“think about it tonight in your dreams,” he told the rest of the band) and got instant buy-in from Eden. Consider this the official record of the fans wanting that too.
Before they wrapped up, Louis used his last thirty seconds of studio time to shout out his uncle Mike and the rest of his Philly family. Eden closed it out with the essentials, “Stay hydrated, stay cool, look out for each other, and go birds.”
Follow along at @weareattaboy on Instagram, and go stream Silt. The tour runs through September 13th, so there may still be a stop or two near you. Keep listening to college radio.
DJ Gabby Mack hosts Fish Food on WKDU Philadelphia 91.7 FM.