Post hardcore band SeeYouSpaceCowboy will release their highly anticipated new album Coup De Grâce on April 19th via Pure Noise Records.
Coup De Grâce is a complex and imaginative new record that invites listeners into a neo-noir world of the band’s creation, and to set the scene we got a peek behind the curtain with a special track by track exclusive breakdown by frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa!
- Allow Us To Set The Scene
Allow Us To Set The Scene was kind of born out of two ideas. When we conceptualized the album, we knew we wanted smokey lounge room tracks, and we had an explosive opening song that we wanted. So we just had to put them together as a dichotomy between this sultry kind of thing that we made and the explosive energy; the stuff that we do, kind of sassy and big breakdowns, stuff like that.
- Subtle Whispers To Take Your Breath Away
For this track, we wanted to take it a little more straightforward, almost indie rock riffs, and combine that with our song structure. We also took influence from Anna Molly by Incubus; then we built it into a Cowboy track.
- And The Two Slipped Into The Shadows
I think this was one of the first songs we wrote when we first started conceptualizing the album. It’s very akin to what we normally do, say on The Romance Of Affliction; but we added little intricacies, little parts that we thought: this is a fun, melodic part that we’ve never done before, let’s play around with this stuff! It was kind of like the first inception of: “what can we get away with?”.
- Red Wine and Discontent
For this song, we were trying to push more into a post-hardcore realm. We wanted to do something that had a lot of movement to it and was more on the melodic side – but of course, it still retains all those parts of us. But it was definitely more like: can we make a track that flows? It’s really dancey and energetic, and I like that track a lot. It’s one of my favorites
- Lubricant Like Kerosene (feat. Kim Dracula)
This track very much goes back to the bands that we originally took in, The Blood Brothers, and a lot of old sassy bands that we were taking from back in the day; and we just wanted to make a fun track, a fun kind of sexy dance thing, something that was all in on things that we usually pick from, but it’s just pure fun. And having Kim Dracula, that was also something really cool, we didn’t know that was going to happen! It happened last minute, we were like: we’ve got the perfect part for you, you’ve got this crescendo-y kind of breakdown section at the end, and it’s built up with rolling toms and stuff like that. And this is the result!
- Respite For A Tragic Tale (feat. iRis.EXE)
When we first conceptualized this album, we knew we wanted to do some sultry jazz stuff because Timmy [Moreno], our guitarist, he can write all this stuff, and we got iRis.EXE to do guest vocals. And we felt like a big part of pulling off this aesthetic and the sound that we were kind of going for was doing a track like Respite For A Tragic Tale. And it turned out amazing in my opinion. I didn’t know we pulled it off when we were in the studio. We kind of wrote it last minute, we put it off right to the end. But we knew we wanted to do it and it was like: oh, okay, let’s make this work. Let’s get horns and stuff. And it turned out really cool. Even with Allow Us To Set The Scene, we had saxophone in it, there was an actual saxophone playing. We had someone lay down all the solo stuff. So those two tracks, Respite too, they’re really cool tracks to me. It’s really just out of a commitment to what we wanted to do.
- Silhouettes In Motion
Silhouettes In Motion actually came from an unused track we had from The Romance of Affliction. We had this one part where it’s this steady clap beat over this dissonant thing, that’s in the beginning. And it’s another song where it’s pushing that melodic fun, but with Cowboy stuff in there as well. And I feel like this is the track that melts it together the best. It released with Respite For A Tragic Tale with a double video, because Respite ends with a cheering audience and then a steady clap rises up underneath it. It’s one full track basically.
- To The Dance Floor For Shelter (feat. Courtney LaPlante)
For this track we were playing around with taking from those emo bands from the mid 2000s. And it was another thing to see if we could take that straightforward chorus and add it with the weirdo stuff that comes later on and have an atmosphere. It’s a little bit darker, but also something that you want to dance to. And then with Courtney’s part, it all fades into darkness, then you have this giant breakdown at the end, and it is amazing. I was wondering when we first hit her up, because I just texted her: do you want to do this? And she’s like: yeah, I would love to. I didn’t know if she’d be willing to scream because I had the trade off breakdown at the end in my head – and she was down! It’s a fun way to end that song.
- Rhythm And Rapture (feat. nothing.nowhere.)
We got really lucky and it was really cool working with people like nothing.nowhere., but instrumentally for this song we wanted to write a fun track that took from bands like first album Foals and Bloc Party. That was something that we wanted to take influence from because even though we grew up with post-hardcore and hardcore, we were also hugely into indie rock. I was in high school and even earlier when that dance indie rock thing was really popular, Two Door Cinema Club came out when I was a sophomore, I think. So that was me and Timmy’s baby, we love this stuff. My first show ever was Interpol, The Bravery and Bloc Party, and I was like 10 years old. And Antics by Interpol was the first album I ever bought as a CD. So Rhythm And Rapture is an indulgent track. It’s a passion track for us, for sure.
- Sister With A Gun
This is probably the most melodic song on the record, and it was another experimental thing. It was like: hey, let’s try to do something really melodic, just because we always dip our toes in that world and we never just commit to it. So that was just a byproduct of playing around with that and being like: oh, fun! It turned out to be an interesting track. It’s a very controversial one amongst the band, but I like it. I think it’s cool how it just plays with this almost bipolar nature, it builds up and you think it’s going to a breakdown. But no, instead the poppiest thing that Cowboy’s ever written comes after that. No breakdown. Sorry!
- Chewing The Scenery
I think Chewing The Scenery was the second song we wrote for this album actually, because when we locked ourselves in a cabin to start playing around, this was just us playing around with a melodic riff. I had said: I want a waltz part, so I want something in three. The beginning of that came out of it and it grew into this thing, a homage to the post-hardcore that we grew up listening to. I think it’s really cool, it plays with these things, people never really heard us do something that melodic and soft before. It’s always usually more bombastic and blah, blah, blah. So it’s another fun thing to play around with!
- Curtain Call
We wrote this one with Isaac [Hale] from Knocked Loose and it was kind of just us playing around. We wrote a couple of these songs with Isaac, but this was one where it was really everybody sitting there passing around the guitar, playing these really interesting chords. We wanted it to have a little bit of a Latin flair, and it came from noodling around on the guitar and then building it into this climactic close, just playing into that sultry, seductive nature and Ethan [Sgarbossa] singing over it – and then just ending with this explosion, and then the little piano flair at the end. And iRis.EXE starts the album with Allow Us To Set The Scene and she says the last word on the album, she does the “adieu” at the end. So it kind of ties everything together!
Pre-order Coup de Grâce here
Every single song SeeYouSpaceCowboy have released since forming in 2016 has been deeply rooted in the life experience and trauma of frontwoman Connie Sgarbossa. Whether that’s existential anguish, substance addiction or suicidal ideation (and attempts), Sgarbossa has never been afraid to detail her pain and torment in excruciating detail.
She holds nothing back, and combined with the band’s intensely dark (and darkly intense) blend of sasscore, punk, mathcore and metalcore, it’s always made for profound and devastating listening. Coup De Grâce is no exception to that rule. The band’s third album, it follows on from 2019’s The Correlation Between Entrance And Exit Wounds and 2021’s The Romance Of Affliction. But unlike those two records, which were unadulterated, no-holds-barred accounts of her life at the time, Coup De Grâce takes a different approach to its lyrics. Rather than Sgarbossa baring her most private and innermost thoughts for all to hear, on these 12 songs they’re funneled through the lives of fictional characters within a noir-inspired world of the singer’s invention.
With blast beats, screams, pulverizing guitarist and exasperated spoken word elements, Coup de Grâce develops the band’s sound by also embracing a more catchy and accessible sense of melody, influenced by the likes of Bloc Party, Foals, Two Door Cinema Club and more.
It makes sense, then, that the record begins with something utterly unlike anything the band has ever made before: a sax-laden, smoky, late night smooth jazz ballad.
It immediately draws the listener back to a time and place that exists decades in the past, a Moulin Rouge-esque club that’s not quite in the real world—and it’s within that parallel decadent and dystopian universe, and its various buildings, that everything then plays out. That ‘everything’ is just as personal as anything the band — completed by Connie’s brother Ethan Sgarbossa (guitar/vocals), Taylor Allen (bass/vocals), Tim Moreno (guitar) and AJ Tartol (drums) — have ever released, but it manifests itself across Coup De Grâce’s 12 songs in an entirely different way than before.
