Photo Credit: James Roy Sullivan
Interview: Good Sleepy
Written by: Oliver Heffron
If you’re feeling bereft of good emo music, you probably just need Good Sleepy. The Central Massachusetts outfit's new sophomore LP, CONSTANT HUMMING, delivers hard-hitting, headbanging riffs with just the right dose of dreamy melodies, with expansive, polished production you’d never guess was mixed in a basement and not a major studio. On tracks like “LOOMING” and “ALL AT ONCE,” the band displays the mixture of raw, DIY energy and infectious songwriting that makes for a great record, and an even better live show.
Good Sleepy includes Thomas Sullivan (bass, vocals), Seth Girard (guitar, vocals), Ryan Duggan (guitar), and Jack Wensky (drums), all Worcester, MA natives. “It's a really nice area, very nice community,” Jack says. “There’s a lot of small towns,” Thomas adds. “Everybody knows everybody.”
The band started in high school when Thomas and Seth became friends over their shared love for music. “We both really liked the emo music and bonded over it,” Seth recalls. “Thomas and I started as a two-piece, just playing house shows.”
Ryan joined after seeing Good Sleepy at a garage show. “I happened to play guitar, and they're like, 'Oh, you play guitar, you should join the band.' And the rest is history,” he says. Thomas adds that the group completed its lineup while recording their first album at Sound Acres: “We needed a new drummer, Jack was there, and he's a great drummer. We've known him a long time.”
After three self-released EPs, Good Sleepy signed to No Sleep Records in 2020, following a feature on one of their compilations. This led to recording their debut LP, everysinglelittlebit, in rural Southern New Jersey at Sound Acres Studio at the year's end.
“Chris Freeman from Hot Mulligan contacted us after we signed and said, 'Come record with us, I'll be down there, and we'll get you three weeks in the studio.' It was a big shift from the DIY stuff,” Seth explains. “We'd never had real studio experience—going from messing around in Thomas's basement to a pro studio was a huge change.”
Thomas says, “We signed right before COVID happened too, which was a weird time to be signing to a label as a band. But it worked out because it gave us so much time to get ready to take full advantage of that opportunity...And then coming back after COVID, our first show back, it was really sick to see the reception.”
Since their first album, the band brought professional studio experience back to their DIY roots and shifted their sound. “We ran dry on twinkly emo when we got into heavier music and took inspiration from that for this record,” Jack says. “We started this record years ago,” Ryan adds. “Our biggest inspirations are The Story So Far, Turnstile, Title Fight—bands we’ve now blended into our sound.”
Photo Credit: James Roy Sullivan
Thomas details their recording process: “We demoed everything out completely DIY back home, at my family's place, actually in the space that we grew up practicing in. So that was a nice, familiar kind of environment to be in during the demoing process, and the whole songwriting process."
Thomas notes that they spent one day in the studio with Boston-based producer Charlie Burket, tracking all 14 tracks on drums. “Shoutout to Jack for doing that.”
Despite the humble home studio, CONSTANT HUMMING features polished production that packs garage-show energy. “Every time we show it to our friends, they're like, 'Oh, like, what studio is this at?' And we're like, ‘we did it ourselves,’” Seth says. “With this space that we had, we really made it work. And I'm really proud of us for making it sound the way it did, for being in a basement, you know,” Jack adds.
Thomas and Seth agree their favorite from the new album is “745.” “It’s the most Good Sleepy song ever. Everything we’ve done is rolled into one, but better,” Seth says. “It just came so naturally and felt so right playing it,” Thomas adds.
Ryan says, “It changes, but 'LOOMING' is an extremely diverse track for me. It's very poppy, very heavy, very listenable.” Jack picks the intro track, 'ALL AT ONCE.' “We spent a very, very long time just trying to get that song to sound exactly the way we wanted it—whether that be the lead, drums, bass, melody. I think it’s very well crafted.”
To prepare for the new album, Good Sleepy launched their first five-week DIY headlining tour last summer. Seth shares, “Showing up across the country and having kids know your songs and sing the lyrics back to you—it's always pretty crazy.”
Reflecting on what the new album means to them, Ryan says, “ I think it's an amalgamation of us growing up as people, us growing as a band, and kind of pushing what we want to sound like.” With CONSTANT HUMMING, Good Sleepy doesn’t just return to their roots, but amplifies them.