Local Texas-Based Band sleep well. Discuss the Release of their Sophomore Album ‘It’s Getting Brighter”

The band reflects on their journey since their first album release and gives insight on the choices that resulted in their new album It’s Getting Brighter. 

Sleep Well (stylized sleep well.) was formed in 2017 after finding their sound in Austin, Texas. The band consists of members Andres Garcia (Vocals/Guitar), Ricky Olivares (Guitar), Marco Martinez (Keys), Dominic Gomez (Bass), and Mark Fountain (Drums). Through their melodic indie/bedroom-pop sound, they broke into Austin’s bustling local music scene and performed shows all over the city with local acts like Eli Josef, Hall Johnson, The Irons, and TC Superstar. The band released their first feature LP called Pictures of Dogs in December 2019, which reached wide-acclaim and commercial success with about 3 million streams across different streaming platforms. 

A lot has happened since the release of the debut record, i.e. a topic we all have embedded in our brains by now. It’s 2023, approximately 4 years later, and sleep well. finds themselves in a more constituted and refined ground to lay on. It’s Getting Brighter is just what it sounds like – things have indeed changed and gotten brighter. The album is riddled with ambient nature sounds and drizzling refrains that hint at nostalgia, all written amongst a new, more sophisticated atmosphere. Unlike its predecessor, It’s Getting Brighter plays around with slower melodies that make each song’s lyrical content pop. Through heart wrenching topics and melancholic tones, each song has its own standout instrumental that resonates with listeners. 

Songs like “Happy Early Birthday” and “New Year’s Baby,” listeners can hear the shifts from their known bedroom-pop sound to the realms of folk, something the band masters so easily. The album’s final track “America’s Favorite Pastime” serves as a poignant end to a beautifully mastered sophomore album – it starts off somber and immediately feels swift. WIth an incredible baroque-style solo of violins and harmonica, it naturally fades to the ambient sounds from the beginning of the album, serving as a positive outlook to the future. Overall, the sophomore album has surpassed expectations, even if it’s different from its predecessor. Sleep well. have proven themselves to be great at blending genres, and it’s exciting to see how these songs will translate live. 

Off Record Blog had the amazing opportunity to help premiere the album to the world with a meaningful conversation with sleep well. ORB and sleep well. Dive deep into their dynamics and reflection on their musical evolution, as well as how they coordinate artistic direction and how each member takes on contribution.

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ORB: Before we get started, could each of you go through your role in the band?

Andres: I play guitar, do vocals, and do a little bit of rallying the troops in the background.

Marco: I primarily play the keys – a Roland Juno, and I do some backing vocals as well.

Dominic: I am the bass player and also provide a peculiar vibe.

Ricky: I am the other guitar player.

Mark: I play drums.

And there is a sixth member, correct? 

Andres: Yes, Sohrob. He is our art director, he comes up with all the visual language for the releases, posters, and our website. 

ORB: Do you have a favorite moment with your fellow band members in your journey as a band? 

Marco: When I think of a good memory, I think of one time during a practice when Mark was doing the floss and I took a video of him (band laughs). Sometimes the video resurfaces on my phone and I just have a really good day after watching it. That’s probably one of my favorite memories. 

Ricky: I think one of my favorite memories is when we were playing a show in Dallas and we had a band sleepover at a hotel. And I remember that night just kept getting weirder and weirder. 

Andres: Yeah, that was a weird night. We went to a Denny’s in an area we didn’t know well and our waiter was funny. He was giving us a bunch of sass about which anime some of the guys watch and only seemed to treat Ricky well when he gave his answer. There was also this other older guy at the Denny’s with whom I can only assume was his wife. He came up to our table and said “Look, I’m here all the time. Can we please order before you? Because they’re gonna take forever.” We said “yeah, go ahead.” We thought that was going to be the whole interaction but then he continued talking to us for about thirty minutes about being a photographer and doing some wildlife rescue. Then he went back to sit at his table. We still ended up getting served before them though. 

Andres: My favorite band memory was also a tour memory when we went to Dallas a few years before the Denny’s story. We played at Club Dada and after the set drove to Fort Worth to stay at a friend’s house. We had the whole tour crew there, which amounted to probably close to 12 people in this small two or three bedroom house. After pizza and some air mattresses being laid out we thought the night was winding down. But we ended up playing hide and seek – it was really funny. At some point, Mark was the only one yet to be found. 

Dominic: Apparently Mark had switched hiding spots to the van outside. It came to the point where we started looking out in the neighborhood because we were like “where the hell did he hide?”

Andres: Everybody there was super invested in finding Mark

Dominic: And it was 3 AM at this point, I think we were 10 minutes from filing a police report (band laughs). 

Dominic: My memory is of back in the day when Ricky and Mark and I went to college together. There was this little coffee shop on campus that did open mic nights and we decided to go play there. But it was like the smallest room on God’s green earth. The size of a shed and the stage was like, two feet deep. We walked in with all our gear, to this tiny place and it was like people reading poems about their trauma. Our set up overtook this open mic and I felt really bad about it for a long time. Now, it is a wholesome memory in my mind because it turned into an impromptu sleep well. show.

Andres: That was a bad memory for me because I had a milkshake that night and it took me out completely. And It was a vegan milkshake. I was betrayed, stabbed by my own sword. 

Mark: Back in summer of 2019, after meeting these guys in college we spent a weekend in a rural area by a river. That was one of the first times I started to grow closer with these guys. This was around the time we were writing our first album, too and that weekend was definitely a good time. 

ORB: It’s nice to get that insight of how each of you connected as a band in those moments outside of the general band time together. Another burning question: if you had 5 hours in an empty room to complete a song, what other band member would you bring and what equipment would you use? 

Ricky: I think Mark needs to be the person I bring and I’d definitely bring a drum kit to that room.

Mark: Funny that you say that because I was gonna say that you, Ricky would be who I would bring. I probably would bring the blast beats and then you would just put some shoegaze guitars over it and see what we come up with.

Dominic: I feel betrayed because I was gonna say that Mark was my person, too. Here is the thing, reasonably, I couldn’t write a song without Mark, it just wouldn’t happen. A song would not come to fruition without Mark. Mark and I would go in with a little synthesizer, a drum or drum machine, an acoustic and we’ll make it like a Grouplove-esque song. 

Marco: I’d probably bring Andres, just because that’s what we used to do back in the day. We would record in his room with a laptop and hold a microphone with a sock over his drums. Andres does a little drumming, so he could hold down a beat. I think we can get something done. Even though we wouldn’t know how to mix.

Andres: This is a really hard question. It’s like it’s being asked to pick between your children. I’m bringing Ricky. I’ve been listening to way too much shoe-gaze lately to not bring Ricky because he knows all those chord vocals and all that. I don’t know that I’d be very productive without my chord guy.

ORB: Congratulations on the release of It’s Getting Brighter! There are very interesting song titles on this album, especially  “I Took My Life and Divided it to My Own Liking.” Can one of you shed a little light on what the writing and creation process was like for this song? 

Andres: That song was originally called “Clementine” because the song was inspired by a poem that I now cannot recall. The poem has something to do with the idea of other halves. The song name was changed on the album, but we still internally call it by its original name. It rolls off the tongue better.

Dominic: It’s a lot easier to read on a setlist, too. 

Andres: The writing of the song was somewhere around two years ago when my girlfriend and I started dating. During that time, we would have these wine nights with friends as an excuse to see each other. It was easier to get to know each other in a group setting and we had a friend group that meshed well together. So a lot of the vibe of the song and the meat of the lyrics comes out of these wine nights. Our friend Riya (Quiet Light), who’s on the song, was present at least one or two of those wine nights. So her and I had this shared memory. The song was also born during this change in my life where I was starting to live in a completely different way after having been out of a long term relationship with another person. Riya and I leaned on each other socially and creatively since she was also experiencing a breakup at the time. Our shared expression of the circumstances worked out really well artistically. The song name comes from the chorus.  After ruling out “Clementine” as a name we decided to go with an absurdly long title because sometimes those can be cool.

Marco: This conversation brought back some memories, going back to the topic of favorite band memories – the creation of this song makes the list. We made it a point during the summer to meet at Andres’s and allot a couple of hours to focus on this album. I remember Andres had sent this song in the group chat, so I had been fiddling around with some sound to have something for this song. When I came into the practice, I started playing a piece, and at some point, I forgot who initiated it, but Mark began experimenting with this funky beat. He and Andres were bouncing ideas back and forth, like a game of ping pong. The time signature was 7/8, and I was lost, wondering what to play. They tried to guide me through an arpeggiated piano riff, but I could not do it for the life of me. I had to try to get it down for what felt like forever. Now, I can play it like the back of my hand, but I remember when we were writing it in that room, my mind was boggled. I didn’t even understand the time signature and at one point I was like “Let’s go back to 4/4.”

Dominic: This is definitely one of those songs where I love everybody’s part on the song. They are solid, like in that scene in Ratatouille when the colors behind Remy make sense of the strawberry and cheese combination. 

ORB: You haven’t released an album in almost four years. What musical lessons have you learned or improvements do you believe you’ve gained during that period of between the release of your first album, Pictures of Dogs to Its Getting Brighter?

Andres: I feel like we’ve all definitely become more skilled in our respective instruments. And we all have a diverse music taste that we’ve been able to pull from and bring that together in a way that fits with everybody else’s. For example, Mark has really passionate drum sections in this album that stem from a black metal sort of genre.

I think that a lot of what being an artist is – this isn’t an original thought – I think I heard somebody maybe Ezra Klein say how you have this taste in you. Our job as artists is to move from tastemaker to executor of that taste. It really takes years to get to that point to where you’re making something that reflects your taste. That was something that I definitely struggled with for a really long time. It wasn’t until this album where I feel that our tastes became one with our abilities. Also we learned how to be more editorial. When we were younger, we would get so excited about having had the time to get in a room together to write something that no matter what we had written, we would put it out. Now we’ve dawned a little bit more wisdom with our approach to being editorial with what we decide to put out. That’s something that I’m proud of as a group. It takes a lot not to just jump on every song that you write.

Dominic: To piggyback off this point, the first LP we put out was only three days of writing, and this one was almost three years. The discipline and growth that comes with just maturing is understanding that what you put out, it’s going to be out there for a long time. And it sits with you that it doesn’t necessarily grow with you. Pictures of Dogs is an amazing experience and speaking for myself at least, I wouldn’t change anything about it because it is a moment in our band yearbook. This album is another moment, too. 

Andres: I also think that there’s something about what Dominic said about having written it in three days. The songs that you hear on the Pictures of Dogs are the only ones we wrote, so there was no choosing specific songs over others. For this album, I demoed a lot of songs on just my acoustic guitar with vocals. This was to give the guys space to write over them. Then we had a big band meeting where we all sat down and listened to what must have been like 25 demos. We boiled it down to 12 songs and over the next year or so, we did even more chopping and substituted some songs in and out of the list. Like Dominic said there was a certain amount of discipline required in committing that much time to bringing the track list to its final form. 

Mark: And I find it kind of interesting how my drumming is influenced. I have this strange fascination with black metal, and a lot of drumming influence from that genre reflects in the way I approach my drums. It’s always weird to me because the type of music we play is different, but somehow it works, you know? As Andres mentioned earlier, it reflects the diverse tastes we each bring to the table. Every one of us has a unique set of inspirations, with a little bit of overlap. The way it comes together, it makes our sound interesting and it’s a truly unique process each time.

Marco: As far as growing from our Pictures of Dogs era, the biggest thing has been the number of shows we’ve played since its release. We had a lot of shows right after we released the album with a break in 2020. And when we came back, that was really where there was a noticeable change in our skillset. And also that change in mindset and vision for the synthesis of the new album and Andres bringing these demos to us with more intention for a certain sound. For myself, I think especially after the pandemic and seeing so many skilled musicians. In Austin I grew up playing the piano since I was a little kid, but  I never planned to do it professionally. But it was really educational to see other musicians whose sound I liked, how they use their instrument in the context of live music and recording. That shifted my dynamic with my instrument and how I approached choosing what to play. It has been a journey and it’s something I noticed for all of us, too. The more we play together, the more fluid our decisions are. And that when we ‘dial in’ where we can tell a song is in our pocket. It has definitely taken time and not just from our own practice and performances, but also with seeing other musicians. There’s an abundance of talent in Austin and San Antonio and  I think that’s also a big contributor to our growth. 

Andres: The last thing I’ll say is that the producers we had on the album definitely kicked us into a better frenzy of being much more selective and more intentional with what we’re doing with our instruments. We had John behind the rack engineering the album and we had Anthony producing in the studio, so it was definitely very helpful for us to have that outside perspective on what sounds good and what doesn’t sound good.

Listen to It’s Getting Brighter, the sophomore album by local band sleep well. on all digital streaming platforms.

Follow sleep well. on socials: Spotify | YouTube | Instagram | Twitter / X

(NOTE: ALL OF OFF RECORD BLOG INTERVIEWS ARE MINIMALLY EDITED FOR LENGTH | Review written by Keylee Paz & Interview conducted by Emily Martinez)