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Small Pond didn't set out to make a concept record - they set out to survive the space between two recording sessions, four hundred miles from home, in a car named Vicki Jean Volvo. What came out the other side is Soft Burn, the New England indie rock band's sophomore album and the sound of four people who've stopped trying to agree on what kind of band they are.
Formed on the New Hampshire seacoast and now rooted in Portland, Maine, Small Pond built their name the way most great regional bands do: three EPs, a live record, relentless local shows, and a songwriting voice courtesy of singer Molly McDevitt - sharp enough to turn discomfort into something you want to sing along to. Their 2022 debut, Let It Fall Like It Should, established the blueprint: folk-honest lyrics braced against modern indie rock's heavier edges. Soft Burn, out October 21, is where that blueprint gets torn up.
The album was tracked over two sessions, one in September, one the following February, with producer Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina. The same room behind records from Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Snail Mail, Waxahatchee, and Indigo De Souza. Farrar, the band says, played a huge role in shaping the record's sound - letting them find their own answers while gently steering them away from simply copying their influences. Some songs date back to McDevitt's solo EP; others were written in the gaps between sessions. There was no unifying theme going in, just an instinct to chase a sound across genres, from pop-leaning opener Everything's Quiet, to the unexpected wall of sound of Holy and swagger of Warm Mud, before the record unfolds its masterfully sequenced back half. It's a record shaped less by a single vision than by four people who, as the band puts it, don't listen to the same music or write the same way - and whatever comes out of a room together ends up being unmistakably Small Pond.
Lead single "Silver Coin" sets the tone: a song McDevitt describes as watching a relationship from the outside, catching yourself not showing up the way you want to for the people who matter, and sitting in that discomfort instead of looking away. It's the through-line of Soft Burn. Not a concept, but a mood: a band comfortable enough with each other to let the ugly parts show.
Small Pond will bring the new material on the road this fall, including stops in Boston, NYC, Amherst, Philadelphia, DC, Portland and Belfast's All Roads Music Festival, days before Soft Burn drops. After four years and one very long drive, they're arriving with a record that finally sounds like all of them at once.