Indie synth-pop act Sylvan Esso is a duo in the truest sense. Amelia Meath, 38, and Nick Sanborn, 43, write, record and play live as a two-piece. Together, they run a record label, Psychic Hotline, in their Durham, North Carolina, home base. And they’ve been married for a decade.
While they’ve brought in outside collaborators over the band’s 14-year history, typically, it’s just the two of them. But for the new album “Ow ∞” (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), they invited friends to help shape the recording process. And they’re touring with a full band, stopping at the 9:30 Club for shows Monday and Tuesday.
“The way that we designed this show was to reintegrate risk into playing,” Meath says of the new tour, an ethos that came from the album’s recording sessions. “It used to feel scary to have someone come into the studio and play them new things.”
“I was always the one resisting,” Sanborn says. “We’d write something and we knew there was something there, but we’re trying to find it. Bringing a friend in, being like, ‘What do you hear?’ and seeing them hear it and hearing the way that they filter that through themselves gave us both a lot of more clarity on what we wanted and what we needed.”
The result is an album that bursts with ideas and experimentation. Sylvan Esso’s glitchy pop has always been driven by the balance between Meath, a folk singer with a distinctive, percussive singing style, and Sanborn, who acts as producer and arranger, manipulating her voice, guitars, synths and drum machines. Now there’s an extra element: risk. There are tossed-off, lo-fi tracks (“Entertainment & Coca-Cola”); tight pop songs (“Flood Season”); propulsive rockers (“Hot Slob,” “Sledge”); vocal dirges (“Ribbon”); and hypnotic, hooky synth jams (“Back Again”).
They started work on “Ow ∞,” their fifth record and first released on their own label, in 2022. “Almost every song on this record happened really fast,” Meath says. But the arrangements took much longer. So they brought in friends — Daniel Aged (a Frank Ocean collaborator), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood), Jake Luppen (Hippo Campus), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak) and more — to improvise and listen to their works in progress.
“It was a lot of generating piles of music, getting people to come in and then remembering what all we had in various hard drives and pasting them on top of each other,” Meath says.
“It was very scrapbook-y,” Sanborn adds.
You can hear that process on the lush folk song “On & On,” which slowly adds layers as it builds. “That was a piece of a jam from a Daniel Aged/TJ session that I had been obsessed with, and I would keep bringing it up anytime people would come in,” Sanborn says. “One day, when Jenn Wasner and Jake Luppen were with us, I played pieces of that, and Jake, right away, came up with that guitar part. We just needed a different person to hear it, and then that’s the pre-chorus, and Amelia came up with this vocal. There were all these folding, iterating types of things.”
Touring with a band has similarly opened up what Sylvan Esso can do live. Sanborn has always been like a mad scientist onstage — part conductor, part DJ, part guitarist — running the band’s electronic sounds through modular synths. Now, he has an elaborate system that routes the live musicians onstage through his effects and gear.
“It’s like an analog version of the digital thing we were doing,” Sanborn says. “I’ve got this big console onstage and then my modular [synth] and all these little drum machines. Now, I can take like the drummer and put him through like the resonator in the modular. Or I can take Jenn’s backup vocal and punch it. I’m slowly doing this big effects mix. It feels like finger painting for the whole set.”
On “Right to Left,” Meath quotes the “Hokey Pokey,” singing, “This is what it’s all about / To be opened and opened and opened again / To do the hokey pokey with your beautiful friends.”
“It’s a different mirror of so many of the songs,” Meath says. “We don’t know why we’re here. It’s so hard to continue existing. But also, there is much joy to be had.”
Monday and Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. $64.85-$138.40.
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