SYLVAN ESSO
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At the beginning of 2022, Sylvan Esso packed up and headed west. Cramming the contents of a recording
studio into their Prius, Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath drove from their home in Durham, North Carolina
to Los Angeles, where they set up a makeshift studio in a small rental house on the east side and did
something that surprised them: they wrote a song. And then another. “Even if we weren’t feeling good, we
would just sit down and try to make something,” Meath says. “Pretty much every day that we did that, we
got a song that we liked.”
Some bands can create entire albums on short-term writing jags, but until now, Meath says, Sylvan Esso
was not one of them. But that speed— and the resulting looseness and live-wire energy in their songs— is
one of many things that feels like brand-new territory in No Rules Sandy, their fourth studio album, out
August 12, 2022. Describing their first three albums as a trilogy that is now complete, Meath and Sanborn
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since their landmark WITH concert— with a live band of ten— in 2019. 2021 marked the launch
of their music label, Psychic Hotline, and in 2022 both Meath and Sanborn will launch projects
with other collaborators. Meath’s The A’s, a new band with her Mountain Main partner Alexandra
Sauser-Monnig, will release an album on July 15, while Sanborn’s Made of Oak project will
release an EP collaboration with GRRL on September 2. The collaborations carry through to No
Rules Sandy as well; TJ Maiani contributes his persistent drums to “Your Reality” and “Alarm,”
while Sam Gendel’s saxophone lends a mysterious, unworldly quality to “How Did You Know”
and album closer “Coming Back to You,” a stripped down and haunting track that’s unlike any
Sylvan Esso song that has come before it.
As all these new chapters unfold and the Sylvan Esso umbrella expands, Sanborn and Meath
continue to run their recording studio Betty’s in the woods outside Durham and think constantly
about what’s next— without overthinking it too much.
“Our whole career up until now, I feel like everything’s been really considered, and we’ve maybe
overthought a lot of the music,” Sanborn says. “I think that might be the ultimate effect of like the
last record and the pandemic— feeling like, fuck that, I know what I want. And it’s now, or never.
So let’s get out there and do it.”
By Katey Rich, Awards and Audio Editor at Vanity Fair
