How Parquet Courts Learnt That They Have To Be Vulnerable

From the moment they released their debut album American Specialities back in 2011 New York City four-piece Parquet Courts have been resolutely marching to the beat of their own drum, ignoring convention and releasing a slew of garage-tinged indie-rock at an unrelenting pace seemingly because they could.

For fifth studio album Human Performance, however, they took their time during the recording process — utilising three studios in the quest for the perfect creative environment — and the result is a meticulously crafted album that foregoes pace and propulsion in favour of refinement.

"Probably a year was spent making the record from inception to all the different recording sessions that we did," recalls co-frontman Andrew Savage. "We spent a lot of time touring right before we started working on it, and then we'd come together in the studio after that and all share what we'd come up with on our own.

"That's the theme to me, but we don't really write records with themes in mind."

"It started off with two sessions in Western Massachusetts with our buddy Justin Pizzoferrato who recorded everything at his place Sonelab, and we started reworking stuff and ended up deciding that we had some good stuff but we weren't entirely satisfied to call it a record. So that culminated in us going first to [Wilco's] The Loft in Chicago — two songs came out of that — and then to Dreamland, which is upstate about three hours away from [New York City] and doing the bulk of it there while we stayed for three weeks and lived and worked and basically just set up the perfect environment for making the record Human Performance — it was very encouraging, very respectful for anyone who wanted to go off on tangents. There were no taboos really, and we kinda allowed one another to bring all our ideas to the table."

Savage explains that while lyrical conceits tie certain tracks together it's certainly not a conceptual work.

"It wouldn't be beyond reason to find [a theme] in there — especially someone who's outside the band and therefore not as intimate with the source of a lot of the material — but for me the theme is just this moment in time that we spent working on it," he offers. "That's the theme to me, but we don't really write records with themes in mind."

But it's certainly an exceedingly personal and introspective batch of songs.

"Yeah it is that," Savage concurs. "I don't know if it's any more personal because I think all Parquet Courts stuff is pretty intensely personal, but maybe a little more vulnerable and more intimate perhaps."

Savage-penned title track Human Performance — seemingly dealing with the fallout of a painful breakup — is particularly devastating.

"Yeah, it was a devastating one to write to be honest," Savage reflects. "It's strange putting yourself out there like that. Being vulnerable in public — whether live on stage or just putting your music out into the public arena is… different. I dunno, if there's a lesson to be learnt from every record then I think that might be the one on this one for me, just how to do that. Not how to do it, but actually just that at a certain point you have to do it."