O'Neill and Mascarenas chalk up the EP's sonic success to City Ghost's experience at Archive Recordings, the new studio recently opened by Mascarenas' longtime friend Wes Johnson. It was also the first song I played for Matt when we met-but with him producing it and the guys playing behind me, it's taken on a different emotional life. "My mental state was at its lowest point when I started writing it, and it was the last song I recorded alone in L.A. "That's an important one for me," O'Neill says. Bones are exhumed on "Back to the Start," while the cracks in O'Neill's voice match the cracks in the dissipated relationship outlined on "Carnival."īut it's When the Lights Go Out's closer, "Silver to Gold," that hits the hardest. On "States," O'Neill sings of gardens that won't grow on "Caves," she laments the heavy summer heat of a former lover's apartment. O'Neill combines the searing narrative concision of Hop Along's Frances Quinlan with an emotive, often-mournful voice a la Erika Wennerstrom of Heartless Bastards. The feeling was mutual: Within a few months of officially forming in May 2018, City Ghost entered the newly-christened studio at Archive Recordings to lay down their debut EP, When the Lights Go Out. "In our past bands, Chase, Ken and I figured out the singing as we went along, but Sadie's got such a killer voice that we wanted to work around it and support her as much as possible." "From the start, we had to pay attention to quieting things down to leave plenty of space for Sadie to sing," Mascarenas says. "He randomly sent me a track that he had produced, though, and I sent him back something I wrote over it, and we were both like, 'Damn, this is cool.'"Īfter pursuing so many different strains of heavy music, Mascarenas heard something unique in O'Neill's choir-trained voice, as well, quickly recruiting longtime friends Chase Griffis, 31, and Ken Vallejos, 30, to form City Ghost. "At first I wasn't sure if we had similar enough styles to form a project," O'Neill says. Exchanging music after a random introduction, O'Neill was impressed by Mascarenas' deep repertoire of post-hardcore and alternative rock material. Then O'Neill met 31-year-old Matt Mascarenas, who currently plays with local emo rock favorites Sunsleeper and helmed past projects like Westing and Heartless Breakers. Armed with an electric guitar handed down from her dad and a notebook full of songs she'd started writing while performing as a solo artist, the 27-year-old just didn't know how that collaboration would come about. When Sadie O'Neill moved to Salt Lake City from Los Angeles in October 2017, she knew she wanted to start a band. Left to right: Ken Vallejos, Matt Mascarenas, Sadie O’Neill and Chase Griffis of City Ghost.
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