Angelsaur has welcomed its second album, titled “The Girls Are Stressed.” (Joseph Hunt / Angelsaur)
Vocalist and bassist Logan McQuade was a transfer student and popular music performance major and met then jazz studies major Jonah Feingold doing house shows around South Central before they both supported King Princess’s first tour and met Angelsaur’s frequent drummer, Antoine Fadavi.
The two former Thornton School of Music students would come together to make their own sound as the Los Angeles-based independent rock group Angelsaur.
The group entered its solo journey with the release of its debut album in 2023, “Children Disguised as Adults,” the first of several creative collaborations with seasoned producer and mixer Andy Baldwin, though the band still had a ways to go.
Angelsaur members have pushed themselves into a new direction with their fresh album, “The Girls Are Stressed.” A small conceptual universe unto itself thanks to its album cover painted by artist Danielle Close, the album is a carefully mixed and lushly performed tour through various genres from rock to shoegaze, featuring small illustrations on the cover of each song as a moment at a dinner party.
“We really wanted to build the visual side of the record,” McQuade said. “We felt it was very beautiful, very flowery and kind of felt like an aftermath of chaotic dinners.”
Such a detail-oriented approach presented its own complications for Angelsaur as the band dove headfirst into the ambitious and all-encompassing world of “The Girls Are Stressed.” Feingold particularly found avoiding the pursuit of perfection difficult as “it doesn’t always make things better.”
“Just knowing when anything is done ever, that’s fucking hard, always,” Feingold said. “When we thought we were done at the end for a while with mixes, we definitely went back so many times and were like ‘we’re not done.'”
McQuade said that, in the process of making the album, it was all hands on deck for everyone involved when it came to mixing, writing and producing, trying to find each song’s individual endpoint.
“All the songs we had [were] at various stages of completion and we were, not stuck, but we were like ‘these are sick and we’re trying to finish them and we’re not really finishing them,'” McQuade said. “So we took all our demos to [Baldwin]. He’s like this crazy old wizard Australian man and he’s an amazing producer.”
Baldwin said he was ready to roll up his sleeves and bring his wisdom to bring Angelsaur’s sound to life, regardless of how the album started.
“What I really love [about Angelsaur] is that they’re just ‘yes people’ and they’re always open to get really excited about things and try things and be in the moment,” Baldwin said. “It’s such a pleasure as a producer and an engineer … they’re always open to pushing it into a new direction, pushing it further.”
Following the natural thread of Baldwin’s collaboration with Angelsaur led the album into a new sonic space that brought the polish of the demos to an entirely new level.
“[Producing with Angelsaur] was an absolute joy. … I’m a string player as well, so I ended up doing a lot of strings, and that kind of took it into a slightly different space that we were all really digging,” Baldwin said. “I ended up getting in on a pretty deep level within the songs as well, so that was really rewarding.”
The depth of the album extended beyond the record’s sonic attitude. McQuade said he found that the album’s release brought new meaning to the lyrics in retrospect due to changes within his personal life. McQuade had written the album in the last year of a nearly eight-year relationship, changing his perspective on the album once it was released post-break up.
“At the time I was writing [the album], I was like, ‘Oh, these are all love songs,'” McQuade said. “Then we broke up, and the album came out, so listening back and analyzing the lyrics and doing interviews about [the songs] and everything, and really having to get back at the mindset that I was in when writing them, I realized how dependent I was.”
An album can become something more once released because it no longer belongs to those building the record from the ground up; it now belongs to those who listen to the songs and make them their own, while writers like McQuade can only watch what the album becomes in the hands of listeners.
“When we listen to the album, we’re like ‘Okay, these are going to be singles’ because we think these are what people will latch onto the most,” McQuade said. “A lot of the time, it’s not what you think it is.”
With the release of “The Girls Are Stressed”, McQuade said he feels validated as both a writer and a person as the album seeps honesty and reflects his “whole heart.” Angelsaur members have come out on the other side of the album stronger and more dedicated to their craft, having embraced whatever they had to do to make the album as good as possible.
