Seattle’s Chastity Belt are back with Live Laugh Love, their first album in five years and first for Suicide Squeeze after three on Hardly Art. “We’ve been playing music with each other for over a decade,” says singer-guitarist Julia Shapiro, “so it really does feel like we’re all fluent in the same language, and a lot of it just happens naturally.” These four really know how to build a languid groove, finding melancholic beauty in a simple chord progression, and with some understated guitar heroics and carefully crafted atmospherics, ride it into the sunset. You can listen below.
For more on the album, Shapiro, Lydia Lund, Annie Truscott, and Gretchen Grimm were nice enough to give us a track-by-track guide to Live Laugh Love, taking us through musical and lyrical inspirations of all 11 songs. Read that below.
CHASTITY BELT’S TRACK-BY-TRACK GUIDE TO ‘LIVE LAUGH LOVE’
1. Hollow
A classic Chazzy-style tune about feeling lost and stuck, waiting for something to change without necessarily taking action. The older I get, the more I realize that I might just always feel this way, and it’s more about sitting with the feeling and accepting it, rather than trying to fight it. I’m still here, doing my thing, whatever that is. I remember first jamming on this song together when we were all in Joshua Tree during the pandemic… maybe spring 2021? – Julia
2. Funny
I was trying to write a medieval inspired tune when I came up with the chords for Funny. I remember sitting out on my Dad’s back terrace in the summer of 2017 fiddling with the tuning on my guitar. I’d accidentally started playing Joni Mitchell’s “Tin Angel” and somehow that morphed into “Funny.” I can’t help but laugh when we play the end of the song, it feels so predictable and oddly heroic, like we’re riding our steeds back to camp after procuring the holy grail. Ridiculous. In the same summer, I had this strange encounter with a woman named Melody who I met during a dance-therapy seminar – the lyrics are about that. -Lydia
3. Clumsy
I’m always striving to write songs like Elliott Smith, and I feel like I came close with this one. That descending verse riff just reminds me a lot of his style. I started playing it without thinking, and then I realized it sounded even cooler if I tuned the B string down to an A, so it would kind of ring out in the background. I’d forgotten I did that when I went to figure out a chorus and started playing chords, and the tuned-down B string changed the way all the chords sounded, but it still worked. I’m no music theory nerd, so I can’t tell you exactly what is going on, but I know I like it.
Elliott Smith also has a lot of slightly mean songs, and I feel like this one fits into that category nicely – especially the line “I don’t want to be a bitch, but I think you need to grow up” – Julia
4. It’s Cool
This song just started happening one day when we were rehearsing for tour. That intro guitar line was something I started playing subconsciously, probably while in the midst of chatting, and then it turned into a song. I suppose it’s about the cycle of being perpetually unsatisfied: feeling numb, then finally experiencing something that reminds you you’re alive, but it’s only fleeting, and before long you’re back to being numb again, longing for that same feeling. – Julia
5. Kool-Aid
I wrote this song in the summer of 2021, during a pretty transitional time for me. I had just ended a 5-year job and had a lot of free time to think about all the things I wanted to change about myself before starting grad school in the fall. One day I was scrolling through my notes app and found a note that said “it’s not hard all day, just sometimes”, which ended up inspiring the original chorus of this song. I was honestly pretty depressed when I wrote this song and felt a lot of fear and shame around some patterns I kept repeating. – Annie
6. Chemtrails
This song started off as a jam when we were rehearsing for an upcoming tour. I started playing that initial lead guitar part without thinking, and the rest came together pretty naturally after that. Gretchen’s drums along with Annie’s bass really drive the song – the drums remind me a bit of Protomartyr (love those boys!), and Lydia’s lead guitar line in the chorus is very rock n roll. The lyrics are about not being able to let go of things and retracing memories in your head. – Julia
7. Blue
This song started as a joke, but we all realized it was pretty catchy, so we figured we should record it. We were just jamming at Lydia’s family cabin on the Puget Sound and I was singing some really funny cliche shit, I wish I could remember what it was exactly. For the chorus I just kept singing “out of the blue,” and when I ended up writing real lyrics for the verse and the outro, I couldn’t change that chorus part to anything else. I tried, but nothing else fit. I guess the words just came OUT OF THE BLUE. I still think the song is kind of dumb, but I appreciate it. The first half of it sounds like old Chastity Belt to me, and the second half has a more Elliott Smith vibe, I think. – Julia
8. Tethered
This song came out of a jam together and was a joke song for a while. Julia would wail, “I’m tied, to a teeeaaaatthherrrrr,” in some parts and I would bellow “She won’t letttt me goooooo!” I think there were maybe some other lyrics that conveyed her holding me captive in a deep dark forest or something? Or maybe both of us were captives? Who knows. Anyway we left it for years but I always liked it and wanted to record it, and somehow everyone finally came around to playing it again during our last recording sesh. We ended up having a lot of fun with it. Julia convinced us to make that last chorus/jam part really long which ended up being great cause we got to layer in some fun stuff in there. If you listen carefully you can hear her repeating in a creepy voice, “I gotcha I gotcha I gotcha…”… an ode to the original form of the song. We also put some completely random like, wailing and off harmonies in the mix. Plus I got a little experimental and piled up some percussion instruments on the drums and used a whip to knock them around haha. Good times! Our engineer Samur did an amazing job weaving everything together.
At the time I was writing the lyrics I was reading The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante. It’s about a teen that’s kind of finding her place amongst her parents and the picture of the world that they’ve painted for her, and an estranged aunt and the new ideas she’s learning from her. It brought up feelings/ideas for me that fit the theme of the song, so I drew inspiration from that and kept the title as is. – Gretchen
9. I-90 Bridge
I started writing this song in a greenroom in Oklahoma City when we were on tour with Kurt Vile a couple of years ago. When I wrote the chords and melody, the song felt like a classic chastity belt song which deserved classic chastity belt lyrics addressing growing pains and self reflection. I-90 Bridge’ is the fictionalized account of real times in Seattle. -Lydia
10. Laugh
I wrote this song during the summer of 2021 when I was still technically living in LA, but I spent the whole summer in Seattle living at a punk house (Spruce) with my friends. It was a really special summer, and I could feel that while it was happening. I’d been feeling pretty lonely in LA, and it had been a long year and a half of Covid, so it felt like this much needed time to be around old friends. The song is about that time, and being nostalgic for it while it was still happening, which is something I tend to do. – Julia
11. Like That
This song is about my friend Aaron who passed away at the end of 2019 while we were on tour. I’d been playing these chords a bit on that tour, but didn’t have any lyrics yet, so I started sort of writing some stuff in my head, and after the tour I fleshed it out a bit more. A few years later, we were nearing the end of our recording session (at Seahorse Sound Studios in LA,) and we didn’t have anything left to work on, so I was like, “oh yeah, I guess I have this one song,” and then I started playing it and everyone wrote their parts right there on the spot. Sometimes songs just magically come together for us like that. I love the way it turned out, I think everyone’s parts fit together so beautifully. It’s a sad one. – Julia
—
Chastity Belt start their North American tour next week and hit Brooklyn at Warsaw on May 7 with Peel Dream Magazine. All dates are listed below.
Chastity Belt – 2024 Tour Dates
April 4 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall #
April 5 – Dallas, TX @ Deep Ellum Arts #
April 6 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk #
April 8 – Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf #
April 9 – Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole #
April 10 – San Diego, CA @ Quartyard #
April 11 – Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram
April 13 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent #
April 16 – Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom #
April 17 – Vancouver, BC @ Fox Theater # (sold out)
April 18 – Seattle, WA @ Crocodile #
April 19 – Olympia, WA @ Capital Theater #
May 3 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy *
May 4 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat *
May 5 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church *
May 7 – Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw *
May 8 – Boston, MA @ The Sinclair *
May 9 – Albany, NY @ Lark Hall *
May 10 – Toronto, ON @ The Great Hall *
May 11 – Detroit, MI @ El Club *
May 12 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall *
May 29 – Vienna, AT @ Arena ^
May 30 – Leipzig, DE @ Conne Island ^
May 31 – Berlin, DE @ Frannz ^
June 1 – Neustrelitz, DE @ Immergut Festival
June 3 – Cologne, DE @ Bumann & Sohn ^
June 4 – Luxembourg, LUX @ Rotondes ^
June 5 – Paris, FR @ La Flèche D’Or ^
June 6 – Brussels, BE @ Botanique
June 7 – Hilvarenbeek, NL @ Best Kept Secret Festival
June 8 – Brighton, UK @ The Hope & Ruin ^
June 9 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club ^
June 11 – Glasgow, UK @ Room 2 ^
June 12 – Manchester, UK @ Deaf Institute ^
June 13 – Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew ^
June 14 – London, UK @ Village Underground ^
* = w/ Charlotte Cornfield
# = w/ Peel Dream Magazine
^ = w/ Meagre Martin