Still House Plants

If i don’t make it, i love u

Anyone with a green thumb will know that the name “Still House Plants” is a contradiction: plants are not still. They move slowly, imperceptibly, in response to the sun. It’s fitting because the music made from this Glasgow-formed, London-based trio often does not move in the traditional sense. Traditional rock sounds are broken out into fragments and then seemingly looped in a way that resembles—get this—UK garage, but with the dance component removed. This confounds a lot of listeners expecting their rock to at least roll a little or that rock songs should “go somewhere.” House Plants are not still, but the music of Still House Plants strangely can be!

Of course, their name—which they explained to Tone Glow—isn’t just an allusion to the house plants that decorated their first-ever live performance, but also a reference to the Still House Group arts organization in New York, while also being a three-word name akin to slowcore’s Red House Painters. UK bass and slowcore are just some of the genres the trio have deconstructed. Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s androgynous rasp come from the long lineage of R&B (albeit by way of dance music samples) while Finlay Clark’s electric guitar chords bring in the tone colour of midwest emo and—with no bassist—David Kennedy prods the empty space with free jazz drumming. Add to all of this the cold detachment of no wave + the pummel of industrial + the flat organizational hierarchy of krautrock, and you arrive at Still House Plants. Simon Reynolds once coined the term “record collector rock” that’s been used to disparage bands that aimed for blatant nostalgia by sounding like previous sources, but by casting their nets this wide, they occupy that tantalizing space between these genres: they are all of these things and also none of these things.

Only three instruments and three albums, they have not yet had the chance to really sonically evolve, and yet, 2024’s If I don’t make it, i love u—the title hinting at that midwest emo influence—feels like a major step forward. Even the title belies a slight change: there’s an outward focus now (“i love u”) compared to the self-referential and insular titles of their previous two albums, Long Play (in reference to the 2018 album being their first LP after graduating from making tapes on GLARC) and Fast Edit (in reference to their collage-like approach).

Long Play’s songs are meandering and long when they’re not super-short and annoying, and the appearance of other instruments—piano and violin—in the midsection suggest a band not fully committed to the drum-guitar-vocal minimalistic approach that would serve them so well later on. Not helping is that Hickie-Kallenbach sticks to the lower register, and constantly weaves in and out of focus in a repetitive way. By contrast, the songs on Fast Edit are much tighter, but I was not won over when I first heard the album during COVID lockdown: “Shy Song” tries for bedroom intimacy but comes up, well, shy; “Do”’s two-note guitar alarm is bound to annoy.

All this to say, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like If I don’t make it, i love u, but I think it’s an even bigger leap. The production is less dry, the sound is cleaner and fuller; gone are the inconsequential miniatures that dotted their previous two albums. They’re also growing more and more confident with every release. Hickie-Kallenbach once said that she had to do her vocals in a separate room out of shyness but now she’s in total command. Where once the words she sang seemed unimportant, they they arrive crystal clear throughout If I don’t make it, i love u. Meanwhile, Kennedy told Quietus that it wasn’t until their third album that he came to terms with playing the drums. The confidence shows in the songs, which are sculpted more and more to be like that—songs—instead of jams or open-ended questions.

It’s Hickie-Kallenbach’s vocals that really push this group over the edge for me. Replace her, and they might sound like a bassless midwest emo group; remove her, and they’d be closer to Moin, also from London, with a very similar cut-and-paste approach from many of the same genres that relied on spoken word samples and features in lieu of a vocalist. Hickie-Kallenbach’s voice is strong, bassy and brassy—occasionally like a trumpet—but also, as she sings on “no sleep deep risk,” deeply sensitive. Without her, the group’s link to neo-soul and UK electronic dance forms would be severed. In that same interview with Quietus, she mentioned how her vocals are informed by dance music, “Growing up listening to loads of house and garage and grime with my older brothers, things that are looped and weird timewise, floaty and strange, that influences the way I sing, find weird patterns and self-sample.” The lyrics often don’t arrive fully fleshed-out but instead, we get to watch her work them out in real time. The results are shamanic, sometimes reminiscent of the great Damo Suzuki, where she manages to shape meaning out of meaningless while the rest of the band shapes form out of formlessness, a comparison that’s aided by the fact that sometimes correct English grammar isn’t bothered with (“I can get to more more faster”).

“I look up, I stood up, I hood up,” she swirls and varies in the introduction of “M M M,” the powerhouse album opener and lead single, before cutting to the chase, “I wish I was called Makita / Like, I just want my friends to get me.” But what adds to the power is that the way she holds the word “called” as if it were the final word of the line, to the point that I was sure she was singing “I wish I was cool” until I bothered to look up the lyrics. But her vocals are no more the focal point than are the alternatively clanging and surging guitar chords of Finlay Clark, while drummer David Kennedy does what so many great drummers do: provide pavement for the solid footing of their bandmembers, while also ready to pull the blanket out and become ocean. (The line “I wish I was called Makita” links to the album closer where she sings “Call me by whichever angel name you’ve got.”) What’s more, Finlay Clark’s guitar has never been so potent as on this album: the spidery harmonics on “More Boy,” the weighty noise in the middle of “Silver grit passes thru my teeth” (the mid-album climax) and his solo introduction to “More More Faster” help each of these songs rank among, not just the best things SHP have ever done, but the best rock songs of the year.

Long Play - C+
Fast Edit - B
If I don't make it, i love u - A-