Sometimes a band and a label just seem made for each other, a marriage made in musical heaven, as is the case with Bay Area-natives Chime School and Slumberland Records. The project of San Francisco-native Andy Pastalaniec, Chime School marked themselves out as the latest purveyors of timeless Indie-Pop on the West Coast music scene with the self-titled debut back in 2021. For his next move, Andy decided to explore a slightly different tone to his debut, leaning into the atmosphere of his home studio on the foggy southern edge of San Francisco. The result is the second Chime School record, The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel. Out next month it’s a moodier, more patient offering than their debut exploring themes of the destructive qualities of gentrification and the “beloved shuttered bars and theatres”, that are left in its wake. Ahead of the release, the band are premiering the video for the record’s stunning centrepiece, Wandering Song.

Describing the inspiration behind the song, Andy suggests Wandering Song, “is about the energy we expend distracting ourselves from the crises unfolding around the world; how we tend to turn inwards when our only chance to survive them is through collective organizing”. It’s an idea he found mirrored in a major influence of his, when he read Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, “in her chapter about social media she talks about our ‘digital golems,’ and articulates some of what I was trying to get at far better than I could”. Throughout, Andy seems to muse on the distance that exists between intent and action, and the ease in doing nothing, noting with resignation how, “nothing’s wrong when you’re moving too slow”.

If the lyrics were focused on there here and now, the musical influence was altogether more nostalgic, “the inspiration was ‘what if East Village had written (Teenage Fanclub’s) ‘Sparky’s Dream,’ and there’s some musical nods to the former and rhythmic nods to the latter throughout”. Resplendent with delightfully layered guitars and airy but distinctly driving drum rhythms, it seems to owe as much to bands like The Loft and Talulah Gosh who spearheaded the UK indie scene of the 1980s, as it does to modern contemporaries such as Flowers or early The Goon Sax. It should come as no surprise that another Slumberland Records release brings about another slice of indie-pop brilliance, and with The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel, both band and label might just be hitting their highest peaks to date.

The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel is out August 23rd via Slumberland Records. For more information on Chime School visit https://linktr.ee/chimeschool.