Alan Sparhawk spirals through a series of escalating horrors as he offers a summary of his mindset over the past five years: “Holy crap, this guy’s going to be our president. Oh crap, he’s our president. Wow, things have been horrible for a long time, and it’s getting worse. What, we’re sick? We’re all going to die now?” Eventually, the Low singer and guitarist shifts from a cartoonish hysteria into a gruff acceptance as he makes a broader point about American life in 2021 as well as his band’s combustible new album, HEY WHAT. “Look at where we are,” he says, zooming to the present tense. “We’re still looking in each other’s eyes and going, What the hell?”
Along with his bandmate and wife, Mimi Parker, Sparhawk has long found inspiration in this type of unlikely perseverance. Nearly three decades into their career, and on their 13th album, Low are making their strangest, strongest, and most fearless music to date. On HEY WHAT, the duo is once again joined by producer BJ Burton, known for his work with Bon Iver and Charli XCX, who helped them explore abrasive digital effects and alien vocal manipulation on 2018’s Double Negative. The new album presents these abstract textures with even more intensity, as Sparhawk and Parker’s gorgeous harmonies pierce through a vertiginous landscape of glitches and static that may make you wonder if your speakers are imploding while you listen.
“Right away, we noticed the songs seemed to be just vocals, with everything else spinning around them,” Sparhawk explains. “Until it proved us wrong, we were going to let the vocals be the anchor of the songs, front and center.” Often, the tension comes from the ways the production seems to actively destroy their voices, the duo’s bright melodies crumbling beneath the weight of the music. “The sky’s the limit for things you can smash apart,” Sparhawk says of this deconstructive approach.
When Low first emerged in the early 1990s, their music was threadbare and frayed in comparison to the dominant grunge of the era: It was categorized as “slowcore” because of their tendency to fixate on glacial tempos and simple chord progressions, blending rock and drone into something that felt both hypnotic and confrontational. In a moment when indie bands had newfound mainstream attention, Low refused to play by the rules: “We were being pretty contrary,” Sparhawk reflects. “We always thrived off that.” Their constant reinventions have made them the rare band who seems to grow more unpredictable with each new release.
It’s a quality that’s important to both the sound of Low’s music and Sparhawk’s role as a frontman. “We’ve been doing this a long time, and I feel like I’ve gotten to bend people’s ears more than most people,” says the 53-year-old songwriter. “Part of me is like, ‘Are you sure you really wanna listen to this old white guy still whining about his feelings?’ But also, ‘OK, if they are going to listen, I have to make sure what I have to say is actually worth saying.’” On HEY WHAT, the very act of survival seems to inform his sparse, careful lyrics, from the apocalyptic visions in opener “White Horses” through the tender love song “Don’t Walk Away,” where he and Parker, both practicing Mormons who first met in grade school, sing in harmony, “I have slept beside you now for what seems a thousand years.”
Speaking over Zoom from his home in Duluth, Minnesota, Sparhawk speaks with great intensity and emotion: As stark as his music can be, as a conversationalist, he tends to ramble, apologizing when he veers off course and laughing at the strange detours his thoughts can take. He notes that his marriage and faith have been crucial to the band’s longevity. “We don’t sit around and talk about music all the time,” he says, “but the fact that we’re best friends and parents and lovers makes it very easy to incorporate the band into our lives.”
In addition to the couple’s Instagram Live performances—a weekly practice they started early in quarantine, which has featured stripped-down takes on nearly their entire catalog—Sparhawk, who currently sports long hair and a handlebar mustache that makes him look a little like a member of Uriah Heep, has kept himself busy with extracurriculars. He’s in a Neil Young cover band; he started a funk side project with his teenage son; and he teaches guitar at the local high school. Distilling the kind of advice he gives to his students, he says, “Whatever you want to be, just make that a part of your everyday. If you want to be a writer, write every day. If you want to play guitar, put it right next to you where you’ll see it every day. Do it every day, and it will become part of you.”
Alan Sparhawk: There was definitely a discussion: “Well, OK, we’ve blown the doors off and found this new vocabulary. Now what do we do with it?” I was thinking about the guitar, and the puzzle of being a guitar player, trying to find sounds that haven’t been heard before. Ultimately, every guitar player goes through this phase where you both love and hate the sound of the guitar, especially in the studio. Effects and technology are always getting faster and better and more vivid, so I dove into that, spending a lot of time trying to build songs and generate stuff that doesn’t sound like a guitar.
When we wrote that song, it was just on acoustic guitar, and it does ride out that way. That song is kind of like a three-act play: It comes in with just a capella, and then the second act is this big distortion crashing down, and then it blows out for the third part, hopefully releasing the tension. The abstractions always come out of the song. That’s been one of the great discoveries of the last few records: The more we try to fragment and abstract it out—even to see how far we can go until it’s not music anymore—that’s where it becomes interesting to us.
It’s an indulgent thing—the same endorphins you get when you’re 15 and you turn up your guitar. It just makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A lot of that is BJ. He’s fascinated with the idea of the extreme possibilities of the digital world colliding with randomness: “As this comes in, what if this starts deteriorating?” That’s definitely the front edge of technology right now. It’s fast and it can do anything, so the interesting thing is to see it get so far out that it starts breaking itself. I want to hear it get kicked off its algorithm and scramble to try to find it again. Maybe it’s revenge—I want to see technology break as much as it has broken me.
It’s also getting closer to the glitchy and abrupt sounds I hear in my head. As a child, it was all distortion and screeches in my head, and maybe I’ve just been given enough time that I’m slowly, consciously materializing what’s going on in my brain. I’ve always approached the guitar that way—to me, the little hiccups and unexpected squeaks and pops are more interesting. But it takes a long time to make a studio do that. For it to really work, you have to be on the outer edge of technology. What’s the possibility of what can be done, and what’s the noise that happens when you push against that? That’s the key. The first use of distortion on a record was an accident; at that moment, it was the front edge. And people have been following it up ever since.
I’ve heard of a bunch of that. It’s great! Although at some point, everything will be destroyed, so we’ll have to come back to something reverential—to then destroy it again. That’s the cycle, isn’t it? There’s always someone who’s reaching back trying to put together the parts that the other people are destroying. But it’s good. That’s what young people should be doing—they should be smashing it and building their own vocabulary.
Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but you don’t want to do that too much. Once or twice on a record is OK, but I think people get upset if you lull them into a nap and smack them with vocals.
After you’ve done a few records, and fans have been with you for a while, you immediately want to play with that, and I think people like that. It would be lying if we presented ourselves and our art as this insular thing. You’re more able to navigate the darkness if you have a little bit of humor about it—and it’s probably more honest. As much as it’s always pretty sobering music, there is a certain part of us that recognizes every once in a while you need an aside: “This is weird, huh? How are you doing, you need some water?” I’m just like every musician: I secretly wish I was a comedian... while also seeing how I’m totally ill-equipped to do it.
When we first started, it was the best time to start a band. It was like 1992, ’93. Gas was cheap. The scene was getting exciting. There were a lot more venues. It was before the internet, so people who were into music and dressed weird would go to a coffee shop and check out whatever band came to town. There was a lot of opportunity. If you could get on a few bills, people would see you. Starting that way really helped us. We were lucky to be able to tour a lot and dig into what we were doing.
There are a lot of opportunities now, and you can self-release stuff, but it’s harder. It’s a field full of people trying to get your attention, and it costs a lot of money. You have to hire promotion to get anybody to treat you as legitimate. Labels are in a different position now, too. A band like us would have to go out and lose a lot of money for a long time before anybody would notice. We wouldn’t have been able to do that. Our first tour, I had $400 in the bank. That was all we had, and I think we broke even.
Try to end every day together. Don’t let it go overnight. This advice was given to us when we were first married: Always pray together at the end of the day. I’m not saying everybody has to pray—even though I would encourage everyone to pray. It was more just to have some surrender. There’s a giving up of selfishness. If you had a grudge or something bothering you during the day, you either have to swallow it at that moment or talk about it and figure it out so that you can be genuinely together. Not to say that’s something we’ve always been perfect about. But I definitely notice when we don’t end the day like that—because then it carries over to the next day. Also, don’t drink alcohol. It’s hard enough as it is—alcohol will ruin everything.