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Shadowgraphs’ sound straddles the world where early 21st century indie rock reverbed back to midcentury folk. But when it comes to releasing their new music online, founding members Wils Glade and Bryan Olson are as modern as ever.
Ramping up for the release of their newest album, Don’t Chase, Will Run, set to drop Oct. 6 with a listening party at Lollipop Shoppe on Oct. 3. Portland’s Glade and Olson have been rolling out singles to game Spotify’s algorithms. As they explain it, the streaming platform is more likely to recommend a set of singles than it is to pluck songs from an album. If it sees singles or even an EP collection of the same singles, the tracks are more likely to get played and recommended for wider exposure.
“We’re doing a waterfall release,” Olson says. “It’s a way to get people to engage with the record more so than they have in the past.”
“We thought, we’re not going through a label this time, let’s just give this a shot,” Glade adds. “It’s actually been doing pretty rad.”
Don’t Chase, Will Run is the band’s most sun-soaked effort to date. A soft but restless beat between drums and rhythm guitar drives earlier Shadowgraphs albums, but Don’t Chase, Will Run largely sounds like what might happen if The Dream Academy made the morning described in “Life in a Northern Town” truly last all day by sipping coffee while a ’00s act like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Silversun Pickups plays indistinctly in the background. The album’s name comes from a phrase Olson saw on a missing-dog poster in his neighborhood, and he thought about different ways to interpret the phrase.
“I connected a lot with it because aside from the dog reference—we both have dogs—there’s a lot of songs on the record that are about that message, where to me it’s ‘the more you zoom in on something, the more it’s going to pull away,’ and to not work toward something so hard,” Glade says. “Just trying not to be so obvious, with a lot of things, and to be more toned back.”
Shadowgraphs formed in North Carolina in 2014 and, shortly after relocating to Portland, landed on WW’s Best New Bands list back in 2019. The music world changed quickly shortly after that. Glade and Olson rented a discounted Airbnb in Portland during the pandemic lockdown to record what became Shadowgraphs’ self-titled album, released in 2022. During that record’s national tour, the band would sometimes play for hundreds of people or shows with as few as five in the audience. Those extremes, along with the financial realities of touring and recording music, gave the band a different perspective for their next project together.
“It was so much work,” Olson says. “We learned a lot from that. It’s fun to get out on the road, but if we do another long tour, it’s supporting a big artist.”
Often relying on mixing techniques and effects to achieve certain feelings through their music, Glade and Olson instead stripped back production and trusted in the advice of producer Trevor Spencer, who has worked with recording artists such as Beach House and Father John Misty. Shadowgraphs has slowly outgrown their psychedelic influences, with Don’t Chase, Will Run sounding like post-trip clarity with a tinge of unshakable afterglow.
Opening tracks “Dawn Over Mountain Terrain” and “Careless” start off still sleepy. The lead song’s plucky acoustic guitar makes it sound like its name, sunny but still in the shadows of last night. “Careless” starts to wake up with some raygun-type effects like from a Saturday morning cartoon. By the time the third track, “Desire,” starts, it’s as if the drums have had their caffeine and are ready to bounce.
“[Trevor] definitely was approaching this record from a producer’s standpoint where I think he was more excited about some of our previous stuff we were doing effectwise, and we were the ones dialing it back,” Glade says.
“It was good for us to get pushback from him in some regards,” Olson adds. “Especially listening to the record now, it sounds really good. There were things we wanted to change that he said, ‘I don’t think you should,’ and we kept pushing to change them, but now when I hear some of those things a year later, I’m like, no, it’s cool, it makes sense.”
SEE IT: Shadowgraphs record release party at Lollipop Shoppe, 736 SE Grand Ave., 971-279-4409, lollipopshoppe.com. 6 pm Friday, Oct. 3. $12–$15. 21+.
