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Millions have heard the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, but it’s safe to say only a small percentage of those people actually know what velveteen is. Similar to velvet but stiffer and less lustrous, the fabric is designed not for luxury but durability. The connotation of softness in The Velveteen Rabbit’s name is plain even to kids, but 105 years after Margery Williams first published her timeless tale of a toy in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, its equally important implication of being made to last is easy to miss.
“[Velveteen] is not elegant or top-tier,” says Matt Hemmerich of Portland indie-rock duo Phosphene, who named their new album Velveteen for the material. “What it does have is strength. That stuck with us.”
Hemmerich and his personal and creative partner Rachel Frankel wrote and recorded the album during a time of personal turmoil. Frankel lost her job as an art director at Zendesk in a spate of layoffs in 2023, while both had fallings-out with family members around that time; this atmosphere of anger and despair colors both the stripped-down sound and vitriolic tone of the record.
“I’m not going to say—not that they’re going to read this,” Hemmerich says when pressed for specifics about the targets of the album’s most acidic songs, like “Lupo” and “The Box.” To Phosphene, sordid specifics matter less than the idea that you can map the matters of your own heart onto these songs.
“It’s like an expression my mom used to use: ‘You make plans and God laughs,’” Frankel says. “It’s nothing either of us can’t surmount, but it was one of those times when a lot of crappy things happened in batches.”
During the writing process, Frankel found herself retreating into piano-based singer-songwriter mode—the milieu in which she started out as a folk singer inspired by the likes of Rilo Kiley and Elliott Smith, before her partnership with Hemmerich and the influence of his more gothic-leaning taste took her into darker musical waters.
“There’s something that happens when I’m writing on piano where the words just come a lot easier,” Frankel says. “It opens me up more. I think especially on songs like ‘Warding’ and “Disappear,’ they dive into pretty personal issues, and that gets more at the roots of my songwriting.”
Frankel also contributed more substantially to the song’s arrangements than on earlier recordings, sketching out ideas in the computer program Reason and fleshing them out with the band’s longtime collaborator Ryan Huff. While the band let Huff handle most of the bells and whistles on their previous album, 2023’s comparatively lush and shoegazey Transmute, the back-and-forth between Frankel and Huff was crucial in the creation of Velveteen.
“[Huff] definitely still has a leading role in contributing to that certain soundscape effect,” Frankel says. “But it was really fun to take more of the reins and actually create the arrangements this time around.”
Transmute was loaded up with gauzy walls of strings and guitars, with the influence of the “walls of sound” prevalent in both ’60s girl group music and later developments in alternative rock such as shoegaze—though, unlike pioneering groups in the latter genre like My Bloody Valentine, “you could always hear what the hell Rachel’s saying,” Hemmerich says.
There’s no mistaking Velveteen for shoegaze, and the lyrics are even more front and center, bolstered by arrangements that span the gamut from the gentle folk rock of “Warding” to the heavy rock of the album-bookending “Heaven” and “Everyone.”
“We have such a big Venn diagram of influences, but when I met Rachel, I wouldn’t have expected us to make such a noisy record,” Hemmerich says.
Both members of Phosphene were born and raised in California—Frankel in Southern California, Hemmerich in the Bay Area—and formed the band in 2012 while studying together at San Francisco State University. “Music has always been an outlet for both of us,” Frankel says.
Velveteen is either their fourth or fifth album, depending on whether you count 2016’s six-track Breaker as a full-length, and it’s the one in which the bond they’ve shared across their long history as partners, collaborators and musical influences is most tangible. The title Velveteen may speak to the durability of the human heart, but it also speaks to the durability of their union.
“We’ve been collaborating musically for over 14 years, and we’ve been together for about 16 now,” Hemmerich says. “And I think what we’ve tried to do from the inception of the band is to just challenge each other while also still maintaining joy in the process. I think that as much as I challenge Rachel, she challenges me.”
HEAR IT: Phosphene’s Velveteen streams at soundcloud.com/phosphene_pdx.
