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If you click on Swiss Army Wife’s Bandcamp page, you’ll notice pretty quickly that horses are a running theme. Their Quarter Horse EP features an aggrieved-looking racehorse on its sleeve, and the cover of their 2023 debut, Medium Gnarly, mashes up equestrian and sci-fi imagery into an eye-popping collage.
But you might have to squint a bit to see the horses on the cover of the Portland emo band’s sophomore album, I Love You, But I Hate It Here, which comes out June 12 through We’re Trying Records. Rendered as faint silhouettes of light by the band’s multi-instrumentalist Ellie Helgeson, the animals stand in the middle of a road at night, one seemingly trying to graze, the other turning its head as if dimly aware of the danger of its surroundings.
“I had two horses growing up, Blue and Stormy,” says singer-guitarist and primary lyricist Kade Dale, who grew up on a farm in Idaho. “I think having two animals that are there for you and incredibly kind and gentle did a lot to make life more bearable.”
The lyrical focus on I Love You is squarely directed at the hinterlands where Dale was raised, which he portrays ambivalently as a place of beauty and nostalgia but also of small-minded attitudes and authoritarian sympathies.
“I grew up in a town with 5,000 people,” Dale says. “Horses, cows. Nothing else to do beyond get drunk or blitzed and fuck around in a field. This record in general has been grappling with the nostalgia for those experiences, but also reckoning with watching the place you love and grew up in become increasingly inhospitable.”
The 10 icy vignettes on the album include “Shopping Carts,” in which bored kids jousting with shopping carts in a parking lot are busted by equally bored security guards, and “Cowboy,” about the transgenerational toll of stoic and unloving Western machismo.
“I think a lot of the songs are trying to pick parts of that experience that I do love or cherish or feel strongly about, while contending with some of the more horrific elements that are increasingly present,” Dale says.
The level-up from the lyricism on Medium Gnarly is obvious. Striking and specific imagery abounds, like a lonesome nighttime dirt-bike ride with only a battery-powered flashlight as a source of light. Blue and Stormy make a cameo appearance on “It Used to Snow,” on which Dale laments “watching things I love get older”; both horses are now deceased.
“For the longest time, I had an idea about what was talked about or sung about in the genre of music we make, and there was definitely some attempt to adhere to that,” Dale says. “On this record, I think myself and everyone else in the band felt more license to talk about experiences we had personally.”
“These songs went through a much more rigorous process, and they feel so much more intentional to me,” Helgeson says. “More confident, more like we started with a purpose in mind.”
The band that would become Swiss Army Wife came together when Dale moved shortly before the pandemic to Oregon, where he and drummer Tim Shepherd started playing under various names that never stuck. The name Swiss Army Wife came from a “five-week discussion” after assembling a list of “40,000 names.”
“We definitely give a different response each time,” Dale says when asked about the origin of their punning band name, “the last one being vaguely that our music is versatile.”
Helgeson and bassist Jon Hashem joined in 2021, in time for the post-lockdown explosion of young, loud Portland bands. (Hashem left the group to start a family shortly after recording his parts on the new record; JJ Shafe, who contributed to Quarter Horse, is now the band’s bassist).
“There were just so many shows happening, and the scene was so excited to be able to come out to shows again that virtually anything was going to have a huge crowd,” Helgeson says. “We played garage shows that had like 200 people filling out into the driveway in the middle of December.”
That thrum of post-pandemic excitement has endured for Swiss Army Wife, and they’re about to embark on their biggest tour yet. Their West Coast run kicks off Friday, June 12, with a show at the Musicians Union in Portland, with eight shows in Oregon, Washington and California; in July and early August, they’ll tour the Midwest, with stops in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and other cities.
“Early on, we had this discussion—what was our goal as a band?” Dale says. “And we said pressing a record on vinyl and going on tour with our friends. We did both those things pretty early on, so now it just feels like everything else we get to do is a bonus.”
SEE IT: Swiss Army Wife’s album release show for I Love You, But I Hate It Here at Musicians Union Local 99, 325 NE 20th Ave., aftontickets.com. 7 pm Friday, June 12. $10. All ages.
