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Indra Dunis' touring partners are a bunch of crybabies. They get cranky if they're in the van too long, never clean up their own messes and sometimes even soil themselves. She puts up with it because they actually are babies—her two sons with husband and Peaking Lights bandmate Aaron Coyes—but to hear her describe it, going on the road with the family doesn't sound much different from her early days playing in punk bands with a bunch of dudes.
"You are in a band with dudes," she says by phone from her and Coyes' home in Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood, where they just returned from a European jaunt, as the kids clamor for attention in the background. "They just happen to be much, much younger."
Of course, when you're married to your main creative partner, domestic life is bound to eventually bleed into your artistic life. For Dunis and Coyes, it happened in the run-up to their latest album, Cosmic Logic. In the past, the duo used to jam its dub-inflected psychedelia into existence, producing at least one record per year. But with Dunis giving birth to their second child, Marlon, just as they started writing again, the process became more complicated. After all, if you're both in the studio, who's watching the kids? "It makes your creative time more limited and more precious," Dunis says. "You never know when you're going to be interrupted."
Cosmic Logic ultimately took 18 months to complete. The finished product is a tighter, more structured and straight-up funkier effort than the band's previous releases, owing much to the extra time they were forced to take in putting it together. Peaking Lights has always cast a wider net than many of its indie peers, drawing Afrobeat, reggae and Latin rhythms into its kaleidoscopic swirl, but grooves often took a backseat to atmosphere. This time, instead of using his home-built synthesizers simply for textural noise, Coyes began to employ them as percussive instruments. The result is the group's most danceable album, with a bubbly Technicolor bounce that's earned comparisons to the Tom Tom Club—not exactly a common reference point in 2014.
Parenthood did more than just stretch out the recording time. For Dunis, who sings and plays drums, it also altered her songwriting. Though she doesn't sing expressly about being a mother on most of Cosmic Logic, she does address the world her kids will grow up in, often in terms simple enough for her toddlers to understand. Peaking Lights have been criticized for their "nursery-rhyme-naive lyrics," as Pitchfork put it, but the lack of abstraction is often the point. And on songs like "New Grrrls," in which Dunis struggles with the responsibilities of being a "worker, lover, mother, wife" while name-checking heroes from Kathleen Hanna to Angela Davis to "Mother Earth herself," the directness is striking.
"I feel like a lot of feminist issues that I was pretty concerned with when I was a lot younger have resurfaced for me now that I'm a mom," Dunis says. "Looking at the role of women in society, we've obviously come a long way, but there are also a lot of things that need to change. I wanted to comment on that from my own perspective, and I want people to listen to the lyrics and understand what I'm trying to say, because I think it's an important issue.â
SEE IT: Peaking Lights play Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., with Ancient Heat and Unicorn Domination, on Sunday, Dec. 7. 8 pm. $10. 21+.
WWeek 2015