To Brooklyn rock newcomers Sledding, their debut single “My Golden Tempo” is best described as “light through smoke.” Members Aidan Drouse (guitar, vocals), Khadija “Deej” Aslam (guitar, vocals), Woods Prewitt (guitar, keyboards), and Kelsey Kussman (bass) pride themselves on crafting a rhythm driven and austere sound, equally at home in periods of isolation and at a party. Created during this year’s string of blizzards, Sledding is a project founded in a tenebrous glamour.
With the release of “Golden Tempo” and an EP set to arrive this fall, Aidan, Deej, Woods, and Kelsey spoke with ALT Citizen about the inception of their band, Wood’s Kentucky Derby party, and their collaborative creative process.
How did you guys all meet?
Aidan: Woods, Deej and I went to Fordham and met through music. There was a coffee shop at Fordham that threw a lot of shows and none of us were in it, but we were adjacent to it. Kelsey came to us through our friend Remy
Did Fordham’s scene shape your sound at all?
Aidan: I started playing music in college and the people that I was living with at the time showed me how to play guitar and drums and everything so I think I have to credit a lot of my musical background to those two people, Hugo and Nils. Funny enough, me and Deej were the rhythm section in college, and now we’ve completely flipped that. Now, Deej and I are singing and playing lead guitar.
Deej: It’s funny because in that band we sang on this one song together and we were like damn we sound good singing together.
Aidan: Also, there was just a lot of cool stuff going on, Aine was doing the booking and the people in Rod’s were really tapped into a lot of cool music I didn’t know. I was listening to standard rock stuff at the time and being exposed to that widened my horizons. We started playing three years after we all graduated, and I think it would be really nice to go back there and play once we do have music out.
All of you are in multiple projects, so how does Sledding differ from your other work?
Deej: It’s the best.
Kelsey: It just sounds different, it’s like choosing a favorite child as a mother and comparing your children. It feels wrong. They’re all very different and have different personalities.
How would you describe Sledding’s personality then?
Woods: I feel like Sledding’s a bit of a diva.
Aidan: Sledding’s sleep deprived.
Kelsey: She’s mischievous.
Deej: Glamorous.
What made this year’s Kentucky Derby unique to the point that you felt inspired to name your first single after the race’s winner “My Golden Tempo”?
Deej: Well Maddie, you happened to be there. Wood’s birthday fell on the day of the Kentucky Derby and we all celebrated at Mr. Nancy’s, where we also filmed a lot of our music video.
Aidan: For a while, we called “My Golden Tempo” “Fast Song,” or have referred to it by its speed and we struggled to find a name. Kelsey came to Mr. Nancy’s a little bit after the races finished and she asked me at the bar who won. I told her Golden Tempo won and she was like, that would be a really good name for a song.
Woods: We felt like it worked too because the horse was a long shot and our friend won really big that night. Everyone was happy for her that this horse came out of the back of the race to win.
See Sledding play a house show on Saturday
What did the writing process look like for the song? Since the two of you are singing, who writes the lyrics?
Aidan: I wanted a fast song to close with, so that was kind of like the idea of going into it. I was listening to a lot of Bloc Party at the time, and wanted to have something with a rhythmic pace to it. I was just fucking around with my looper pedal and doing different stabs and stuff on my guitar. When we originally started playing this song, it was much more a riff-off of a Bloc Party song, our guitars were trading, but now less so. I wanted the song to be kind of dumb with a big chorus, and I was thinking it’d be funny to write a song about what a bad Hinge dates feel like, or what it’s like to get into a fight at 2am outside of a bar, something like that. That was the idea behind it, and Deej and I both worked on the lyrics and melodies together. I want Deej to be singing more than I am, so sometimes I’ll come up with a melody and give it to her, or vice versa.
Deej: It’s fun that we can both sing on these songs, it adds so much, it makes it conversational and makes it a lot easier to write.
Aidan: It makes it a lot easier to write songs if you have more than one vocal because you can have a long verse and it doesn’t get tired.
Deej: It’s fun to switch perspectives.
We share very similar music tastes, and in a lot of Bar Italia songs, Jezmi, Nina, and Sam switch vocal leads. Were you inspired by that at all?
Aidan: Yeah, I think a lot of that London stuff has informed this band.
I was so sad I couldn’t make their show.
Aidan: It was amazing. I’ve never seen them live before. They were way louder and it felt a bit meaner seeing them live.
Deej: Nina is so cunty.
Kelsey: I was lit the entire time.
Aidan: Seeing bar italia and then last night, seeing Iceage, Deej and I had a brief conversation about embracing a more front person role in the band going forward. Having a guitar around your neck throughout the whole set can be limiting in how much energy you can give.
Who’s going to be the front person?
Aidan: I think we’ll both be.
Woods: Aidan needs more ability to jump on stage and space to swing the mic around.
Deej: I want to dance more.
Woods: We need Aidan crowd surfing.
Aidan: I’ve tried to lean into that a bit, but every single time I try to do it, I step on Deej’s cord and her amp unplugs.
Woods: Yeah, that is the reality of having five people up on stage.
Sledding at Sugar Hill, photo by Katrina Stewart
It’s like when you guys played Le Bain and were in a horizontal row.
Deej: That was fire. That’s my ideal setup, it looks really satisfying.
Could you hear each other on stage?
Woods: I could hear pretty well.
Aidan: The sound was great, shoutout Sean. Playing up there, six inches in front of you there’s a body of water and then six inches behind you the ground is twenty five stories down.
Kelsey: It was actually really terrifying. I always lose my balance when I’m playing, so for that show I tried to hit my pedal as little as possible. Even though you wouldn’t fall to your death, it really feels like you could.
Post “My Golden Tempo,” you’re releasing an EP in the fall. When does it come out?
Aidan: We don’t know yet, but around Halloween-ish.
Woods: I feel like a couple of our songs are kind of spooky.
Aidan: The songs that we have recorded are way different from “My Golden Tempo.” This one is fast and fun to play, so we wanted to put it out, but everything else on the EP is a bit weirder.
Woods: It’s a lot spacier.
Is it what you’ve been playing live?
Aidan: Yeah. It’s really groovy. The priority is interesting rhythms. Overall, the EP is a better screenshot or what our sound is. After this, we’re going to sit with someone to work out string parts and piano. It’s going to be a bit bigger and weirder. I feel really good about it.
Is there any particular narrative that the album is trying to tell?
Kelsey: I don’t think there is as much of a narrative, as there is a world. It feels like something that happens at night.
Aidan: It’s gotten to the point where I’ve had to stop saying night in lyrics. I think every single song I made a reference to night. In my head, I want it to feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s really dark, and it’s smoky, and there is this blue light cutting through the smoke.
Kelsey: It’s definitely light through smoke.
You can name the album that.
Aidan: We wrote all these songs this past winter, which was horrible. Everything was sort of informed by the isolation.
Deej: And the snow.
Woods: It was so cold.
Aidan: The songs represent every terrible thing that came out of that winter, but it’s also really fun.
Deej: It’s the feeling of sledding when it’s the dead of winter.
Woods: Yeah, it feels pretty moody and dramatic, but in an angry way.
Kelsey: But, it still feels like a party. It’s fun and taunting.
Listen to “My Golden Tempo”