Big Bang: After 13 years, psych-rock band Supermassive Black Holes releases debut first full-length album

Courtesy of Supermassive Black Holes

Formed in 2010, Kansas City’s Supermassive Black Holes define themselves as playing music as a “mind-bending sonic experience that defies boundaries, with entrancing drumming, rock-solid bass, and mesmerizing guitar work,” and there is no more perfect example of how that all comes together than their new album, Stop Safely Now. Released in October of 2023, it is a grandiose and, yes, supermassive affair that moves through psychedelia, prog, dad rock, and myriad other genres while still feeling as though it’s an album proper rather than some loose collection of songs composed over the decade-plus since the band’s self-titled debut EP.

That realization led to our first question when we spoke with the band from their rehearsal space one January evening. Given their extensive pedigrees outside Supermassive Black Holes, we had to ask drummer Matt Davis, vocalist and guitarist Chad Brothers, bassist and vocalist Alexis Barclay, and vocalist and guitarist John Johnson if the fact that their debut full-length took so long was because they’re all in other musical projects.

“I would say that’s maybe 15% of it,” says Davis.

“I mean, yeah, we had other things going on,” agrees Johnson. “The last six or seven years, we’ve been trying always to get together and record something. We always had it in the back of our minds to do an album, but two years ago, we got a little nudge.”

As Brothers explains, Supermassive Black Holes have worked on a full-length album before, but it never came to be. About five or six years ago, they recorded around a dozen original songs, but due to this, that, and the other thing—marriage, moving, etc.—the band just never quite got it finished.

“A completely different set of music than what’s on this album now,” Brothers says. “We’ve always been kind of working at it, but we never quite got it.”

Davis agrees, saying that he always thought the band was going to finish that album.

“Then we started doing our lives and growing up and stuff, I suppose,” says the drummer. “At least for me, you know, and then when we all were in close proximity once again, we realized that we needed to do this.”

Davis continues on to say that the four members of Supermassive Black Holes didn’t realize how much they needed this group until it was something they put on the back burner.

“Within the last couple of years, we’ve been closer than we have ever been in our whole time together, and recording this album just solidified it,” Johnson says.

Once back together, the members of Supermassive Black Holes decided to take the opportunity that had been returned to them and chose to write all new songs—or 85-90%—if we’re still crunching numbers. In addition to new songs, it was a new songwriting process for the band, too. Previously, as all four members were songwriters in their own right, they would each bring in their own songs and then assimilate them into the band, but they chose to forge a new path for what would become Stop Safely Now.

“When we first met, we all had a bank of songs that we drew from, from either older projects or things that we’d had in our minds,” Barclay says. “This was the first time we’d really, absolutely wrote everything together.”

Listening to Stop Safely Now, it is an album that feels like it needs to be this extensive (big) to encompass all the ideas and concepts being explored, be it the sinuous opening feedback of “Spaghettification IV” or the dreamy looseness of “Young and Childlike,” and everything in between. It also feels like an album where the members of this band decided that if they’d waited this long to make a full-length record, they needed to go way big.

“That was the approach, and it was just necessity, too,” says Brothers. “We had all these new songs, and when we were in the studio, we got all of our new songs done faster than we thought we would, and so we had a whole extra day to track.”

Because of this, each member picked one of their older songs, upping the total by four more tunes, thanks to the fact the process was going so smoothly. That’s how they ended up with the 17 tracks that make up the album.

“We knew we were on the right track ‘cause everything seemed so effortless, you know?” Johnson says. “That’s why it ended up being so big to me. We each contributed some newer songs, but then more stuff started coming out, and we’re like, ‘No, we got to put this on there too.’”

“The excitement level of that really, really helped the creativity,” Barclay agrees. That creativity was an absolute necessity because the songs were put together thanks to a weekend at Table Rock, where the four members brought their recording equipment and finished writing all the ideas and songs for this album. It was all brand new, with none of the old stuff from the previous attempt several years before. That helped lay the foundation of what these songs were about, then the band went back home, rehearsed before they went to the studio, and were ready to go with the bones of the songs.

However, they didn’t rehearse a whole bunch because it was in the studio where the songs would come together. Most of what would become the tracks on the album had not been played live at that point, which is the opposite of how Supermassive Black Holes had previously treated the recording process. This has made for some challenging experiences introducing the new material into the band’s live sets promoting Stop Safely Now.

Courtesy of Supermassive Black Holes

“We’re normally gigging the songs before we go into the studio,” Brothers says of past experience. “I feel like we had to find our sea legs, so to speak, when we started playing them live.”

Case in point, he says, was vocals. There were harmonies they were able to do in the studio that they then had to figure out how to wrap their heads around when playing live. Many of the songs on Stop Safely Now have three, four, and even more part harmonies, thanks to the members of Supermassive Black Holes really exploring just what the studio had to offer.

“There’s an exciting level when we took it live,” says Barclay. “I was a lot more nervous taking it from the studio to the stage rather than vice versa because we didn’t know what kind of reaction we were going to get. I mean, we had a feeling. We loved what we were doing, and we were excited about it, but also, it was more of a leap than I expected it to be mentally and emotionally.”

“The nervousness is because we were always a little more adventurous in our previous compositions,“ Johnson says as he struggles to find a way to describe the material on Stop Safely Now. He rejects “stripped down” and “poppy” before settling on “song-y,” with Brothers chiming in to explain that they’re pretty intricately arranged, which is a little different than what people might expect.

“We’re still maybe internalizing all that to take it live,” Brothers says. “I mean, we’ve played quite a few shows now, and it’s come a long way, but like, I feel like we’re still working on it.”

“Some of the songs are coming together so well,” says Johnson. “It’s almost like, ‘Oh man, can we record that again?’ That’s a fun part of playing live, is that we can do different things.”

“We’re starting to let them breathe live,” Brothers says. “We have a tendency to improv and kind of jam a song out. Some of these songs, we’re starting to do that, and we’re finding even more lifeblood in the songs live and different places to go.”