The indie trio—Adam Abildgaard (vocals/guitar), Ted Davis (vocals/bass), and Nick Duffy (drums)—has spent more than a decade moving between indie rock, psychedelia, dream pop, and the different sounds that have caught their attention along the way. From 2015’s Neapolitan through Sportswear, touring and years of writing together have continually reshaped their approach to making music.

Now, the band is in another new chapter with Butterfly in a Landslide. Arriving four years after Sportswear, the record began after a period away from the band and eventually developed through a renewed focus on collaboration and writing with the live show in mind.

Photos by Kaelyn Higgs (atomicdownloads)

Uncut Collective: You’ve been a band for over a decade now, and obviously a lot can change creatively and personally in that amount of time. When you look at the band now compared to when you first started, what feels the most different?

Adam: To be fully honest, I think everything in our lives has changed a lot except for our love and relationship to music and writing—well, that’s changed to some degree, but more of a deepened connection rather than a full-on change. Over the last ten years we’ve grown, and we’ve fallen in love, and there’s been heartbreak and friendships lost and gained. We’ve travelled to many places with our music, and it’s truly been a roller coaster, but we still, in the end, do all of it because we love that feeling of chasing inspiration and passion and translating it into a song.

Uncut Collective: Butterfly in a Landslide comes four years after Sportswear. Where were you all at creatively when you started working on this record, and did you go into it knowing what you wanted the next version of Hot Flash Heat Wave to sound like?

Adam: After Sportswear, we took a small break to live our lives, which felt like something we had put off for a while because the band came before everything and was all-consuming. Nick went on hiatus, and Adam and Ted moved to Los Angeles and eventually started working together on Butterfly as a two-man project. It felt like we were starting over in a way, and we had to rediscover how we wanted to collaborate in this new form. We wanted to write for a live context again with more emphasis on guitars, and with that in mind, we started putting together a group of songs that felt cohesive.

Uncut Collective: You've described your music through a lot of different sounds over the years, and the newer material continues to move between indie rock, psychedelia, dream pop, and heavier textures. How do you keep experimenting without losing what makes something feel like a Hot Flash Heat Wave song?

Adam: We do our best to have our records sound like HFHW while following the sounds that inspire us. I’ve started to think of each record as a kind of playlist or a movie where there is an arc that takes you on a journey if you listen through from front to back.

Ted: Yeah, kinda like a director who’s making a new movie. I think there’s always a part of us in what we write, our sort of signature sound, even if we are chasing what feels dynamic and exciting to us rather than trying to tell the same story over again.

Uncut Collective: Last year marked 10 years since Neapolitan, and you revisited the album with an anniversary release while also moving toward completely new music. What was it like looking back at who you were when you made that record while figuring out where the band was headed next?

Adam: I think the timing was interesting because in a way we set out to write something that reminded us of Neapolitan, but through our current lens as humans who aren’t the same kids that we were ten years ago. Looking back at Neapolitan really gave us an appreciation for that blissfully ignorant energy you have when you first start a band and how we just did things using our intuition and a lot of the time feeling very unsure about it all. In the end it felt like a bit of a full circle moment.

Uncut Collective: You've spent years touring and playing to very different crowds. What have you learned about yourselves as performers that you probably couldn’t have learned without being on the road?

Ted: All the experience playing with different bands for all sorts of audiences definitely instills a confidence that we can play for anyone, no matter the size of the crowd, but honestly I think the most important lessons from touring come from what happens in between the shows. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience, but it can also be incredibly grueling, and it has taught us a lot about how vital it is to communicate well and how resilient we can be. All the challenges that come up on top of spending all day every day together for 6 weeks straight will test your relationship with anyone, and we’ve managed to do that for upwards of 10 years now, which is something I’m very proud of.

Uncut Collective: When you’re making a record like Butterfly in a Landslide, how collaborative is the process between everyone? Does someone usually bring in the foundation of a song, or has the way you write together changed over the years?

Ted: For us, that dynamic has really changed with each record cycle. This time around was one of the most deeply collaborative processes—probably the most so since Neapolitan. About half of the songs on this record we co-wrote together; the other half is a pretty even split of songs we wrote more individually before finishing them together.

Uncut Collective: Now that these new songs are being played in front of audiences, has performing them live changed the way you hear the record or made you appreciate certain parts of it differently?

Ted: A lot of these songs are still coming to life in our performance. The ones that we’ve already been playing on tour feel very comfortable at this point, and there’s definitely a different feeling playing those ones now. This tour will be some of our first performances of most of the album, though, and I’m really excited to experience them that way with our fans. I think there’s a special kind of magic you tend to find only by playing songs on tour—something about sharing the songs with an audience night after night feels like the last step in completing them. Once a song becomes second nature that way, I find that I can really lose myself in the emotion of it in a way that is unique to performing.

Uncut Collective: You’ve already gone through several different eras as a band, from Neapolitan through Sportswear and now Butterfly in a Landslide. Once this tour and album cycle wraps up, what do you hope the next few years look like for the band?

Ted: Each record cycle takes on such a life of its own and is so all-encompassing, from writing to recording and then releasing and performing the music, that usually by the time an album is out we are dying to start working on the next project. Once we wrap this cycle, I’m excited to start from the drawing board again and see where this next cycle and its phase of life will take us. Writing music and having people interested and listening is such a privilege, and one that we don’t take for granted, so as long as we can continue to do that, we will.