Artist Spotlight: Total Wife – Our Culture

Total Wife is the experimental shoegaze duo of composer/producer Luna Kupper and lyricist/vocalist Ash Richter, who have been friends since high school. Having formed the band in 2016, they moved from Boston to Nashville in 2020, establishing themselves as part of the city’s DIY scene and enlisting Ryan Bigelow (Rig B), Sean Booz (Celltower), and Billy Campbell (Make Yourself at Home) for their live lineup. After more than a couple influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence.

We caught up with Total Wife for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about first falling in love with music, childlike inspiration, their intentions behind come back down, and more.

I was thinking about the idea of the title, come back down, in the context of the album being released and your upcoming tour. I’m curious how much of that euphoric high the record both documents and interrogates is tied to music and Total Wife as a project. I know ‘still asleep’ is about your first tour, but how has that feeling grown and changed over time?

Ash Richter: It’s insane, because at the level we were at, it was still so euphoric. It hasn’t plateaued in any way either. It’s just changed. I feel like keeping ourselves grounded in each thing that we’re doing is super helpful. And I feel even more excited for what’s to come.

Luna Kupper: Yeah, tour never stops being exciting. After that first tour, we just kept wanting to do it. And with music in general – writing it, too – I think it’s always about chasing that first thing that made me excited when I was writing music for the first time. Not changing that initial intent.

You’ve talked about the album starting as “one thought unfolding endlessly,” which goes back to that feeling of first falling in love with recording. You sold all your synths prior to recording this record to pay rent, but I’m sure it also played into this feeling.

LK: Yeah. I feel like you could just buy a bunch of gear, and that’s not gonna change anything. But after a while, I kind of just wanted to not think about trying to find anything new from outside of what I already had, or whatever I already knew. When I first started making music at all, it was just recording, so I feel like that’s always been so tied to songwriting and every other part of making music for me. I feel like it just helped me get lost in the process of editing and recording versus, like, trying to use a new pedal or a new synth patch or something like that. Just coming up with my own sounds from what I had.

Were there any specific moments where you really felt like falling in love with recording all over again?

LK: A lot of what I used to have fun with was almost like collage-style copy-pasting stuff in Pro Tools. The song ‘ofersi3’ is kind of just that pushed as far as I could, because it’s just distorted breaks, making them atonal through just chopping it as much as possible, and then using those chops to create different sounds. Just continuously manipulating whatever waveforms were already there. That copy-paste thing was always so fun for me, but I didn’t really realize that was the fun part at first. I was more focused on trying to learn how to write a song. I felt like I didn’t really know how to piece chords or anything together. Once I figured that out, I was like, “Wait, that’s not really the part that I always thought was fun,” and honestly felt more like myself. I feel good that I can sit down and play guitar now, but getting into just having fun editing, reprocessing guitars and vocals – that was definitely the most fun part for me. And ‘(dead b)’, that song was much slower at first and in a different key, and I didn’t really like it anymore. So, not worrying about the take being, like, “Oh, I played this and that’s good because I could play guitar,” but instead just reprocessing it until it sounded better to me.

I know you’ve been friends since high school. Do you mind sharing some of your earliest memories of playing together?

AR: The bassist for our band, his name is Ryan Bigelow – he has a project called Rigby, which you might like.

LK: It’s really sick.

AR: I first met him when I was 17 and he was 15. A mutual friend was supposed to play with me doing a solo acoustic cover set. My friend couldn’t do it, so he gave me Ryan’s number, and I hit up Ryan, and we played together for the rest of high school. Then I went to college – that’s when I met Luna, right at the crux of that.

LK: I was in my junior year of high school, and you were a freshman in college, I think, when we met. I can’t remember exactly, but we immediately started talking about wanting to make music together the night we met. My first memory of us working together was doing a cover of ‘Diana Ross’ by The Concretes. That’s so funny, I haven’t thought about that in a while.

AR: At that point, my background was more in mall emo stuff, like All Time Low and We the Kings. [laughs] That was a cool kind of intro to different styles of music.

Has the way you talk about making music changed over time?

AR: I feel like it’s gone through a lot of changes. We haven’t always been really good at working together – we had to work through some stuff. You know, when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily have a clear vision of what you want yet, but you know what you don’t like, kinda, and then you work your way into a style from there. Having known each other for over 10 years and working together, we’ve had disagreements, but we’ve honed in on a way to collaborate really well.

LK: Just always refining, I think, always changes the narrative. But we’ve always been critical, and definitely informed by the stuff we don’t like. If we get the ick from something we do, we’re like, “Fuck that.” So it’s a good bouncing board, and it took a while to lock in on what we both thought would work.

Is it also about communicating better around the thing that feels off?

LK: Yeah, that’s our rule: to always say when we’re feeling that.

AR: And it can be hard, you know, when you’re writing about stuff you care about, to not let your feelings get involved. But we have ways of working through that. If one of us gets the ick and the other’s like, “No, this is the song,” we can work through and compromise.

LK: And push it more toward what it’s supposed to be. Super open communication has always been our rule, for sure.

With this record, more than setting specific goals, were there things you were explicitly trying to avoid? 

AR: Yeah. There were ideas we worked through in the last couple of records that we didn’t necessarily want to get rid of, but we’d done enough of them. Like, a lot of the more krautrock-y stuff… Once you make so many songs like that, it starts to feel a little repetitive. I think we have fewer of the songs that just go on infinitely – not that I don’t love that stuff too.

LK: We just incorporated that in a broader sense, I think. I feel like at this point we took everything we liked about making music and applied it more broadly, not as obviously. Taking ideas from things – not necessarily how they sound, but being more conceptual about it – and then using what I had, rather than trying to make it sound like somebody else.

I think that ties into what you’ve said about being a “psychological mixer.” That really shines through on songs like ‘naoisa’ and ‘(dead b)’, which feel sonically both in line and at war with the headspace of the song. There’s a dizziness to both songs that kind of acts over what the brain is saying, whether that’s the need to slow down or how life is on pause.

AR: It’s awesome that you get that from them. It definitely is that juxtaposition of, like, My life on pause, but then, LOL, nothing ever stops.

LK: Being able to just embrace the chaos, for sure. I was really trying to think about the perspective of the person listening to the mix, rather than focusing on where instruments should technically sit. Using a lot of low-end, especially with guitars, because usually they’re cut out, but that takes away certain effects. It’s always like, “Should you at all think about the audience?” But it’s also about the audience, making sure the objective experience comes across when mixing. Trying to catch yourself in a state of passive thinking while hearing the song.

Do you just try to imagine the listener, keeping the process private? Or do you send demos around for feedback?

LK: It’s pretty private. Those moments are caught when I’m mixing and literally falling asleep. I’m less aware of what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m happy with where it is, and then, as I’m mixing, I’m starting to hallucinate a little. That perspective shift informed a lot of how I wanted the album to sit sonically, because you really start to see the shape of something, when you’re falling asleep.

It’s tricky, figuring out the extent to which you allow the music to sit in this limbo state. 

LK: Definitely. I feel like this album was the first time I felt we’ve expressed that in a way that’s not too abstract or kaleidoscopic.

There’s a sense of awareness around the idea of the album title in lines like, “Excitement is not the same as anxiety/ My body wants to know what the difference is.” It’s such a direct, non-abstract way of expressing that dichotomy. Does the line ever get blurry, for you, between restless creativity and self-consciousness?

AR: Certain life experiences made those feelings physically feel very similar in my body. Musically, I’ve mostly found a lot of clarity in the difference. I can see and feel my nerves before playing a show, and I can see and feel my excitement about doing the same thing. I’m able to tease them apart better now. At first it was really overwhelming – not being able to see the nuance, just reading everything as anxiety and really feeling that leading up to experiences that are supposed to make you feel good. Because you’re choosing to do them, you’re getting validation for them, even though sometimes rejection is really close by. It doesn’t matter, because there’s nuance to it.

LK: I honestly never thought about how much clarity that brings. It kind of repersonalizes you and places you in reality, and you can see the difference between the two.

The album’s escapism or nostalgia is often rooted in memories of a child self, especially in Ash’s lyrics. Luna, I’m curious how you resonated with Ash’s recollections of growing up, and what it feels like for both of you to sing those lyrics together.

LK: It’s interesting, because it’s really easy to just keep moving forward and not think about that stuff necessarily. But the words really put you there. Even more so than live, during the recording of the album, that was another variable that reminded me: just do what you would have instinctually done before making a bunch of albums and becoming so self-critical. Just follow that childlike inspiration.

AR: Because when you are a kid and you’re creating, you’re not necessarily so self-critical. But if you’ve gotten used to being so self-critical, it’s hard to get out of your own way to create. That’s an instance where you give yourself more grace by reconnecting with the child self. And we both grew up in Connecticut, so a lot of the natural imagery – there are certain places you know I’m talking about.

LK: Yeah, for sure.

Luna, did Ash’s lyrical perspective affect how you mixed the vocals?

LK: Yeah, it definitely comes from a similar place. I don’t want to totally obscure the lyrics or bury the vocals in the mix, because they feel important. That’s so often done.

AR: On that note, I do feel like they’re louder than people are saying they are? They’re not fully buried like so many other–

LK: They’re texturally placed. They’re definitely in the mix. In the session, they’re loud, and they’re mixed a certain way so that they could be very present. I don’t know, it’s still hard to hear, I guess. [laughs]

AR: I guess it’s still hard to hear, but not to me.

LK: For us, we’re like, “Cool, we can actually hear every word.”

AR: But also, I have a specific example of her psychological mixing with my voice. I remember in the studio, when we were recording ‘in my head’, I did a vocal take, and when she was mixing the vocals – we don’t normally put any effects on the voice. At least on this album, we were very clean vocally,and I think the last one too.

LK: Yeah, there isn’t any effects on either.

AR: But on ‘in my head’, there were a couple of specific, time-stretchy things that you did with my voice, like the stutter effect.

LK: That’s all the 404MK2’s stutter effect, just layering, trying to create space without delay, reverb, modulation and stuff – keeping to the idea of using what’s there. So those were just chopped-up samples over and over and over again, layered – kinda sounds like reverb.

AR: But it had to do with the lyrics. The way she edited them was informed by what I was singing about – the feeling of being lost, and being okay with it.

LK: Yeah, we’d take the lyrics and play with what you would imagine the sound of the word to be, I guess.

Jumping to the final song, ‘make it last’, was it more or less of a challenge to stay true to the original feeling?

AR: That was an intense struggle for me, sticking to the original feeling of that song. For a lot of the time playing that song, I was improvising lyrics. Actually, both of those songs, I was improvising lyrics before we recorded. In my head, I could improvise about being lost, riffing about breadcrumb trails or whatever whenever we’d play it. But ‘make it last’ felt a lot harder to stick to my guns about, and the lyrics of that song changed a bunch.

LK: That was probably the first one of this batch of songs we started playing live. It’s always the same, and then that ending section that’s just one chord for a long time, we kept stretching more and more. We do that probably for like 15 minutes at shows now, so that’s changed a lot. But the beginning of it came from me trying to be simple structurally: there’s three sections, repeat that, then do a long chord and don’t go crazy with it. That was also the first time I tried layering sounds to make a synth sound for that sound in the chorus. I was chopping stuff, stacking an “ooh” of the vocal with one note of a guitar, and a bunch of other elements to create the sound. I had layers of both of us singing the melody, then I played it on guitar, resampled it and changed the pitches, to create a lead. That was really fun.

Could you share one thing that inspires you about each other?

LK: I mean, the fact that you always want to keep going. That’s awesome, I’m down for that. To find someone that is also just pushing forward really hard.

AR: Something that inspires me about Luna is that whenever she doesn’t know how to do something, she’s just gonna figure out how to do it, but in a way where she’s very detail-oriented, which I don’t necessarily – I’m working on it. I’ll often throw myself into things, but the way she’s gonna look into all the details of something and actually get so good at the thing. It’s almost as if she never didn’t know how to do it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Total Wife’s come back down is out now via Julia’s War.