“The new single “Crown” is a shimmering slice of pop-Americana, riding gentle waves of guitar and draped in weepy pedal steel while Spino contemplates then vs. now. The song is from a 7-inch Coma Girls will release on Dec. 20 and one of the first two tunes (“Smoking Gun” is the other) that the songwriter penned after arriving in L.A. ”
Coma Girls - “Smoking Gun” b/w “Crown”
For Chris Spino, the creative nexus of Los Angeles jangle-pop/folk rock project Coma Girls, reinvention is paramount to longevity in any artistic endeavour. If allowed to stagnate, art becomes recursive and its impact diminishes. After forming Coma Girls in Atlanta in 2014 and releasing a lo-fi rock & roll LP (Coma Girls, 2015), Spino felt the incoming pressure of stasis and made a decision: he sold his belongings, moved to Los Angeles with no more than a backpack full of clothes and a guitar, set up in a hotel room in Culver City, and immediately wrote the songs that would become Coma Girls’ new 7-inch, “Smoking Gun” b/w “Crown.” “When I got to L.A., these were the first two songs I wrote,” says Spino. “I hit this wave of creativity as soon as I got here and these songs just fell out of me.”
The new singles, out December 2019, are a marked departure from the shimmering garage-pop of Coma Girls’ self-titled debut. The fuzzy ‘60s reminiscent tones pervasive on Coma Girls have been replaced with a nuanced clarity, allowing Spino’s confidence as a songwriter to shine atop a more sparse sonic landscape. Atmospheric swells of pedal steel and harmonica dance around chord-driven guitars, pushing the sound almost into alt-country territory, while Spino’s silvery vocals and memorable ‘50s-pop influenced melodies give the songs a timeless feel that refuses to be bound by genre lines. “I never want to keep doing the same thing,” says Spino. “I always want to keep pushing forward and trying new things, new sounds. The genre or aesthetic is arbitrary. I just want to get lost in a song, whether that song sounds like Motown, or shoegaze, whatever, I just care about how it hits me when I listen to it.”
While Coma Girls began as a four-piece power-pop band, these days Spino is the only permanent member, writing all of the songs himself and bringing in a rotating cast of players as the songs necessitate. For “Smoking Gun” and “Crown,” Spino teamed up with Thayer Sarrano (Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal, Cracker) on pedal steel, fellow Los Angeles-via-Atlanta transplant Shepard Martin on drums, and brought in Winter’s Anders LaSource on harmonica. The singles were recorded straight to tape by Tomas Dolas (Oh Sees, SASAMI, Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel) and were co-engineered by Mac DeMarco drummer Joe McMurray at Dolas’ studio in Los Angeles.
Coma Girls’ new 7-inch marks Spino’s emergence as a formidable voice in the modern indie-rock conversation, and lays the foundation for his next artistic phase. Uncontent to simply sit still, Spino has already been working on Coma Girls’ follow-up and continuing to expand his sonic palette. “I’m always going to unabashedly do whatever feels natural to me,” he says. “And these songs definitely feel right.”
“Smoking Gun” b/w “Crown” is out this December via Baby Robot Records.