There’s an old saying of dubious origin you’ve probably heard before, and it goes like this: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
After a fast decade of going it alone, Philadelphia quartet Sheer Mag are ready to go far. Once dubbed “the best band nobody can sign,” the famously independent power-pop bruisers inked a deal last year with Jack White’s vinyl-focused Third Man Records for their third LP, Playing Favorites, released last month to widespread critical acclaim.
Following years of courtship from top-shelf indie juggernauts like Merge Records and Rough Trade, 38-year-old frontwoman Tina Halladay says it was finally time to seek out a little support in the interest of longevity.
“For a long time, there were a lot of things we didn’t need a label for. We were able to kind of figure it out,” she told Boulder Weekly ahead of the band’s April 22 gig at Hi-Dive in Denver. “I think we just got to a point where we reached the limit of what we can do on our own. If we’re going to keep doing this after 10 years, maybe it’s time to lean on somebody else a little bit.”
While the band has built a sterling reputation as one of the decade’s most electrifying underground rock bands on their own terms, Halladay says signing with a label has thumped Sheer Mag to a new orbit that would otherwise be out of reach.
“It’s all stuff I don’t understand. I think that’s the reason we did it,” she says. “We’re on the Billboard charts for the first time ever. It’s like, what even is that? I have no idea what that means, but obviously it’s something good that doesn’t happen if you don’t have a label.”
‘Room to breathe’
Listening to Sheer Mag’s latest collection alongside full-length predecessors Need to Feel Your Love (2017) and A Distant Call (2019), you’d be hard-pressed to find a fissure between now and their storied DIY days. Driven by the blistering peal of Halladay’s unmistakable and uncontainable voice, Playing Favorites continues a road-tested tradition of big guitars and bigger hooks that won’t leave your head for weeks.
“It all has to do with us having the room to breathe and figure out what kind of band we are,” Halladay says of sharpening their signature style. “Having a recognizable sound is a very difficult thing. That happened by just doing things on our own for a while.”
But it’s not all familiar terrain on Playing Favorites. New shades abound on the dreamy disco boogie of Side-B standout “Moonstruck” and the sprawling orchestral swell of “Mechanical Garden,” which finds Halladay waxing on the communal grief of the last few years from a wider lens: “Everyone’s breaking down / it’s gumming up the works,” she sings in a register somewhere between a snarl and a sigh. “I guess I’m gonna take a cab to the city.”
“I told my story for so long, and this record is more about human experiences instead of just my own,” she says. “The other day I was like, ‘Didn’t everybody have a mental breakdown during the pandemic?’ The band was kind of teasing me about it, but now they’re agreeing and realizing it’s true. Maybe it’s a collective trauma we’re addressing.”
This American knife
With the support of a powerhouse label behind them, Sheer Mag are doing more than tinkering with the edges of a proven sound. The proud working-class band, whose proletarian heater “Expect the Bayonet” became a fixture at Bernie Sanders rallies in 2020, are also leveraging this opportunity to improve their own labor conditions as they embark on a new phase of their career.
“We were just reminiscing about the first sprinter van we ever rented. It was actually poisoning us,” says Halladay, who tends bar in Philly when the band isn’t on tour. “All our boogers were black — we were just covered in soot. It’s like punishing yourself to do this thing you wanna do really bad. Obviously we’re not doing it for our health.”
This tradition of grinding through hardship is nothing new for Halladay, who grew up in poverty with a father who suffered from addiction and a mother who juggled multiple jobs while raising four kids by herself on Long Island. Asked how her upbringing might have influenced the person and artist she would become, the plainspoken punk singer says it likely put some steel in her spine.
“I’ve never really given a shit about what anyone thought. I’ve always had a stronger sense of self,” she says. “I was the only one who went to therapy — not like actual expensive therapy, but poor-people counselor therapy. I think that helped. I’ve never been apologetic about who I am.”
Given Halladay’s experience growing up on the sharp edge of this American knife, her band’s longtime refusal of an easy payday is all the more remarkable. Now that Sheer Mag is facing their next chapter with a well-funded creative partner to help execute the vision built on their own over the last decade, the band is eyeing the future with a bit more wind in their sails — a sure way to go far, if not fast.
“We always did things the hard way — which can be, you know, hard,” she says with a laugh. “Now I feel like we allow ourselves more grace to maybe take it a little easier on ourselves than we did 10 years ago. I guess we just know who we are now.”
ON THE BILL: Sheer Mag with Cleaner, Flora de la Luna and Glimmer of Nope. 7 pm. Monday, April 22, Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway, Denver. $20