ALMA
Interview conducted September 16, 2021
By Dan Locke
NYC-based trio ALMA bring a quirky, cinematic DIY approach to dream pop. Often compared to artists like Sylvan Esso, Tune Yards, The Staves, and Dirty Projectors, their music is immersive, chock full of vocal harmony and homegrown production. Collaborating with industry giants Elliot Moss and Ted Jensen on their debut record, ALMA crafts a sound that is purely and uniquely their own. Their genre-bending freshman effort, Mosaic is due out this Fall.
ALMA is comprised of Alba S. Torremocha (vocals, strings, bass, drums, guitar, uke) Lillie R. McDonough (vocals, piano, Glock, violin, hammer dulcimer), and Melissa K. Carter (vocals, guitar). The trio formed in 2019 out of a shared delight in harmonizing and experimentation with quirky instrumentals and old-fangled synthesizers. They discovered certain alchemy in the combination of sensibilities as film composers and audio engineers that have made for a genre-bending offering to the wide world of indie-pop. Elements of Folk, Rock, Grunge, Pop, and even movie soundtracks are all at home in their songs.
How did you start to write music?
Each of us started writing music at different times and for different reasons. Lillie was always writing scores inspired by Disney songs, according to her parents. Melissa grew up being obsessed with The Spice Girls and first started writing songs for her friends at daycare. Alba was writing and conducting full orchestra pieces at age 13, you know… just for fun.
How did your band form? How did you get your band’s name?
ALMA formed in summer of 2018 from a three way call on a humid night “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool to start a three-part harmony pop band?”
Later that summer, all three of us found themselves singing in harmony while eating camembert and drinking wine at one of Lillie’s cheese parties, and ALMA was born. Cheese and wine has been a must at our rehearsals ever since!
How did you get your name?
ALMA is our initials: Alba, Lillie, and Melissa! It also means “soul” in Spanish.
Describe your music. What is the process of writing your music?
We all split up the writing and producing evenly: we have each led the development of four songs on our 12-song debut album, but everyone always has a say in every aspect of the creative process.
What was your first performance as a group like?
We performed at The Footlight in Ridgewood, Queens. During our set, balloons were tossed around by the audience and our friends cheered us on. Honestly, we thought it would be scary but it was just plain fun.
Tell me about your Debut LP Mosaic?
Mosaic is a story about our relationship with New York City, our home, but extends beyond the skyscrapers of the city itself and explores how our memories live inside the spaces we inhabit. Through the music itself and through our personal stories, we will invite the audience to sit beside us on the subway, walk with us through Astoria park, and ride the Wonder Wheel at night to form their own relationship with this city that we call home.
What is your favorite track on the record?
We’d have to draw straws to answer this one. We’ll just say this… we love all of our children equally.
During the lockdown you started a series of videos “Seaside Sessions” This started almost a year ago. And you just completed your episode 7th of the series. Are there any plans to keep it going? Who came up with the idea of the series?
We love our stripped down Seaside Sessions! It’s an opportunity for us to dive into our songs in a much more vulnerable and open way. During lockdown, we decided to start a month-long residency where we all got together in a house by the sea and focused on creating and recording music. This has become a yearly tradition, and the Seaside Sessions will always be attached to it. Episode 8 (Big Green American Dream) should be up in there now! We’ll keep recording Seaside Sessions every summer during our residency!
Tell me about Sips of Oxygen? How were Sips of Oxygen inspired by WH Auden’s poem?
When Lil’s mother in law, Joanne, got sick, we were in the midst of preparing a 4th of July party (her favorite holiday), so there was a sense in which we were literally putting away the good and beautiful and normal things as we prepared for our last moments with her. Carefully putting away the party cups, the tables, the un-cracked beers highlighted how wrong the world felt. And it was this feeling that became the basis for the opening “chant” of Sips.
Through Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues,” he systematically asks the reader to put away each beautiful thing, each normal thing, because since that person was gone, “nothing now can ever come to any good.” That’s the feeling. So when writing the opening of Sips we echoed the chant-like nature of Auden’s poem, and the literal act of putting away to express the wrongness of those early days.
