LOVING FUN

LOVING FUN

Sheer Mag work smarter, not harder

Hilary Pollack

Sheer Mag’s newest song was written using artificial intelligence.

The sentence above might set off alarm bells of shock and horror if one were to learn it entirely out of context. THAT Sheer Mag? The iconic Philadelphia garage-punk outfit that’s written so many of the best powerpop songs of the past decade? With those killer riffs and the Thin Lizzymeets-Freaks and Geeks vibe? I’d worry about the future of rock ’n’ roll. But before I continue, let me tell you a bit about the song, made using the AI tool Udio. It’s a real Whitesnake-esque hair-metal crusher; the

vocals howl, “This ain’t a concert, it’s a revolution!” with the same ferocious energy as David Coverdale or Dee Snider; the guitars blaze; the drums crash. It has a face-melting, mullet-banging guitar solo. It would have made a seamless addition to the Monsters of Rock compilation that captivated late-night TV audiences in the late ’90s. To put it succinctly: It rocks. “Sheer Mag—they’re rock ’n’ roll gods!”

And Sheer Mag agree. They’ve been opening their shows on this 2024 tour for the release of their third full-length album, Playing Favorites, by blasting the hell out of the autogenerated track to herald their ascent onto each stage night after night. “Sheer Mag was made for you!” the song wailed through the walls of Los Angeles’ Lodge Room, where I recently watched them rip through their set with their signature wild-hearted, windswept (literally; there’s always a fan on stage pointed at singer Tina Halladay) cool.

Earlier that day, we convened over Mexican food at a Highland Park restaurant called My Taco, a name that is equal parts charming and disconcerting. Over a massive spread of tacos, guac, and quesadillas, the band played the AI song for me out of Halladay’s iPhone, cackling with delight. Our modern reality has reached unforeseen levels of ridiculousness, and while the threat to creative industries from AI is concerning (“apocalyptic” is probably a better word), there’s surely dark humor to the infinite possibilities—positive and negative—that this technology could hold. (A friend of mine recently used the same app to create a Phil Spector-esque ’60s girl-group song about how Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.) If you’re worried the band has lost any ounce of its DIY ethos and eternally punk spirit, rest assured that they’re very much in on the joke; rhythm guitarist and lyricist Matt Palmer quipped that he “wanted to steal the guitar solo" from the AI track.

WHY SHOULD THE MEMBERS OF SHEER MAG

BE SITTING AROUND WORRYING ABOUT EMAILS WHEN THEY COULD BE FIRING UP HOT-ASS LICKS?

But while some of the band’s steps forward into the future with the release of their new album Playing Favorites may be tongue-in-cheek, others are more earnest. For the first time in its decade-long run, the band has signed with a label (Jack White’s Nashvillebased Third Man, home to an impressive slate of releases from artists ranging from Alex G to Coldplay to the Melvins to Waxahatchee), started working with a professional publicist (they used to avoid interviews and social media), and subsequently outsourced the menial administrative tasks that distracted the group from its main focus: writing absolutely killer rock songs. This all makes sense—why should the members of Sheer Mag be sitting around worrying about emails when they could be firing up hot-ass licks? “For so long, I was just writing emails all day and not working on guitar stuff, and it was quicker to get burned-out,” lead guitarist Kyle Seely says. “It’s great to just be able to focus on the fun and the stuff that we’re good at.”

Although many of Sheer Mag’s sonic influences— Thin Lizzy, ZZ Top, AC/DC, Cheap Trick—were ’70s and ’80s stadium acts, their roots are unequivocally in DIY. Fiercely committed to self-sufficiency and autonomy, they made it through three EPs, two fulllength records, and a live album without involving many third parties. In the band’s earlier days, they lived in a punk house called the Nuthouse, spraypainting their logo on the wall. But after the tour cycle for the band’s critically acclaimed 2019 album A Distant Call was “kneecapped by CO VID," in Kyle’s words, they realized that the band had outgrown the figurative skintight leather pants of doing virtually everything themselves as their audience widened.

For Halladay, being back out on the road is cathartic, but also kind of weird. During the pandemic, she became more of a homebody, and like many others, she’s still in an adjustment period of figuring out her bandwidth for socializing. “So much of what we do [as a band] is just being around people.... It’s like I have to train my brain not to be [introverted anymore]. I’m still dealing with, like, I’m lonely, but this is what I want. Or do I? What’s happening?” As the band members trudge into the second half of their 80s, they have the distinct feeling that it’s now or never. “I realized, I’ve got to make this shit happen before I’m too old. But I don’t feel old....” Halladay says. “But then I’ll be like, my back! My eye! Last tour, a vein in my eye popped—inside of my eye, my retina burst and my vision got all blurry, and I had to get eye injections once a month. When we started this tour I had two fractured ribs—I got COVID and coughed an insane amount, and the pressure fractured my ribs. But I think the worst is over.”

Physical ailments and lingering pandemic blues aside, she’s more comfortable as a lead singer now than ever before. She has always been an assertive, no-bullshit kind of person, but the incidents of sexism and boys’ clubs are fewer and farther between than earlier in the band’s career. “I used to walk into a room and sometimes they’d think I was the merch girl. But my photo’s over there on the poster! I’ve gotten better at just walking into [venues] and projecting a different thing,” she says. “Most of what I’m dealing with [as a woman in rock ’n’ roll], everyone has to deal with—men in their life who don’t realize certain things, because they’ve never had to think about it. So it’s basically just me doing that with four people at a time.” There’s no denying that between her searing vocal delivery and commanding stage presence, she’s just a really, really good lead singer; one who is proud to have inspired other women to pursue music, but who also rejects categorization. “No one wants to be portrayed as a caricature of who they are.”

Halladay and the band have been through countless trials in recent years; while already dealing with the “isolated, crazy times” of COVID, Halladay’s father passed away as she went through a painful breakup, and soon after, the band lost a close friend. “These past five years were so bad—so much happened,” she says. “I can’t believe it’s been five years [since A Distance Call], because those first five years of the band, we were doing so much."

After their last record, the band started feeling the tension of being “big fish in a DIY pond," heightened by their frustration that they’d lost the ability to tour and promote a record they were extraordinarily proud of. After this much critical acclaim and reverence within the scene, how couldn’t Sheer Mag believe they were ready for bigger stages, unless they were allergic to success? Now they understand the appeal of both outsourcing the less creative elements of bandhood and of wading a little further into the mainstream. “We’re entering a different game, I guess,” Kyle says. “It feels the same day-to-day, but I do think that we have a much better distribution [with Third Man]."

Being in a rock band these days—putting aside the insanely fun parts, like shredding in front of a bunch of people singing along to your songs every night— can feel like an uphill battle. Money is increasingly elusive, relegated in dwindling quantities to a smaller and smaller subset of channels and platforms. “DIY will always keep on going. It’s more like the middle class [in music] is disappearing,” Palmer explains. “There’s always gonna be small bands—that’ll never die. But to be in a band that plays in front of 50,000 people...it can feel like you’re nothing or you’re, like, Taylor Swift.” The money in music is starting to feel more and more like one of those old-timey cartoons where Mickey Mouse forlornly saws a single bean in half. As much as the band knows there’s room for growth in their trajectory, they know they’re already in an advantageous position compared with many of their peers. Yes, they are pissed about the state of things—but they’re going to enjoy this, dammit.

A Distant Call was a concept album about survival in a personally challenging and politically daunting world, a swinging political-punk manifesto with lyrics about crooks in the Senate and being denied SNAP benefits. But on Playing Favorites, Sheer Mag intentionally dial back on the capitalism-gloom misery and take the opposite approach, leaning into more levity and fun with the aim of healing the past five years’ “collective trauma,” in Halladay’s words, by writing the catchiest songs that the band could possibly conjure, without any other distinct goals or narratives in mind. They describe the record almost as a revenge project against the pandemic; a supreme fuck-you to the misfortunes of the past five years in the form of joy as a revolutionary act.

“We were on a tour a couple of years ago where every night we were just getting drunk in the van and listening to Christine McVie Fleetwood Mac songs,” Palmer says. “They’re so to the point. ‘You Make Loving Fun’ and stuff like that. They don’t have to secretly be more complex or be about the Trump era or something like that. It’s a less is more’ thing."

There’s so much to be angry about in the world— wealth inequality, racial injustice, the war in Gaza, the futility of our government, the cost of health care, the algo, the popularity of TikTok, the potential banning of TikTok, influencers, people who cut the line when boarding groups are being called out at the airport, bunions, mosquitoes, being left on read, single-use plastic. Can’t rock music still allow us some escapism, instead of endless rumination? “[This album] is not gonna have a concept about Schindler’s List or anything," Palmer says. “My favorite albums are just a bunch of bangers, you know?”

The album opens with a war cry, a declaration that they’re getting the hell off their couches and onto a stage near you: “When you ring a bell, it can’t be unrung/I can’t sit around at home where I don’t belong,” Halladay sings, “So we packed up the van, just like the old days." There’s an extra kick of roller-rink disco beats on “All Lined Up,” no shortage of sing-along choruses, and a guest solo from Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar on “Mechanical Garden.”

Listening to the second track on Playing Favorites, “Eat It and Beat It,” I couldn’t help but think about the good old days of classic rock ’n’ roll feuds, like that of, say, Nirvana and Axl Rose, especially with Sheer Mag’s penchant for nostalgia. “Take off your number/You had a good run/Or at least that’s what you tell yourself,” Halladay sneers. “Take a break/It ain’t a mistake/And everyone can see/You just don’t got what it takes/To make it in rock and roll.” The lyrics are giving “diss track,” so I had to ask...is that directed at anyone in particular? If the song is a drive-by on any other bands within the scene, Sheer Mag are tight-lipped about it. I offer to start beef with an artist of their choice, just for fun, but they’re not interested. “It’s actually kind of self-directed,” Palmer says. “After it was done, I realized, [these /yrics] are all of our worst fears come to life.” Maybe it was some sort of exposure therapy to out their insecurities of “not making it,” of ending up irrelevant. The higher you aim, the greater you might fall—and the bigger your audience and the harsher the stage lights, the more risk there is of failure.

With the new album, the band is unapologetically keen on letting go of cynicism and showing a more vulnerable side. On the tender “Moonstruck,” a love song about the horny, confusing tingles of a crush emerging when you’ve long been mired with loneliness, Halladay sings, “It’s just been me for so long/It gets harder just to go on/I need some loving arms to keep me warm.” Sheer Mag have never shied away from material about love—after all, getting laid and feeling confused about whether your mushy feelings are reciprocated are what most great rock songs are about—but their sentimentality never feels sappy. “On ‘Moonstruck,’ I was trying to combine weird Southern rock, like Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band, with disco, different influences that maybe aren’t the newest thing you’ve ever heard, but I hope we’re combining them in certain ways that are fresh,” Kyle says.

While much has changed since A Distant Call, even more about the band’s approach and perspective has stayed the same. Halladay, Palmer, Kyle Seely, and his brother Hart Seely, the band’s bassist, have been the band’s four core members since day one, although they recently added a new drummer, Evan Campbell, also of Philly punk-metal outfit Zorn. (Sitting next to me at My Taco, wearing sunglasses indoors, he shrugs and says, “I’m the best [drummer],” and I believe him.) Sheer Mag haven’t strayed far from the blueprint that has made them one of the greatest bands of the American underground: Halladay’s unmistakable sour-patch-candy vocals, equal parts warmth and grit; bluesy guitars full of memorable hooks; an impressively tight rhythm section; and most important, a joie de vivre, capturing unbridled house-party, crusha-beer-can-on-your-head pleasure. Sheer Mag purists need not fear that just because the band is thinking bigger and catchier, they’re going to dilute their Heavy Metal Parking Lot soul. “I like to think we have fans that don’t want us to deviate too much or do too much,” Palmer explains. “They like our formula.”

I ask if they’re tired of being compared to Thin Lizzy (no), tired of being called arena rock (no), or tired of being interviewed about being “cool” (sort of—they tell me they don’t trust journalists and, like many other artists, have reservations about how they’ll be portrayed in stories written about them). Even as the journalist tasked with writing this story, I get it—who could blame them? Only crazy (in a bad way) people like being “perceived”; the rest of us simply want to be seen and appreciated.

After gorging on Mexican food and yapping about Fleetwood Mac, Jeffrey Epstein, and other topics of importance, we headed to the backyard of a friend of the band’s to play a rousing round of Stump, a delightful, incredibly dangerous drinking game popular in upstate New York (the band’s original four members met while all attending SUNY Purchase). A couple of rounds pass by uneventfully—all nails remain erect. Then Palmer lights a cigarette and lets it dangle from his lips as he flips the hammer. “Now we’re talking,” he says with a grin.

“I might just have to finish you off,” Kyle grins at Palmer before missing his intended nail and hammering his own farther into the stump. “Jesus Christ. At this point, I’m doing a Hail Mary.” Palmer swings and nearly hits Hart in the shin; he jumps back from the stump and we all laugh nervously.

At the Lodge Room show later that night, halfway through the set, the band invited a friend to join them on stage, which quickly evolved into a surprise wedding proposal. The crowd roared and cheered as the newly engaged couple sucked glorious face on stage. The sweetness in the room was palpable— but soon transitioned into a more riff-driven emotional release when Sheer Mag kicked into a fist-pumping cover of “Cum On Feel the Noize.” There’s no question that the band is serving as much energy as ever, and that Palmer is right: The people like the formula. The people, friends and fans alike, just want to rock. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The AI was right: This ain’t a concert—it’s a revolution!

SHEER MAG’S FAVORITE DRINKING GAME

Sheer Mag know a lot of alcohol-related activities that have a low likelihood of grievous bodily harm. For instance, there's Strangers in the Night, which is simply listening to Saxon’s 1980 banger “747 (Strangers in the Night)” and drinking every time the word "night” is in the lyrics (it’s in there 26 times). There’s another game called Get God, but “it’s impossible to explain,” Kyle says. “Only 10 guys on the East Coast know how to play it.” But why talk about those when we can talk about a fun game that involves sharp things, flying hammers, and alcohol?!

STUMP

Stump is a charming pastime that, like many fun things, is also a great way to get maimed or blinded. Here’s the gist, should you wish to play along at home: You will need a large tree stump, a hammer, and enough nails for every participant.

1. Each person gently hammers a nice, long nail into the top of the stump just enough that it remains upright.

2. Take the hammer by the handle and flip it into the air, catch it after one or more revolutions, and immediately try to hammer each other’s nails into the stump as fast and hard as you can—one swing per turn.

3. The person whose nail is the least hammered into the stump after everyone else’s is the winner!

The nails sometimes go directly into the stump as intended, but other times they fling out of the stump in unpredictable directions, create showers of sparks, or elude the hammer, causing it to swing toward the extremities of whoever is close by. The Seely brothers have distinct memories of Stump from their time at SU NY—“It’s very safe,” Hart says, “but sometimes nails would fly out and go through chairs, or in the direction of people sitting at eye level.”

Enjoy! Bye-bye fingers and hello urgent care!