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written and produced by Krissy Lassiter
engineered by Charles Mueller at Tiny Panther studio in Brooklyn, NY
mixed by Emma Newton at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI
mastered by Heather Jones at So Big Auditory in Philadelphia, PA
performed by Sam Wolff (drums), Olivia Mancuso (bass), Ethan Silver Wheeler (guitar), Joey Fasolino (guitar), and Krissy Lassiter (vocals, guitar)
photography by Bao Ngo
latte art by Julie Patadia
album packaging layout and text design by Favorite Vegetable (Matthew Durkin)
Music Video
Directed by Astrid Dong
Starring Anza Keller
DP Maggie O’Malley
Loader Casey Purtell
Editor Meghan Moynihan
by Mariah Yvi
by Bao Ngo
The Band Sounded Tight and the Timing Was Right
By Emma Madden
Krissanthemum (Krissy Lassiter) makes music in a world without tolerance for a body in pain. The Band Sounded Tight and the Timing Was Right, her first studio album, emerged during years of unmanaged, debilitating menstrual illness—years when jobs kept letting her go and doctors minimized her pain. But the album’s prevailing mood is not despair. Instead, it’s full of wryness and joy: stacked harmonies, chiming guitars, buoyant melodies. The record could only have materialized once Lassiter found a creative community that treated her with the empathy and dignity the rest of the world denied her. If the record tells a story, it’s this one: even when her body was in agonizing pain and the world tried to shift it to the side, she kept showing up for her friends; the band; and making something that sounded like a body in full health. She had to. The band sounded tight; the timing was right.
With stacked, sun-warmed harmonies, arch emotional candor, and the winking deadpan of anti-comedy, the album feels at once tender and funny. In Krissanthemum’s case, pain always lands with a punchline. Leaning into the anti-humor mode of delivering bleakness with a straight face, Krissanthemum is constitutionally funny across the record. Even at her sickest, she aimed to laugh, to be the advice friend. That instinct shapes the album’s emotional temperature: sadness is present, but so is a stubborn lightness. “Watching Gordon Ramsay on the television / I’m not doing enough,” she sings on ‘Pick It Up/Take Me Higher’.
Musically, the record lives somewhere between Elephant 6 psych-pop and bedroom emo: bright, layered, melody-forward songs that smuggle despair inside candy-coated harmonies.
by Mariah Yvi
Before she studied classical composition in college, Krissanthemum grew up overdubbing her voice alone in her bedroom. “I always liked things that had a lot of vocal harmonies,” she says. That carries through here, but now it’s embedded in a band context also: guitars chiming against each other, fat basslines, drums that explode upwards. But the deeper musical kinship might be Jens Lekman: the art of confessing ruin with an irresistible melodic hook. Like Lekman, she refuses to pledge allegiance to a single genre. Arrangements and melodies serve the lyrics, not the other way around.
Across the album, Krissanthemum transmutes the feeling of pain and illness into composition. She weaves repeating patterns into the songs. “Coming Back to the Surface” is built around a baffled refrain—“I don’t know how I got here / and I lost this appendage”—and cycles through the same chord pattern, mirroring what she describes as “the cycle that I was going through over and over again. Just as soon as I got back on my feet again, the problem was just right back in a couple weeks anyways.”
Weed became a big part of breaking that loop.“Being sick every day I had to get myself to feel better, and I definitely needed that medication.” Songs like “Go Ahead, Do Your Thing” are stoner anthems in the truest sense. “It brings me to myself instead of elevating myself,” she says. “It removes the pain and the depression. And the pain and the depression, that’s not the real me. The real me is this happy, funny person.” As the great David Lynch adage goes: “The more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be.” Weed reduced the suffering and made the songs possible. As did good friends.
After losing a job, Krissanthemum formed a friendship with an engineer who had watched her health deteriorate and offered to record the album at a flat, friend-rate. It meant she could finally make the kind of record she’d always wanted to make: one for a band, not a laptop. That physicality is a core part of the album’s ethos.
“My personal goal has kind of always been to make a record– like a physical, vinyl disc,” she says. The artwork reflects that impulse: latte art, sculptures, speakers with wire flowers blooming out of them. “I wanted people to know that this is a physical thing that happened,” she says. “The band was there physically, so I didn’t want it to be this fleeting digital thing.”
The Band Sounded Tight and the Timing Was Right is a recorded document of that rare moment when the world aligns. It’s a testament to what it sounds like to keep creating inside systems that don’t accommodate pain, and to still find humor anyway. It captures the sheer effort and labor of getting through the day, of convincing yourself you’re not weak for needing rest, of learning to say, as Krissanthemum sings over and over: “I don’t have to.”