Bronze, Venus Club, and Giant Day

 

The seeds of Bronze were planted, curiously enough, at an avant-garde Japanese noise show. Dylan Ryan and Scott McGaughey first met as teenagers at DePaul University in Chicago, recognizing each other as having attended the same Ruins show, kindred spirits converging in the Chicago indie rock underground. They played in various rock bands in the 90s, but they found they had a particular itch that was not scratched by the various projects they were involved in; a shared love for the likes of Robin Gibb, Roxy Music, and the soundtracks of Tangerine Dream, the kind of shimmering studio productions that sound luxurious but still push the envelope.

The experiment was backburnered when Ryan moved to LA and started playing and touring with Cursive—at least until one of those early tracks (“Jezebel”) was synched in the breakout A24 film The Florida Project.  At the same time, Ryan was working on another band in LA with Nic Johns—a fellow composer in film and TV with a history in indie bands—and started to realize that he was having a lot of the same conversations he had with McGaughey when Bronze first materialized; the same shared references, the same overlap in record collections. There were lingering influences that kept coming up but weren’t right for that project yet still needed an outlet. 

When Ryan finally asked Johns to join him and McGaughey in Bronze, those separate conversations became one. “It seemed like a very obvious and seamless thing to do,” Ryan explains, “because we were already working on each other’s music all the time.” But there were still challenges. “What’s considered ‘yacht rock’ now were very expensive records made by very expensive session players,” Johns says. “Even though I loved Rupert Holmes as much as humanly possible, I couldn’t foresee myself making a record that sounded that good. How do you do that!?” What they did have was a wealth of experience recording with other bands, as well as scoring and doing cues for television and film. And with no deadlines and no pressure to deliver, they built a creatively fertile environment within which to craft a record that only feels and sounds expensive—a soft rock masterpiece with a DIY sensibility.