Trey Shilts and Leo Dolan are Finnish Postcard, a rock band based in Los Angeles, CA. The band formed in March of 2022 after the pair met and became fast friends, connecting through their love of music and tendency to overwork when it comes to creating.
Dolan has been in Los Angeles for about four years now, after moving from Bend, Oregon. Shilts made the move about a year and a half ago from small town Red Bluff in Northern California.
“We have weirdly parallel stories,” Dolan said. “The reason we’re both — not the reason we’re in L.A., but the reason we met and the reason we’re in the music scene is cuz we both dated girls who are from, born and raised, in Los Angeles. That was our gateway into the music scene. And then we both went through breakups around the same time.”
“It’s weird for two people to have that similar of a thing happen, but its cool because there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in the DIY West LA scene that we got to be exposed to and stuff like that is kind of hard for you to find if you’re just coming into L.A. cold,” Shilts said. “So, very thankful.”
Photo from Finnish Postcard Instagram
Dolan and Shilts have both been making music individually since childhood.
“I was in a band when I was in 8th grade, and we played a lot for being 13 year olds,” Dolan said. “We played probably like 25 or 30 shows and, I don’t know, probably since like 7th or 8th grade music had just… took over my life, and there kinda has never been anything but music for me since. It’s kind of a single path for me.”
“I’m envious sometimes that you [Leo] grew up in a place like Bend, with an actual community of artists and bands and stuff for people who are young. Cuz I grew up in a place where that was not a thing at all,” Shilts said. “And the music scene of people that I was a part of was like, me and like two friends who were just in ten bands that never played shows. And just one of our friends happened to have like a back house at his house where we could be loud and play drums and stuff. But I think that that really informed my kind of trajectory of just making music in a room and then posting it on the internet, and eventually kind of finding a community of a bunch of other people who were doing that, like the lo-fi bedroom rock kind of online scene. It wasn’t until I came to L.A. that I really… found a bunch of other musicians who were from a similar lineage and, you know, could potentially be in bands with me and stuff, to kind of see a way to do that.”
Shilts and Dolan recorded their solo projects themselves — in their bedrooms. Shilts played in a number of bands and Dolan collaborated with other local musicians on projects, however, neither really *clicked* with another creative until they met one another and created Finnish Postcard.
“We’re just both… obsessively and clinically always doing it to the same degrees, which is nice. So we’ll just be like, hitting up texting a voice memo of an idea. All the time. We’re like, ‘Listen to this song, I think that we could do something like this part of it.’ So it’s just kind of this constant conversation,” Shilts said. “But we do have those Paul and John moments, where we’re literally facing each other with guitars, and that’s fun, and I definitely never thought I would be doing that with anybody.”
“I didn’t think I could have a writing partner that was where we felt as… healthy I guess? I didn’t think I could just bring shit to the table in this way.” Dolan said.
The two met when Shilts was performing his solo work at an art gallery that Dolan happened to be visiting. Dolan sat to watch Shilts play, and approached him afterwards. They bonded over their shared interests in bands like Elliot Smith, Iron and Wine, Alex G, and more.
When they first began creating music together, Dolan lived on the West side of L.A. while Shilts lived East. Dolan made the drive, during rush hour, upwards of four times a week to jam until eventually deciding to move into Shilts’ shared living space, called The Musician’s Loft — an old brewery turned into housing, with a top floor dedicated to musicians; equipped with practice rooms, miscellaneous communal instruments, and even a recording studio.
“I moved here entirely for this band,” Dolan said. “And it’s been awesome.”
Both Dolan and Shilts have retired their solo projects since the creation of Finnish Postcard, however Dolan does have an EP done.
“It’s gonna come out next year at some point. I just don’t know when,” Dolan said. “Cuz I just… I don’t really care about my solo music anymore. I wanna make Finnish Postcard.”
Photo by Quynn Lubs
When listening to Finnish Postcard, the first thing one notices is the juxtaposition of acoustic instruments mixed with electronic sounds, like drum machines and synthesizers. Dolan credits this to Shilts’ experimentation. The two are constantly surprising each other and themselves when they sit down to create or share new ideas.
“I think it really comes down to like, what I had easy access to when I was learning how to record, and I am really, super lucky that my family is pretty musical,” Shilts said. “And I’m the youngest child, and so there were hand-me-down instruments around, including acoustic guitars, and synthesizers, or ya know, like keyboards, and so that was just the stuff I was recording first, so I think it’s kind of what I learned how to write with. And I just really like the sound of acoustic instruments. I think they’re so evocative and can be used in really cool ways. I guess the answer is that I’ve never really thought about it. I think it’s just kind of something that came naturally to me.”
Dolan is known to experiment more with “computer stuff,” according to Shilts. The two use Logic production software, where Dolan messes around with pitch-shifting, vocoding and more.
“I loved music when I was young that wasn’t super produced. I loved songwriter stuff, whether it was like raw sounding, garage band, early Strokes stuff, or like songwriters, really simple acoustic guitar music. I kind of came up playing acoustic guitar music cuz I could just see a way forward, I was like ‘Oh, I can be on stage alone with a guitar and a voice, and I can write full songs. So I’m just gonna try to write with that in mind,’ starting around the time I was like 16, that’s what I was doing.” Dolan said.
He continued, “I love that stuff, but if you really like music, you just run out of… like, to make really barren songwriter music seems really boring to me right now. You can kinda take a form, like guitar and words and vocal lines, and how can you make it feel really essential and right now? Or how can you just make it feel different than the stuff it might have been influenced by? I use drum machines cuz they’re easy. And I love how they sound. There’s some mixture of electronics and acoustic that feels so… taboo or something. To have an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. It still is a kind of subversive thing to hear for some reason. I don’t know why.”
Photo from Finnish Postcard Instagram
When it comes to lyricism, the two share a love for the abstract and complex.
“Even when lyrics don’t make sense, in the, like, you’re reading them and there’s a story or something, the reason that you wrote them is because they do make a kind of sense. They make the right kind of sense for the song, I think,” Shilts said. “It’s just allowing yourself to kind of lose your mind a little bit, and allow yourself to actually get at the bigger thing rather than what you can kind of accomplish just with straight forward lyrics. And I think that’s something we both have in common.”
Finnish Postcard has four songs out on all streaming platforms. They are working on an EP to come out in 2023, with sound engineers/producers Ryan Pollie — who mixed and mastered Finnish Postcard’s latest single, Monuments/Leaving Home — and Joey McMann.
“They [Pollie and McMann] both run studios, and they’re both in the same world where they have really similar recording approaches where they’re very… they don’t really use software. They use a lot of vintage hardware gear, which is cool as fuck.” Dolan said.
“We have an engineer and a producer, and we’ve only ever done stuff basically just us two,” Shilts said. “It’s really nice to feel that supported and have a team like that.”
What does Finnish Postcard hope to accomplish with their music? When asked, Shilts said, “We want to make stuff that we like. And that’s always changing, and it always should change, and I think that’s priority number one is just following that, and not trying to do anything else.”
You can stay up to date with all things Finnish Postcard by following them on Instagram, TikTok, or checking out their website.
Finnish Postcard is available for streaming on all platforms.
Watch the full interview below!
Full Interview Transcript:
L: I’m Leo, I am in Finnish Postcard, I’m originally from Oregon, and I live in L.A.
T: I’m Trey, I am also in Finnish Postcard, I’m from Northern California in a town called Red Bluff.
Q: So both of you guys aren’t originally from L.A.?
T: No.
Q: And you’re both kinda from, like, woodsy-vibes?
L: We have weirdly parallel stories. The reason we’re both — not the reason we’re in L.A., but like the reason we met and the reason we’re in the music scene is cuz we both dated girls who are from, born and raised, in Los Angeles. That was like our gateway into the music scene. And then we both went through breakups around the same time.
T: It’s weird for two people to have that similar of a thing happen, but its cool because there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in the DIY West LA scene that we got to be exposed to and stuff like that is kind of hard for you to find if you’re just coming into L.A. cold. So, very thankful.
L: Yea, I spent a year in L.A. not knowing anything and not knowing anyone. So I had a year of being like, ‘How do I be a musician here?’ and then it kind of happened all at once when I met the right people.
Q: When did you guys move to L.A.?
T: I’ve lived here for like a year and a half. I moved here like the May before last I believe.
L: I just passed four years. I moved here August of 2018.
Q: Both of you make music individually, right? I know… I interviewed both of you for your individual music so I know… but how did you both individually start like getting into the whole ‘playing music’ thing?
L: I was, like, in musicals a lot when I was young and loved acting. My earliest memories are, like, wanting to perform and be musical and theatrical. Yea, I think I sort of… I was in a band when I was in 8th grade, and we played a lot for being 13 year olds. We played probably like 25 or 30 shows and, I don’t know, probably since like 7th or 8th grade music had just like, took over my life, and there kinda has never been anything but music for me since. It’s kind of a single path for me.
T: That’s really cool. I’m envious sometimes that you grew up in a place like Bend, with an actual community of artists and bands and stuff for people who are young. Cuz I grew up in a place where that was not a thing at all. And the music scene of people that I was a part of was like, me and like two friends who were just in ten bands that never played shows. And just one of our friends happened to have like a back house at his house where we could like, be loud and play drums and stuff. But I think that that really informed my kind of trajectory of just making music in a room and then posting it on the internet, and eventually kind of finding a community of a bunch of other people who were doing that, like the lo-fi bedroom rock kind of online scene. It wasn’t until I came to L.A. that I really was like… found a bunch of other musicians who were from a similar lineage and like, you know, could potentially be in bands with me and stuff, to kind of see a way to do that.
Q: What kind of music, like when you [Leo] started in 8th grade you were in a band, what kind of music did you guys play?
L: It was like garage rock. We like covered Strokes songs and Ramones songs. Green Day and The Strokes were the two big bands for me, like, until like I was like a freshman those were pretty much the only two things I cared about were Green Day and The Strokes.
Q: You [Trey] played like the lo-fi stuff. Do you think that that that’s still kinda where you’re at or do you think you’ve like…
T: I’m tip-toeing out of lo-fi bit by bit into what could absolutely still be considered lo-fi. But, now we’re working on… should we talk about that?
L: Yea.
T: Yea. Now we’re working on an EP with, co-produced by Ryan Pollie, who has, you know, kind of an illustrious career of working with really cool people and making really cool stuff. He has a great studio that is high-end lo-fi, or something along those lines. It’s definitely elevated, but still retains that essential lo-fi kinda quality. But also, I was only ever a lo-fi musician out of necessity because I just had a computer and like a thing that I could plug a guitar into and I was like, didn’t know anything about mixing or producing or effects, and just was like, ‘I’m gonna put some gain on my voice so you can’t really hear how bad everything sounds.’
L: My first solo stuff I released that aren’t on streaming anymore are same way where I like, I don’t know what I was trying to do but it was super lo-fi, and it kept a lot of soul but like my first record we did the drums, we recorded a lot of it in a library. In like the study rooms at a library. I feel like only in the last couple years have I came around to lo-fi as an intentional choice and what you can take from low fidelity music, and like, what conveys emotion really well in that type of music. I don’t know if I ever wanted to be super hi-fi, but I just like was just making music that sounded as good as I could make it, which was pretty lo-fi at the time, so.
T: And it’s like, the music that we connected with early on was like, Elliot Smith, Iron and Wine, Alex G, who are all like very lo-fi in different directions kind of I guess. There’s so much, I think, soul and spirit that can be captured when you’re not trying to make the cleanest thing possible, and I think there’s something raw about that that attracts both of us.
Q: That’s so funny, I was listening to your single you released and I was like, ‘This sounds like Alex G.’ And it does. It’s very good.
T: Wow. That is a huge compliment.
L: We take Alex G very seriously.
Q: Me too, me too.
Q: And Ryan, he produced your single too, right? So are those gonna be on the new EP coming? T: We kind of made those ourself and then were like, ‘Hey Ryan, we have this new band called Finnish Postcard, would you be down to like, take the stuff that we recorded and make it sound cool?’ And so he just mixed those, but we really just, that process was really fun. And we’ve worked with Ryan a lot over this last year. Yea, so those won’t be included on the EP, but they’re very much so part of that trajectory towards working together.
L: Yea, I feel like something we are like, wanna do is like, I have done the singles thing a lot, and it just gets super tiring and stuff. So, I think Finnish Postcard likes to release bodies of work kind of all at once. We only have four songs that are out now, but it felt really cool to just put em out and be like, ‘This is it. You can listen to all of it at once.’ And I think the EP is gonna take a similar trajectory.
T: Yea, and there’s so much pressure from like the modern, quote-on-quote I guess ‘way’ that people release music, at least that I know of and that we know of is like, it’s very like, ‘Oh, ya know, you’ve gotta hit your 4 weeks before, put out a single,’ or you know, whatever.
Q: Like the ‘blueprint,’ like the single, then the 3 song EP, and then the full album.
T: Right, for maximum impact. But honestly, personally, I love it when a band just drops a thing. I’m still probably gonna hear ‘the single,’ first, like somebody’s probably gonna show me the single off of the EP or whatever but then when I go to listen to it, it’s all there. And singles lately, for me, probably because music is this super demystified thing where you can just get it all for free all the time, they kind of take some of the fun out of an album. Like, I love the experience of just going to an album and listening to the whole thing.
Q: Like in order, all the way through. The way it’s meant.
L: Yea, and if you hear singles first you’re just like, there’s like if you listen to a song like a certain number of times, you kind of go through phases with the song, where you’re like getting used to it, and then you love it, and then it’s like the greatest song ever, and then it almost feels more like nostalgic after awhile where it’s like, ‘I remember when I had a burning fire for this song, but it’s not there, but I can still like kind of connect with that.’ So it’s cool if you can have that relationship with an album.
T: Yea, totally. And then you still have a relationship with the songs. I don’t know, if you’re putting out singles and stuff, I don’t think that that’s wrong. And it’s probably smart and like, it’s how its worked for a long time. But I think right now we’re very interested in the idea of just, kinda going against that grain and just putting stuff out.
Q: What’s it like working with another person when you’ve been making music by yourself for most of your life?
T: I mean, for me, I was making, we were definitely both making music by ourself, but I was to a way more intense degree I think. And I’ve been in lots of bands over the years, but like, it just never really worked out.
Q: Or like, it wasn’t yours.
T: Yea, something about it, like the creative chemistry just wasn’t really there because I’m like, you know, used to doing it on my own, so that bond has to be like perfect. And I never really found anything that worked until meeting Leo, and we started writing songs together.
L: It’s pretty crazy.
T: That was like a year ago.
L: Yea. When I was making solo music I was more like, I was always working with people and producing and co-recording with other people, but never really like the writing phase as much I guess. Me and Trey will like, write songs while sitting next to each other, which is like, I always thought that would be cool, but I could just never do it with like anyone for some reason. We’ll just like have ideas flyin. We’re both like pretty vision oriented. Like I feel like we’ll bring stuff to the table and it won’t be like an idea, it’s more like, ‘The song sounds like this and the drums will be like this, maybe a bassline like this,’
T: Yea just using like crazy adjectives that don’t mean anything.
L: Yea.
T: We’re also just both like obsessively and like clinically always doing it to the same degrees, which is nice. So we’ll just be like, hitting up texting a voice memo of an idea. All the time. We’re like, ‘Listen to this song, I think that we could do something like this part of it.’ So it’s just kind of this constant conversation. But we do have those like Paul and John moments, where we’re literally facing each other with guitars, and that’s fun, and I definitely never thought I would be doing that with anybody.
L: I didn’t think I could have a writing partner that was where we felt like as… healthy I guess? I didn’t think I could just like bring shit to the table in this way.
T: Right, and be like, ‘Oh that’s sick,’ and like, ‘Oh, I don’t really like that.’
Q: Being honest.
Q: How has it changed, since like, cuz you’ve [Trey] been livin here for about a year and then Leo moved in like two months ago, so how has it been with you guys living together with the music? T: It’s honestly just been way easier I think from my side at least. Because Leo lived on the West side, and I didn’t have a car for a lot of that time so a lot of it was Leo was driving his Ranger over here, two, three, four times a week.
L: In rush hour.
T: Just cuz that was like, when it had to happen and we just had to do it. Now it’s like, I work remotely so when Leo’s off, I just walk out of my room and we’re like, ‘What’s up? Should we work on something?’
L: I mean, I moved here entirely for this band. And it’s been awesome.
Q: That’s cool.
L: We have way more time to work on shit. So much of my week was going to driving, cuz I was driving here to work on stuff. Now I like, I’ve been like reading again, which I couldn’t do for like six months cuz all my time was driving.
Q: Are you guys mostly focusing on Finnish Postcard now, or are you guys still doing your solo stuff? L: We both pretty much retired our solo projects.
Q: Yea?
T: Yea, they’re on hiatus.
L: I have an EP done, but I don’t know. It’s done, I just don’t know when it’s gonna come out.
T: And it’s really good.
L: Thanks dude.
T: It’s gonna come out at some point.
L: It’s gonna come out next year at some point. I just don’t know when. Cuz I just, I don’t really care about my solo music anymore. I wanna make Finnish Postcard.
T: Solo music is always like a necessity thing, I think for both of us.
L: Yea, we’re like ‘Fuck, no one else wants to work as often and as hard as we wanna work.’
T: It’s belligerent that we want to because there’s no real reason. Just like, ‘Okay, well I gotta keep doing this somehow, so I guess I’ll do a solo project.’ But being in a band is so much more fun. It’s not just all about you and you’re like, ‘Come see me at my show and buy my stuff,’ it’s like, ‘This is a thing that I made with somebody else.’
L: Also like a base level of this band for me is that I’m just a huge fan of Trey’s music, so I get to like, play his music in this band, which is cool. Part of my duty is to help Trey’s songs reach people the way they’ve reached me.
T: And totally vice versa. like we both get to kinda be, still basically be ‘songwriters,’ but also be kind of producers of each others’ stuff into the same stuff. I feel like I could talk about it for a long time, but it’s cool.
L: Those like, four songs, you can like measurably split up which parts came from me and which parts came from you [Trey]. It’s so cool. What vocal lines you wrote, what guitar part I wrote.
T: And then some stuff is like, I don’t even remember. That was like, in a weird fugue state where we were both like editing stuff at the same time and writing.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish with your music?
T: Ya know, that is the question. I think the biggest thing is that we want to make stuff that we like, and that’s always changing, and it always should change, and I think that’s priority number one is just following that, and not trying to, you know, do anything else.
L: Just keep surprising myself and being stoked on stuff that I make.
T: It’d be cool to get signed and tour and all that, but from knowing bands that do that stuff, it’s like, that is really fun, but it’s also not a means to a sustainable life in music on its own. So I just try to live in the moment. Keep enjoying it.
Q: It’s also like, when people get signed sometimes their creativity gets taken out of it.
L: That would suck.
T: That would really suck. The idea of somebody else being involved, and like all these like crazy Google Calendar email, Zoom meetings and stuff is like, unless you have a great label, I think it’s really hard for that to be fun.
Q: What inspires you when you’re sitting down to write something?
L: I feel like more and more of my songs are kind of like patchwork emotions, where like, I keep a big Google Doc in my phone of just lines that pop into my head, or like, little verses and stuff, and when I’m writing, I open it and see if I can make any of it work. Not having to take stuff at, like, a literal meaning. I feel like I became the songwriter I was trying to be when I was like, able to write with less directness and less specificity. Songs don’t have to make sense on a face value to mean something to people.
T: Even when lyrics don’t make sense, in the like, you’re reading them and there’s a story or something, the reason that you wrote them is because they do make a kind of sense. They make the right kind of sense for the song, I think. You know? It’s just allowing yourself to kind of lose your mind a little bit, and allow yourself to actually get at the bigger thing rather than what you can kind of accomplish just with straight forward lyrics. And I think that’s something we both have in common.
L: Cuz songs are not like literature or stories. Songs are something else. Even the best story songs are just pretty simple if you just look at the words. The emotion’s being conveyed, through something else. Through a song, which you can’t really make sense of it. You know?
Q: So one thing I noticed when like listening to Finnish Postcard, is there’s a lot of the, like, electronic synth-y stuff and then mixed with the kind of acoustic vibe. I really like it, I think it’s a really cool juxtaposition of using the old ways like the acoustic, and then mixing it with all the electronic stuff. How do you go about experimenting with that?
L: Trey’s great at it.
T: Thanks. Thank you, dude.
L: You’re welcome.
T: I think it really comes down to like, what I had easy access to when I was learning how to record, and I am really, super lucky that my family is pretty musical. And I’m the youngest child, and so I, just, there were like hand-me-down instruments around, including acoustic guitars, and synthesizers, or ya know, like keyboards, and so that was just the stuff I was recording first, so I think it’s kind of what I learned how to write with. And I just really like the sound of acoustic instruments. I think they’re so evocative and can be used in really cool ways. I guess the answer is that I’ve never really thought about it.
Q: Yea? T: Yea. I think it’s just kind of something that came naturally to me.
L: I think I’m pretty experimental too, right? T: Well, Leo’s crazy with his like, in the computer stuff. Cuz we’ll be recording something and like, there’ll be some fuck-up that happens, and he’s like, ‘Yo, let’s take that and like, pitch it up, and then put a vocoder on it…’
L: I love pitch shifting shit.
T: So, I think we both love experimenting and, view kind of being in — we both use Logic — being in Logic as kind of, like, that’s like, the sandbox of songwriting, or a big part of it.
L: I like, loved music when I was young that wasn’t super produced. I loved songwriter stuff, whether it was like, raw sounding, garage band, early Strokes stuff, or like songwriters, really simple acoustic guitar music. I kind of came up playing acoustic guitar music cuz I could just see a way forward, I was like ‘Oh, I can be on stage alone with a guitar and a voice, and I can write full songs. So I’m just gonna try to write with that in mind,’ starting around the time I was like 16, that’s what I was doing. I think, you know, it’s like, I love that stuff, but if you really like music, you just run out of… like, to make really barren songwriter music seems really boring to me right now. You can kinda take a form, like guitar and words and vocal lines, and how can you make it feel really essential and right now? Or how can you just make it feel different than the stuff it might have been influenced by? I use drum machines cuz they’re easy. And I love how they sound. There’s some mixture of like electronics and acoustic that feel so, like, people have been doing it for a long time, electric acoustic music is not new, but it feels kinda like, taboo or something. To have an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. It still is like a kind of subversive thing to hear for some reason. I don’t know why.
But I definitely am mind-blown by you, Trey.
T: Thank you.
L: There’s been times where we’ve been workin on stuff where I’ve just been like, ‘What the fuck is this, Trey.’ And then it turns into something. Like I just had an a capella vocal one time that Trey like, we were playing with this plug-in called ‘Little Altar Boy,’ that I had just got for like 30 bucks. He made like this crazy chordial vocoded thing. It was so sick.
T: So fun. Leo had like done this thing where he just kind of sang this really simple melody to these cool lyrics he wrote about… what was that about?
L: Yea, it was totally true. I was just like, in Venice walking around, and this dude came up to me, and he was this like incredibly well-kept dude. He was like, perfect haircut, rosy skin, he had a heavy Irish brogue, like Irish accent, blindingly white t-shirt. And he just came up to me and I had like, I was like listening to music, and he like talking to me, I was like ‘What?’ and he was like, ‘You have so much going for you.’ I did not know this guy. He’s like, ‘You’re beautiful, and just remember to be thankful for your family. Remember to be yourself. I love you. You have so much to be thankful for.’ And then he just like, went off. I turned around and he had turned the corner and I never saw him again. And I had a feeling that he might have been an angel, so that’s what the song is. And I was like, listening to this stupid audiobook about how to like, take charge of your life.
T: Oh my god.
L: It was causing me stress! They were like, fuckin, ‘Just make sure you like, have a good career and stuff.’ And at this time, I was like, ‘I’m a musician who works at a restaurant.’ I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have a career at all.
T: Oh my god, and then this angel comes up to you and is like, ‘Forget all that stuff, dude.’
L: ‘You have so much to be thankful for.’
T: So anyway, the lyrics were about that story, and he just kinda sang it dry to nothing, just by himself. And he’s like, ‘Let’s try to do something with this. Let’s do something weird,’ and he had this cool, I think you [Leo] heard about it from Finneas, like Finneas was talking about it on some show or something?
L: I love Billie Eilish.
T: It’s just like this thing where if you plug in vocals to it and you have a keyboard in front of you, you can make the vocals like, be that note, so we did like five tracks of that to this like weird, Jazz, crazy, Stevie Wonder chord progression. It was really fun.
L: And I’m like, ‘This can not be a Finnish Postcard song, there’s no way.’ And then at the end I was like, ‘Oh, yea.’
T: Maybe it could.
Q: Maybe.
L: That’s fuckin crazy.
T: I think that we’re always surprising each other. Leo always surprises me when he just comes out of his room and he’s like, ‘Hey, I just worked on this like, thing. What do you think?’ and I’m just like, ‘Dude, this is…’ Like your melodies, like, you’re always just writing stuff. I couldn’t do a Leo impression if I were like, writing a song. We’re friends. Deal with it.
Q: How did you guys meet?
L: Trey was playing a set of solo instrumental guitar music at an art gallery that I was at. And I just sat and watched him for awhile. And then I cold approached him after. And I was like, ‘I wanna be friends with you.’
Q: That’s so beautiful.
T: Yea, it was really cool. And also this is just Leo being like, who he is. Which is just, very outgoing in the most genuine way. It’s one of the awesome things that can happen when you come into contact with him. You might start your favorite band.
Q: When is this new EP, when do you think you’re gonna get goin on it?
T: We started recording a couple weeks ago.
L: We’ve done a ton of pre-production. Like, the songs are pretty much arranged.
T: We have, like, full recordings of all of them that we’ve made ourselves.
L: Two people that are kind of in our greater scene, Ryan Pollie and Joey…
T: Joey McMann of Structurally Sound Studios.
L: They both run studios, and they’re both like in the same world where they have really similar recording approaches where they’re very, they don’t really use software. They use like a lot of vintage hardware gear, which is cool as fuck.
T: It’s super cool.
L: Cuz we’re super, we do tons of software stuff. We don’t have any outboard gear.
T: And we don’t know that world that well. But yea, workin with Joey, we recorded a song with Joey recently that is gonna be a part of this EP, and working with him is so funny because we’re both like lightning fast on Logic because we’ve been using it forever, and he’s like, blowing our minds with his ability to understand all these preamps and compressors and stuff, and he’s so slow on Logic. He’s like, just such a perfect fit for us. And Ryan is really similar in his love and appreciation of old analog gear.
L: Joey’s crazy cuz we just record with him and once we get the stems back, they just sound done. Cuz his gear is so nice it feels like you wouldn’t even have to touch the song.
T: It’s like mixed already.
T: So they’re both really cool, and we kinda had a four way powwow about making this record together. We have an engineer and a producer, and we’ve only ever done stuff basically just us two. It’s really nice to feel that supported and have a team like that.
L: Crazy drummers, too.
T: Oh my god, yea. We have a few session people. And just the wider kind of circle of musicians that we know are all kind of getting involved in one way or another. It’s fun, I love making music not by myself.
Q: Do you guys have any shows coming up or are you hoping to play shows soon?
T: We are hoping to play shows soon. We have some stuff that’s maybe gonna happen but nothing to announce. But, we’re actively seeking out house shows and stuff, so if you’re watching this and you put on house shows or you know someone who does…
L: Hit us up.
Q: Where can people follow you?
L: We’re on the web.
T: We’re on the web. I think Instagram is the best way to follow us. We’re on TikTok. I highly recommend checking out our dumbass TikTok. We are so bad at it. We’re on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music. You can find the music everywhere. We have a website, finnishpostcard.com
L: It’s pretty sick.
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