Photo by Violet Teegardin
When childhood friends Rand Kelly (guitars/vocals) and Ramsey Bell (bass) met Josh Resing (drums) at DePaul University and decided to form a band, they were just a group of friends looking to scratch a creative itch. Their earliest efforts, like 2017’s Susan’s Room, captured a carefree charm – scrappy indie rock recorded using Garageband at Kelly’s parents’ home. As the years went on, the band’s ambitions grew and led to touring the midwest and relocating to Lexington, Kentucky to take advantage of a lower cost of living and focusing on music full-time. Then came a brutal stretch of setbacks, from canceling tours to experiencing personal losses, the trio questioned whether it was all worth it.
While many bands would have packed it in, The Slaps doubled down and leaned into improvisation and embraced their weirdness. Inspired by free-jazz and post-modern experimentalism, they stretched their sound on 2023’s Pathless, an entirely improvised release, and explored folk traditions on This is My First Day at Drawing. These influences collided brilliantly on the band’s latest album, Mudglimmer, an album that feels like the culmination of everything The Slaps have weathered. It’s raw, confounding, and utterly them — a record born of existential threats and redefined purpose.
Drummer Josh Resing popped into a friend’s boutique in Chicago to join a Zoom call to discuss the album, the journey to this point, and what it means to embrace the chaos of the road.
You’re in Chicago today. Is that where you live?
JOSH: The rhythm section lives here, me and Ramsey. Our guitarist/singer lives in Atlanta.
Did you all live in Kentucky for a little while?
JOSH: We did live in Kentucky. The bassist and guitarist have been friends since they were five years old. They grew up in Lexington. I grew up outside of Chicago, in Elmhurst. We all ended up coalescing at DePaul University in downtown Chicago.
Chicago has always had a good music scene, and it seems like there’s a strong sense of community there. Does it feel to you like there’s currently a strong scene?
JOSH: Yeah. It’s been sort of rebuilding. When we were coming up, it was in the wake of the whole Twin Peaks vibe. They were holding it down from 2012 to 2017-ish. And then there was just a huge outgrowth of house shows. If you were in a band, you could play a show every weekend all year long at 10 to 20 different houses. They might not even be established DIY venues, but people just throwing shows. The music was happening. There were bands that were maybe together for just a year, it was just friends who were like, “We’re going to play music this year.” And there weren’t huge dreams of becoming something.
In the wake of the pandemic, and in the wake of that scene of this strewn about playing music for the love of the party, there are these bands that survived it, bands like Friko, Free Range, Girl K, us. Bands have blown up, like Beach Bunny, who is huge now. That was all in the same scene as playing house shows for the fun of it.
It’s starting to turn back around now because everyone has to do their duty of, “We have to keep doing this, we can’t just keep playing house shows. We’ve got to get out of the state. We’ve got to play bigger markets, go check out smaller markets, just get the music to people’s ears.” If you’re doing it independently, you have to tour. There’s no easier way to distribute the music unless you want to do the TikTok thing.
For local bands, sometimes the biggest dream they have is to play the big venue in town. Is playing The Metro a dream of Chicago bands?
JOSH: We ran into this sort of ethos on our last tour. It was like, would you rather play the big venue where you don’t really have the connection with the fans, you’re elevated above them, the venue wants you to have a merch seller? Or would we rather play a 150-cap listening room where people are seated, and the performance is at eye level, people are connecting with you as you are, just as musicians? I can just get up from my drum set and I’m immediately talking to people that just heard what I did. There’s no escaping or pretending to be anything you’re not. You just immediately turn back into the person that you are. There’s no curtain.
Obviously playing the Metro would be sick, but I’ve always just really enjoyed that experience of being part of the crowd almost immediately and not having to hide away. There’s a lot of anxiety for me that comes with that.
People who follow you on Instagram see when you post tour dates, and it all looks like fun. What’s it really like for a band like The Slaps to go on tour? What don’t people see?
JOSH: So this last tour, we did a bunch of B markets that we don’t play often or have never played. For instance, we played Grand Rapids, Pittsburgh, Portland, Maine. Canada is always a toss-up. It’s kind of that same five-year cycle. You have kids that are in college, and they might like your band for the years they’re there, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of transplants in Toronto and Montreal. We have some years where we’ve got plenty of fans that are coming out to Canada shows. And then some of the years we go back, and it’s like, well, just got to restart here again because that crop of people isn’t there anymore.
But the cool thing about our band is that we have maintained a cult following. No matter what city we go to, there’s usually a solid group of super serious fans. They know all the words, they know a lot about us, and they just want to connect with us through the music. I think that’s what’s most rewarding – we can go to a town we’ve never been to and meet someone that’s been listening to our music since the beginning, that has just been waiting for us to come there. It’s a really big deal to them and it makes all the grunts of the day go away.
On this last tour, we had some big flagpoles. We played a huge show in New York, played a great show in Boston. The Detroit show was pretty good, and the Chicago show was good. It was kind of like a mixed bag this run, play to a couple of crowds that are only 30, 40 people and then play some bangers that kind of literally just keep the gas going.
Do you ever look at those dates, in the middle of a tour and on an eight-hour drive between shows, and think, “What are we doing? Is this even worth it?”
JOSH: All the time, but it always ends up being worth it. I remember one time we had to get from Seattle to Madison, Wisconsin. It was like three days, but on the third day we played that night. And you’re just looking at it like, “What are we thinking? Who is doing this?” And then we ended up playing a great show in Madison and we’re home again. At the end of the day, you’re like, “Well, at least we’re on the way home.” It’s really scary when you’re halfway through a tour and you have a really big drive to a city you’ve never been to. And if it doesn’t show out, it’s just painful. I had one of those days this week where you’re just kind of like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this?” I ended up getting some really good advice from an artist. She was like, “As long as you still feel like you’re playing the game, you haven’t lost.” At the end of the day, in those 10-hour drives or you’re going to a small city, at least you’re still in the game. It’s when you tap out that it starts to feel bad. And shout out to Rand and Ramsey, if one person wants to tap out the other two have enough gusto to be like, “Don’t worry, I got you. It’s going to be fine.”
At my day job, I just had to turn in my year-end self-evaluation. I’m going to make you do that for me. I had to talk about what my goals were for the year and then determine whether or not I met those goals. Were your goals at the start of 2024 to record and release an album and then play some shows to support it?
JOSH: Pretty much. We also wanted to not just release a record but release a record better than we’ve ever done before, preferably getting experience with working with publishers, working with distro or one of these legs of what a label would offer us.
My boss would call that thinking outside the box and taking on new challenges. Do you feel like you were successful with all those new things you took on with the release of this album?
JOSH: Yeah. I think that we were surprised by how if you just ask for something, without ego, just being like, “Hey, we’d really like to work with you, we’re willing to put the money up that we can to do so,” a lot of people are willing to work with you. In the instance of finally working with publicists, it was a very short negotiation. They were like, “Thanks for reaching out to us. Yes, we’d love to work with you. Does this price work?” We’re like, “Turns out, yeah, it does.” You’ve just gotta put your best foot forward. It costs what it costs, you’ve got to swallow the pill. If we want people to hear the music that haven’t heard it before, you’ve got to get the right people for the job and you’ve got to hire them. So that was super successful. I wouldn’t be talking to you if it wasn’t successful.
And then we reached out to Sugar Records, a local Chicago record store that puts out local music. I reached out to them. I was one step away, one handshake away, and I finally met the owner and he’s like, “Dude, I’d love to support your record. Let’s do it.”
You’ve just got to believe that what you’re doing is worth it to somebody.
Another part of my self-evaluation is talking about how I collaborate with others. Besides being the drummer, what is your role in the band? Do you also have songwriting credits?
JOSH: What we like to say is that we’re a capital B band, as in everybody has a high amount of output on all levels. We all write words; we all write progressions. I might write a guitar part that Rand ends up playing or Rand might write a drum part that I end up playing. On “Fool,” we all wrote different verses. Rand and Ramsay wrote the verses, then I wrote the chorus, and it all came together as a really beautiful song. It’s just a driving rock song.
We’ve never really written a song the same way. The songs come out of jamming, they come out of poems, taking something that’s either super basic and turning it into something complicated, breaking it down. It’s usually 33% from each of us. It’s really just beautiful. I don’t know of a lot of bands right now that operate the way we operate.
The other part of collaborating is not just collaborating within your team – or, in your case, your band – but collaborating with others, whether it be other musicians, other people in the music industry, promoters, journalists. Are you out there contacting other bands to play shows with and things like that?
JOSH: Within the band, we’re all pretty different. I’m a little bit more of a homebody artist. I don’t go out too much, I just try to keep my peace. But I do go to shows, I try to stay in the community and be someone that makes things in the community happen. I’m hosting an improv session in December for people. I’m inviting 20+ artists out to do a two-hour improv session. If I’m doing something, I want it to be worthwhile for everybody. But I do really enjoy going out to shows. Last night, I went out to the Empty Bottle to support the record fair they do, hanging out with Discog sellers and buying records.
Ramsey plays in other bands, Rand plays in other bands, they’re pretty tapped into that kind of community.
Between the three of us, we cover a lot of ground. When it comes down to actual collaborations with The Slaps, it’s always a group conversation. I feel like we tend to be pretty to ourselves.
The last part of my self-evaluation is to discuss how I represent and live the company values. Within The Slaps, do you have your own band values or maybe do you have personal values that you exhibit every day?
JOSH: We’re a music first group. Everything else is always falling to the wayside, for better, for worse. We’re not focused on branding. We’re not focused on marketing. It’s all about the art itself and creating things that we are proud of and not too concerned with how they’re perceived. We believe that if we continue to do what we think feels good, and what is expressionism to us, that that’s what it’s all about. The journey we’re on is enjoying each other and enjoying the music that the three of us make and the worlds that we can inhabit together. Whenever we play together, it’s just such a joyful experience.
One of my personal values is to be a good human. What do you contribute to being a good human or can you think of someone in your life who you think exhibits this value?
JOSH: I think we all just admire each other. It takes a lot to be in this industry and not let it poison you. We’ve worked with all different kinds of people here and some for the best and some for not. You just gotta know when it’s not working for you and people have different values. The main thing that I follow is intuition. If it doesn’t feel right, then it’s probably not right. And trusting each other’s intuition as well, that baseline of being honest and clean about it and not being deceitful. Sometimes that’s boring to people, but it just makes me feel the best at the end of the day. I’m not doing this to do anything other than make delicious music.
We’re done with the self-evaluation part of the conversation. Given your age, what value do you put on music? With streaming services in the palm of your hand and more music than you can ever listen to, is music disposable to you or are you a collector of physical media that you spend a lot of time with?
JOSH: I’m a collector. I collect all forms of physical music. I’ve got a tape player in the car. That was one of the prerequisites of the cars I was looking at. I was like, “If I’m going to get a car, I want it to have everything. I want to have a tape player and a CD player.”
I’ve got my record player, I’ve got my vinyl collection. And then I’m obsessed with mixing on CD. I have this cool Gemini robot thing. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly for restaurant usage but I use it to mix. It’s very basic, it just has a looping function.
I’m always listening to music and finding new ways to enjoy it. That’s one of the joys of mixing – you can make it enjoyable again, even if you think you’ve outgrown it, you can put it back on and find a loop or something that is cool.
You guys have talked about your influences and nearly every review I’ve read for the album references bands from the ’90s. How did you discover bands like The Sea & Cake and Tortoise? Those are bands I’ve seen mentioned.
JOSH: I had very incredible private teachers as a kid, guys that have gone on to run the entire percussion department at colleges. If you do an hour lesson, the first 20 minutes of any good lesson is warming up. That would be the moment where they’re putting me on to music and we’re just playing on a drum pad to cool tunes. It gets you in the current of what’s tight, what’s cool to listen to. That’s how I got super into stuff.
I got into The Sea & Cake and Tortoise because I interned at Thrill Jockey for a summer. I was lucky enough to inherit records from like my dad’s brothers, just weird stuff. Then you’d go to the record store, once you have records, you’re involved in the trade, and embracing that and being like, “Word. I have this record, I’ve had it for like five years, haven’t listened to it in a year,” and then go trade it in, grab something new and random and not being afraid to not like it.
Your sound to me is indie jazz. I’ve described it as uncomplicatedly complicated. You take advantage of space; you’re not piling things on, there’s not a dozen instruments on each song. It’s kind of sparse and that sounds complicated to me.
JOSH: I hear that. I think we have songs where it’s like, “Oh, here’s the important part.” We made it to the landing place of this song. Like with “Soul’d and Settled,” that’s one of the longer songs on Mudglimmer. It’s very much a build to a landing place. It’s not that the message becomes clear, but the emotion does. I think that is complicated in a sense where it’s being able to build to an emotion instead of it being consistent and obvious from the top.
I think we all have a huge appreciation for classical music and being able to pay attention long enough to get the reward. There’s other songs on the record where it’s like, “Oh, now they’re just a rock outfit.” It doesn’t have to be complicated to be cool, it just happens to work. Giving each other space has been huge. An obvious example of this is bass drum patterns. I think all about my bass drum patterns and how they give Ramsey space to play.
You’ll often find in my phrasing that maybe somebody would have put bass drum notes there but I don’t because I want people to take a second to listen to something else.
The song “Flip” has a couple of recognizable guitar parts. I think I hear “Low Rider” by WAR and maybe something by the Allman Brothers. I love that.
I think “Filthy Sex Maneuvers” is my favorite song on the record. What I appreciate is that the last couple of songs are as strong as some of the ones earlier on the album. It doesn’t just whimper to an end.
JOSH: I think we could have made this really complicated for ourselves in terms of sequencing. Rand made a sequence, Ramsey made a sequence, I made a sequence. And then one day we took our hands off for a second, just listening and I’m like, “Dude, I think I got it. I think I figured it out.” I sent it over and everyone was like, “That’s the right way to do it.”
I’m not a fan of fade outs. I know it’s not good for streaming, but I think that ending is part of songwriting. It’s not a complete song if there isn’t an ending. A fade out can be an ending, but it needs to be a choice. It shouldn’t be, “Well, we faded it out because we don’t know how to write an ending.” All that to say, on both our 2022 album, Tomato Tree, and Mudglimmer, the last song is a fade out.
I’m not positive but I think the first time I heard of The Slaps was when Bailey from Friko and Free Range mentioned you in an Instagram story. I’m open to being influenced by artists that I’m a fan of. So, with that being said, are there any bands or albums that you’re particularly jazzed about right now that you’d like to turn me and others onto?
JOSH: We just toured with Noah Pope and Shane T, which are both Nashville artists turned New Yorkers. They write really nice singer/songwriter songs. Noah’s married, he’s a young man, and he writes a lot of love songs that are hard not to enjoy.
Is there something you’ve recently discovered that might not be brand new that you think more people need to know about?
JOSH: My favorite band is Happyness. They’re a Canadian band that is really stellar. It seems like you’re already pretty in tune with a lot of the Chicago bands that I would normally put on. Ramsey plays in another band called Feller. It’s heavy music, but they’re also a trio. There’s some there’s some like other smaller Chicago bands like Modern Dairy and Blinker.
My favorite guy out there right now, I think he just changed his name, there’s a good dude out of Massachusetts that makes sweet hyper-pop called Lucy Cooper B Handy. His lyrics are worth it, he’s just a smart person. We’ve played shows with him and he’s super inspiring. He dances on stage, it’s just him. He plugs in his phone and he’s got all his MP3s playing out of his phone. He’s just a total performer.
I’ve got two more for you. Anyone on Rent Control Records, it’s ambient electronic stuff. It’s a SoundCloud label. Good friends of mine, great producers. And then, Hataałii, a Navajo artist from Arizona. Great performer, great band.
Is that a plan for 2025? You’ve got West Coast dates already announced. Anything else tentatively planned or you seeing where the proverbial road takes you?
JOSH: The current thought is to record as much music as possible in 2025. I want to do some state-by-state extreme coverage, like hit every city in Ohio, hit every city in Michigan. There are these relatively big cities that are worthwhile. It’s so sad when people only play Chicago, LA, New York. There’s beautiful people everywhere that have great ears, just go to them.
