Equal Vision Records and NJ/NYC-based indie-rock band The Vaughns are excited to announce the Friday, September 29 release of Egg Everything, an album produced by Joe Reinhart of Hop Along that presents itself as the band’s take on the sampler and an homage to record label mixtape CDs handed out at festivals in the early 2010s — the sharing of a variety of sounds and genres that influenced the band in the form of one release.
Containing elements of both the dreamy indie-pop and the effortlessly cool surf-rock/power-pop hybrid they made their own on previous releases, Egg Everything is looked upon by the band as a vessel to express their innermost emotions in more depth than ever before. Exploring their limits, the result is a record that’s both a continuation of their past and a brand new beginning, one which builds off the legacy they’ve already asserted for themselves while simultaneously marking The Vaughns as one of the most exciting, interesting and original indie-pop bands around today. This is them in their purest, most complete form, with all the toppings. Watch the music video for the album’s new single, “Turn Around,” a song about fear and how it has the ability to take over and dictate our lives, on YouTube HERE. Pre-save/pre-order Egg Everything HERE.
When it came to their second full-length, Anna Lies and Ryan Kenter of The Vaughns wanted to do something special. And so the pair, who formed the band back in New Jersey in 2014, decided that instead of approaching it like a traditional record, they’d treat it like a mixtape. It’s actually an idea they had a number of years ago, but it was only more recently that all the pieces started falling into place. Including its peculiar title. And while titles don’t often mean very much, the synergy of this particular one (and the album as a whole) is worth pointing out.
“We thought it’d be a cool concept to put out an album that was a mixtape, but by one band,” Kenter says. “We were actually just going to call it ‘Sampler’. “Then one day,” adds Lies, “Ryan was in a bagel shop, and he just texted me ‘Egg Everything’ as a title suggestion. It’s a type of bagel a lot of places offer around us, so it’s a bit of an ode to our home state. I also really like it as a verb, the idea of throwing eggs at everything, because I felt that summed up the lyrical themes on the record. Plus, the word ‘Everything’ points to the sampler idea. It was the perfect title.”
The concept of a one band sampler may seem like an ambitious idea, but one listen to Egg Everything’s twelve tracks — ten actual songs and two brief, joyous interludes — and it doesn’t seem crazy at all. Ambitious, maybe, but not crazy. Besides, The Vaughns have executed it to perfection. The follow-up album to their debut, self-released full-length, F.O.M.O., this record was engineered and produced by Hop Along’s Joe Reinhart, who was also at the helm for the band’s 2021 EP (and debut Equal Vision release), rom-coms + take-out. The idea with this set of songs was to bake in the band’s history while also simultaneously experimenting and expanding with hitherto untried ingredients.
The result is a record that runs the gamut of genre — whether that’s the smooth, wistful alt-pop of opener “Dimes,” the gently up-tempo rock’n’roll bounce of “Turn Around” or the jittery post-punk swagger of “Gizzards.” Elsewhere, the gentle lilt of “Bop Star” manages to turn melancholy into an inspiring indie rock anthem, the dreamy jangle of “Mancala” is a rumination on a lost loved one, that implores during the song’s intensely quiet breakdown, ‘we were happy crying together in this God-awful time’ before the song swells into a gorgeous, string-laden crescendo. Yet despite the disparate sounds, it works together as one cohesive whole, and on two distinct levels. For a start, it keeps you guessing, interested, excited — like those old label samplers used to — from track to track, start to finish. Not many albums can say that these days. Two, it’s all underpinned by the tangible intimacy that’s at the heart of these songs.
A wonderful songwriting experiment that embodied the title’s other meaning, Lies and Kenter — with invaluable contributions from lead guitarist Jordan Smith and bassist Brian Hughes — really did throw everything they had into these songs, both musically and emotionally. “We put more of ourselves into this album than anything we’ve done in the past,” says Kenter. “We learned a lot and we grew a lot, and hopefully that shows.” “We went into this with a real ‘Oh, fuck-it’ energy,” adds Lies. “We wanted to make something we liked, because who knows what to expect of anything anymore?”
Egg Everything track listing:
Dimes
Turn Around
Bop Star
Mancala
Sixties
Gizzards
Excuses
Survive
Day by Day
Closer