Earworm engineers

Surprisingly little has changed about the three- to five-minute pop song since it emerged in the 1950s. Even today, despite the boundless possibilities of electronic music production, much of the sound palette has remained more or less the same and many songwriters still rely on the verse-chorus format. It’s a proven formula.

The New York-based indie-rock duo Cults works under those same parameters and, in fact, sound a whole lot like the pop that played through tube radios back in the ’50s. But it took a unique route to get there, says guitarist, keyboardist and back-up vocalist Brian Oblivion.

“A lot of people are surprised that ‘Go Outside’—our first big song and the first song we wrote—hardly has any live instruments,” he said. “There’s some guitar strumming over the second verse, but you hardly hear it. It’s almost all electronic plug-ins and samples. In a way, this has always been an electronic band.”

The CN&R caught up with Oblivion and lead singer Madeline Follin ahead of Cults’ performance at Sierra Nevada Big Room on May 20. The show is a bellwether for the venue’s new direction under Manager Mahina Gannet, who took over booking in March. In the CN&R’s recent Local Music Issue, Gannet observed that Cults plays “100 percent different music than has ever been seen in this room.”

For its part, Cults is stoked to play the Big Room—maybe too stoked. “We’re more excited than you probably think, because Brian is a Sierra Nevada, um, lover,” Follin said.

Leading up to the release of Cults’ self-titled debut record in 2011, Oblivion and Follin approached their music as an art project, combining modern electronic elements with the sugary-sweet melodies of The Shangri-Las and other mid-century girl groups. The follow-up, 2013’s Static, took that formula and flipped it, adding darkness, tension, and standouts like the brilliant “Always Forever.” With the release of the band’s most recent record, last year’s Offering, Cults has produced three albums’ worth of sweet and insidious melodies, the sort of hooks that bury themselves in one’s mind and stay there for weeks.

Oblivion and Follin haven’t agreed on where to take the band’s sound from here, though, and Oblivion was reluctant to give any hints.

“It’s always a lie, whatever we say, because we end up actually recording and it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, we didn’t do any of that,’” Oblivion said. “For me personally, I feel like our whole catalog has been go-go-go. I want to do a really chill album where nothing is over like, 80 [beats per minute]. But she wants to make our ultimate party record.”

The tug-of-war will probably result in their fourth album falling somewhere in the middle, and sounding just like Cults. “That’s usually how we get there,” Follin said. “We have totally opposite ideas of what we want, and then we compromise.”

The band has expanded its sound beyond its original retro influences, however. Since they’ve gotten tighter in the studio and have access to better equipment, the lo-fi haze of Oblivion and Follin’s first record is long gone. And they’re excited to push Cults into new territory.

“Computers are getting so advanced, we might be able to step beyond what we think is the palette for music,” Oblivion said. “I feel like someone is going to come along and blow this whole thing wide open.”