Warm, slow-burning psych-pop with soft falsettos, dusky guitars, synths moving like light across a room, and enough weight underneath to keep it from floating away. That is where Meltt land on “Pathways,” their third album, out today, June 12, via Nettwerk Music Group.
The Vancouver quartet arrive here after their first EU/UK run, nine cities from Istanbul to Dot to Dot Festival, with one of those small, strange tour moments still ringing in their heads: a Manchester crowd singing the synth melody from “Up All Night” back at them until it felt, as vocalist Chris Smith put it, like “a tiny taste of the War On Drugs at Glastonbury.”
The record they carried through those rooms was mostly still hidden at the time. Now, with “Pathways” out in full, those deeper songs finally have their own space.
What opens now is not just another soft-focus indie psych record, but a carefully built document of four friends approaching their 30s, looking at relationships, loss, anxiety, memory, and the uneasy business of trying to stay hopeful while the world keeps feeding you reasons not to.
Meltt first surfaced with the “Visions” EP back in 2017, but this May run marked their first time playing the EU and UK. It opened in Istanbul at Babylon and moved through Manchester, London, Brighton, Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne, Bristol, and Nottingham, ending across the two Dot to Dot Festival dates. By the time they reached the dressing room in Manchester, with that synth line still echoing back at them from the crowd, “Pathways” already felt less like a private studio record and more like something learning how to live in public.
Meltt’s work has always glided rather than pushed. Dusky guitars and airy falsettos sit close to the mic, the synth pads wash in slow and warm, and the rhythm section holds the floor down so nothing in the upper end has to fight for air. It’s the kind of record you put on after midnight when the lamps are off and someone is still in the room with you.
Listeners coming from Cigarettes After Sex will hear the same softness in the vocal register and the same unhurried pulse, though Meltt’s records feel warmer, more lived-in, and more layered, with the synths doing most of the colour mixing.
There is a mellow, cozy glow running through it, less midnight bedroom haze and more late-afternoon light through the curtains, the kind of slow warmth that could sit beside a close dance with someone you love, or a solitary walk along the beach, feet dragging through the sand while the song keeps moving at its own quiet pace.
Closer in spirit to early Beach House drifting into a War On Drugs-shaped mid-tempo, with the acoustic guitars dialled in slightly louder than they were last time, and the whole thing leaning into a richer, more open sense of calm.
“Pathways” began after the spring 2024 tour, the last of five runs the band had taken since their first ever tour in 2022. For the first time since they wrote 2023’s “Eternal Embers” during the covid lockdowns, they had an open-ended stretch of time and no scheduling fence around it. The first phase looked the way it usually does.
Each of the four members went home, sat in their own home studios, and started writing. “We took some time to dig deep and came up with over 100 ideas,” bassist Ian Winkler recalls. More acoustic elements began surfacing alongside the synth-driven style the band have been recognised for in publications like Music Connection, Under The Radar, FLOOD, Northern Transmissions and The Big Takeover.
Once the demos were on the table, Meltt did something they had never done before: they produced the record themselves.
“We started reviewing all these little seeds of ideas and saw them through,” drummer Jamie Turner says. The home setups had improved enough that early demos were already at usable quality. “We’ve improved our home-recording techniques, so a lot of what we were recording while writing ended up being used on the record itself,” Winkler says. Guitarist James Porter adds, “A lot of it just sounded good enough to use right when we recorded it.”
Mixing went to Chris Coady, whose work on Beach House and TV on the Radio records sits on the shelf the band have been quietly climbing towards. Coady ran the sessions remotely from his Burbank studio, with an unusual workflow.
He would transmit the music live to the band with their microphones muted, the four of them sitting in their own room, watching and listening as he moved through the mix. “We’d type it in the chat and he’d immediately reflect that note,” Smith explains, “and we could hear exactly what the change was and sign off on it.” Porter puts the result more simply: “He took every song and made it sound way better.”
The album’s thematic centre is what Winkler calls “four men approaching their 30s and figuring out their paths and lives.”
Relationships, the aftermath of loss, the unease of trying to live a normal life inside the modern news cycle. “Our tone is usually pretty optimistic and hopeful, but this time we let some darkness in,” Porter says. “There are so many things we experience individually, but when we get in the studio, it’s clear that we’re on a journey together.”
“Goodbye”, the pulsing synth track buried near the back end of the tracklist, came out of one of those darker stretches. Porter wrote it during what he describes as “a pretty intense period of anxiety and hopelessness. I was allowing myself not to feel hopeful about things, and it was very cathartic to have the space to do so while writing this song. Sometimes, you just need to vent.”
“By Your Side” leans the other way, looking back instead of staring at the present. “It looks back on those times in your 20s that have gone by,” Porter says. “You were just fucking around with your friends, but it was also the best times.” The glitchy synth chords that flicker through the track came from a plugin pack Ableton released called “Inspired By Nature”, run through a granular synth and treated as if memory itself had been given an invitation to the recording session.
“Up All Night“, the song the Manchester crowd sang back at them, sits second on the tracklist and came out of a Chris Smith demo that Winkler describes as “the ultimate Chris song.” Smith built it around several events from the year the band were writing, including the death of a childhood friend.
“You’re getting older, you sense these changes. Things don’t always stay the same, and you start to sense time passing you by. But you also still try to figure out how to make the most of your life all the time. You go through hard times in life and hold on to those memories while trying to always find the bright in the darkness.” The band weren’t sure how it would hold up live. When they’re producing an album, Smith says, “in the back of our heads is often a voice that goes ‘how the hell are we going to pull this off live?'” That song was one of the questionable ones. The UK answered.
Some of “Pathways” was built using techniques that read more like art-school experiments than indie-rock studio defaults.
A Tascam cassette recorder runs on vari-speed across parts of the album. Smith would play something high-pitched and fast, record it to tape, then slow it down for the warmth and grain of the slowed playback.
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On one track that approach started before the slowdown ever happened: Smith was playing those parts on a high-pitch Nashville-tuned guitar, the band liked the sound as it was, and the tape stayed at speed.
“Never Let Go” started from a Radiohead live video, specifically Thom Yorke playing the Prophet8 part on “Everything In Its Right Place”. Smith went home, tried to recreate the patch on his Hydrasynth, arrived at an arpeggiated intro of his own, and built the rest of the song around it.
The instinct with most “Pathways” tracks was to keep the studio version tight and let the live shows stretch them out. “Never Let Go” was the exception. “Our initial thought was to save the whole build/crescendo section for live, but we ultimately decided to push through and get it on the record.” It’s the longest song on the album at over five minutes.
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For all the songs that did make the EU/UK setlist, the cuts were the harder conversation. North American audiences had heard the singles gradually rolled into the band’s fall tour last year, so the energy shifts on those nights felt less jarring. Now the question is which catalogue songs stay and which leave. “Sometimes we’ll talk to fans before a show and they’ll ask us if we’re playing their favorite song,” Winkler says, “and it’s always heartbreaking if it’s one we’ve cut.”
The next tour starts in August. From Calgary on the 14th to a hometown closer at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on October 2, Meltt have booked 34 North American dates, including a stop at Third Man Records in Nashville on September 3 and a Mexico City date at the House of Vans on September 10.
After playing only the singles in Europe, the band have been waiting to put the deeper “Pathways” tracks into a live setting. Coming home, Turner says, has changed how they hear the record. “After playing most of the singles on tour, I’d say it’s made us even more excited to perform the album tracks on the upcoming North American tour.”
Smith already has an idea of where the road might push the next batch of writing. The most physical parts of the live show are the ones pulling him towards more guitar-driven, more open-ended music for the next record.
“My favorite parts of the live show to play are always when things are the most tactile and emotive, like guitar playing. We’ll see if that actually holds through the writing of the next thing, when the joy of synths and sound design hits hard too.”
For now, “Pathways” is out, the tour is booked, and Meltt have a record that has finally caught up to the live show that built it.
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AUG 14 – Calgary, AB – Commonwealth Bar & Stage
AUG 15 – Edmonton, AB – The Starlite Room
AUG 17 – Winnipeg, MB – Sidestage
AUG 18 – Fargo, ND – The Aquarium
AUG 19 – St. Paul, MN – Turf Club
AUG 20 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
AUG 21 – Ferndale, MI – The Loving Touch
AUG 22 – Toronto, ON – The Mod Club
AUG 24 – Ottawa, ON – The 27 Club
AUG 25 – Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa
AUG 27 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair
AUG 28 – New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom
AUG 29 – Philadelphia, PA – The Foundry at the Fillmore Philadelphia
AUG 30 – Washington, D.C. – The Atlantis
SEPT 1 – Durham, NC – Motorco Music Hall
SEPT 2 – Asheville, NC – The Grey Eagle
SEPT 3 – Nashville, TN – The Blue Room
SEPT 4 – Atlanta, GA – Purgatory at the Masquerade
SEPT 5 – Orlando, FL – The Social
SEPT 7 – Houston, TX – Meow Wolf Houston’s Radio Tave
SEPT 8 – Austin, TX – Antone’s
SEPT 9 – Denton, TX – Rubber Gloves
SEPT 10 – Ciudad De Mexico, Mexico – House of Vans
SEPT 12 – Denver, CO – The Bluebird Theater
SEPT 13 – Santa Fe, NM – Meow Wolf
SEPT 14 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom
SEPT 16 – San Diego, CA – Quartyard
SEPT 17 – Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room
SEPT 18 – Ojai, CA – Ojai Deer Lodge
SEPT 19 – Felton, CA – Felton Music Hall
SEPT 20 – San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall
SEPT 22 – Portland, OR – Polaris Hall
SEPT 23 – Seattle, WA – Neumos
OCT 2 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom
NOV 21 – Victoria, BC – Capital Ballroom
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