“No one knows the bottom” is Wall Street talk for the moment during a downturn when nobody can call how much further things will fall. Jackson Fig have made the phrase their album title and the thesis of the record. The Charlotte band’s new full-length, out June 5th via Catholic Morphine Records, premieres today with its title track and music video. The line that anchors everything: “Here-in lies the cause / Same shit, different job.”
The financial vocabulary runs through the album art and through one of the music videos, and it’s the throughline back to their last record, Good Morning, Factory. Where that one worked through corporate frustration by reaching for something better, No One Knows the Bottom is, in the band’s words, “almost a direct response to that, like the older sibling smirks, ‘Who are you kidding? We’re all still stuck here.'”
Jackson Fig formed as a three-piece indie rock band fronted by Logan Sneed (guitar, vocals) and anchored by Grant Jordan on bass. The current lineup locked in when drummer Kevin Kinne joined, bringing an audio engineering background and an active interest in growing Charlotte’s shoegaze scene. That perspective rerouted the writing. Kinne and Sneed built the new songs together “over long hours in a dingy storage unit.”
Good Morning, Factory had been tracked in three months at Charlotte’s Old House Studio. Looking back, Jackson Fig felt they had rushed it.
“We felt like we had rushed a bit, prioritizing new content and calling it done before giving it a chance to get more refined, like we hadn’t quite done the songs justice.”
For No One Knows the Bottom they reversed the approach: no paid studio time, no fixed schedule, a year-long writing window. “Patience, for the tracks themselves and within them, was a constant reminder.” Songs got time off. Anything that didn’t feel surprising or interesting was cut. “We wanted every song to feel like it could be the single, and if it felt like album fodder we cut it.”
Tracking eventually started with help from Tony Davis. Davis is the production lead, FOH, monitor and system engineer at the Fillmore in Charlotte, where Kinne also works as an engineer. Kinne asked his boss to help track the new record. Davis agreed, and stuck around. “In that moment, he went from Kevin’s boss and mentor to our brother and collaborator.”
The band had auditioned two or three guitarists for a missing second guitar slot. None of them clicked. Davis offered to write and record lead guitar himself, at least for the demos. He came in from a metal background, which on paper shouldn’t have fit a shoegaze record.
“Tony comes from a metal background but is an extremely versatile and well rounded guitarist, and it ended up fitting in better than we could have ever imagined. I don’t think we cut a single thing he initially put down on the demos.”
Drums and guitars went down at Illage Vidiot studios, a converted garage in Charlotte that the owners let them use for free. Everything else got tracked in Davis’s and Kinne’s home studios.
The reasoning was practical (avoiding a few grand in studio costs) and creative. “When recording in a studio, we’d feel the time contraints and feel sorta forced to work between the margins, and then only hear the variation of mixes as they are sent over after a session.”
Doing it themselves meant hearing every step. “You get to see and hear this raw and rough, noisy outline transform more and more into something that is never what you envisioned, but somehow exactly what you wanted. That kind of control felt like a powerful tool that I don’t think we will ever go back on now.”
The biggest reference point for the album was the most recent Downward record. Jackson Fig describe being “awestruck by the beautifully clean and softly restrained singing, gut wrenching lyrics, and smooth but also heavy driving guitar.”
The band have always sat between indie rock with singer-songwriter leanings and noisier shoegaze, and hearing Downward do both at once was the green light to commit to the hybrid. They cite Modern Color, Title Fight, Elliott Smith and Alex G as long-standing reference points alongside it.
The Wall Street imagery ties together a record that is, plainly, about workdays. The dissatisfaction with jobs. The disillusionment with corporate America while still dependably performing a function inside it. The habits that keep you in place. Jackson Fig say they wrote No One Knows the Bottom as something that might sit with someone in a tough spot who doesn’t have anyone to talk to. “Yes it sucks a lot all the time, but fuck it, we’ll stay, we’ll complain about it, we’ll try to change things and be a good force in our time.”
For the Carolinas shoegaze context, Kinne wants two bands flagged: Subvertigo (Charlotte) and Bluegill (Greenville, NC). Both have been the band’s “biggest advocates and friends in the scene.”
All three have spent the last while booking new bands, pulling touring acts into the region, and trying to make Charlotte hold its own with bigger US markets.
The second single drops May 22nd. No One Knows the Bottom is out June 5th via Catholic Morphine Records.
Tony Davis produced, mixed and played lead guitar. Kevin Kinne co-produced, tracked, and played drums, and edited the music video. Logan Sneed wrote the lyrics and handled guitar and vocals. Grant Jordan played bass. Corey Coffman mastered.
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