Something Sneaky open their new EP loud, with ’80s dance drums running underneath a fast indie rock churn and a chorus that gives up on words and lets the guitar finish the line. They close it loud too, on a track Justin Iacovino calls a season finale. In between sits a song about a paranoid wedding reception, scored to a Moog tuned to the same settings as “A Real Hero” from the Drive soundtrack.
The EP is called “Old Notes”. It took eight years. And the reason it exists at all, in the form it now does, has more to do with an old network of South Shore relationships than with any Boston scene the band might have come up in.
Bassist Chris Casserly’s mother is best friends with vocalist and guitarist Justin Iacovino’s aunt. Justin and drummer Jeremy Iacovino are brothers, born in Pembroke. Chris grew up in Kingston, where he became close friends in elementary school with guitarist Jesse George. Justin and Jeremy’s father played in rock bands in the late 1960s and 70s, and once shared a bill with Earth, Wind and Fire. Jesse’s father toured with Po Boys and East of Autumn. And in high school, Justin became close with Jesse’s cousin Jack Dennison, who later helped write some of the first Something Sneaky songs.
Before the band ever played a show, Chris and Jesse had already had one together. Their high school project Eye Ball Kid won a battle of the bands during an MTV episode of the reality show Made. By the early 2010s, that band had split, Justin had finished a solo full-length called “No Opinion Needed” with help from Jeremy and Jack, and the obvious move was to bring it to a stage.
The first show was in Cambridge in the summer of 2011, a three-piece with Justin, Jeremy and Chris. Jesse came in full-time in 2012 after a run of guest appearances.
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Two EPs, a 2015 LP called “Pictures”, a 2017 Rock and Roll Rumble slot, a single, mini-tours around New England and a 2024 live recordings collection followed.
They filmed the music video for “Pictures” in Pembroke itself, the South Shore town where Justin and Jeremy grew up. Somewhere along the way, Justin had a few formative conversations with Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. One thing Ian said about lyrics stuck.
“Ian Mackaye used to say something along the lines of ‘we print the lyrics, you can read those, but the only real meaning is what the song means to you,'” Justin recalls. He paired that with another lesson, this one from Pinback, who have spoken about picking words for how they sit phonetically in a line, almost like another instrument. Justin has been writing that way ever since.
Most of the songs on “Old Notes” came together with engineer Chris Chase at The Noise Floor Studio in Dover, New Hampshire, and producer Chaimes Parker at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Then the pandemic arrived. Lives shifted. The EP sat.
“I hate using the COVID excuse, but it did definitely derail us a bit,” Justin says. “It never quite felt like the right time to release the EP, and it allowed us more and more time to discover the things we didn’t love about. The EP kind of went dormant and all of the band members had personal life transformations that brought us further and further away from it.”
Chris is more matter-of-fact about that stretch. “We never really left, but life stayed happening and we slowed down on shows and recording and focused on friendship and family but never really stopped creating.”
When the band came back to the recordings, they handed them to mixing engineer Larry Crane at Jackpot! Recording Studio in Portland, Oregon, who pulled them apart, kept the parts they loved, and tightened the rest. Jeff Lipton mastered the tracks at Peerless Mastering in Boston. The cover artwork came from Dan Nelligan and Cal Ciarcia. “Old Notes” landed on Swimwear Recordings.
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The 2026 version is, in Justin’s words, “tighter, more focused” than the 2020 one, with “all the organic elements that stemmed from our previous sessions” still in place. It is also the most collaborative record they have made. “For this EP it was more like four chefs working on one dish from scratch,” he says.
What kept the band from quietly dissolving in the gap is, according to the four of them speaking together, the same thing that put them in a room in the first place. “The family bond and blood has always kept us alive,” they say. “The music and band is deeply personal to us, almost like another family member, so any time one of us feels like we were negating it, one of us will rally the others to pick the music back up.”
They still practise on the South Shore, in Justin and Jeremy’s parents’ basement.
Justin is not interested in over-explaining what any individual song is about. He tends to talk in shapes rather than meanings, recurring images rather than narratives. Across the five tracks on “Old Notes”, themes of ocean tides, gravity and waves keep surfacing, and what Justin calls “multiple relationships” come up over and over, not always between people. “Sometimes music or drugs or anxiety,” he says. “Gold Notes“, for instance, runs a kind of melodic brightness underneath darker lyrics. A few of the others are worth lingering on.
“Stevie’s Here”
The opener was born in a spare bedroom of Chris’s apartment, during a stretch when the four of them were trying to keep two practices a week. One was loud, at their usual basement spot. The other was silent: a Jambox plugged into headphones, guitars and bass and electric drums and a vocal mic all running through it, the four of them rehearsing without disturbing anyone in the building.
Justin walked into the first silent session with an idea. Fast pace. Jump straight into the first verse. ’80s dance-style drums under the pre-choruses. And, in typical Sneaky fashion, no words in the chorus, just a guitar melody finishing the line. They tried it silently. It worked. They took it to a loud practice. Jesse’s brother Stevie, who had produced the band’s first EP, had started joining writing sessions to offer input. Whoever was holding the phone for the iPhone recording usually named the file off the top of their head, and the first version was titled “Stevie’s Leaving”. Months of revisions later, the take they liked most was “Stevie’s Here 3”. The name stuck.
On record, it shoves the EP open with a jangly indie rock propulsion that may also be the only place on the record where the lyrics drift towards a love story.
“Hole Foods”
The lead single came to Justin as a bass riff while he was riding home from work in 2018.
“A simple quiet/loud song made sense,” he says. “Harsh verses, soft choruses. The opening words I tried were ‘this pill’s down.’ Sometimes this is how it starts. One riff, one melody, one lyric – how can we fill the rest? ‘We need 80s synth,’ was a thought.”
Something Sneaky had never written with a synth. Justin went and researched the Moog settings on College and Electric Youth’s “A Real Hero”, the song from the Drive soundtrack. At Big Nice, Chaimes had a Moog clone they could dial in to those exact settings. Along the way Justin played a jangly country riff during one iteration, which the band decided needed to live in the bridge for good. The lyrics took longer. His process is melody first, words later, and the phrase “this pill’s down” did not budge for months. He thought about being paranoid. He thought about other situations where people are paranoid.
“I will say though, that the lyrics came about after recalling a wedding I attended,” he says. “Extremely sleep deprived after some really late nights, I found myself consumed with paranoia during the reception. This was sort of the jumping off point for a high-energy song, which ultimately touches on themes of music and film industry issues.”
The visual he had in his head: a character knotting his tie, drinking wine, swallowing benzos, then making conversation with strangers. The wedding falls away pretty quickly in the song. What is left is the experience of trying to stand out in any social setting, including industries built on standing out.
“Depressure (Buried Dust)”
This one took longer than any of the others to settle. During the earliest practices, Jesse played his lead with a glass slide, and they tried it as a fully quiet song. Justin sang the melodies high. By the time the mix happened, the low takes won. Year after year someone would want to change something else: different amps, different mics, slide or no slide. Jesse would want to re-record his guitar again. But the song had become a live staple, the one they could drop in when a room needed a comedown.
“We never doubted as a band that this song belonged on the EP,” they say.
Justin had one more thing he had been carrying. He always wanted the track to end the way “Kicked it in the Sun” by Built to Spill does, building into a chord progression that opens up into something bigger. The question was where that something would go.
“Stoner Kids”
It went into the closer. The four chords that wanted to flow out of “Depressure” became the intro to “Stoner Kids”, a track Justin describes as the band’s season finale.
One night at Chris’s apartment they wrote the loud verse, stretching the E chord by two extra measures. Justin asked Jesse to find his inner David Gilmour and layer solos across the chord progression. He pushed Jeremy on fills that, as he puts it, “pulled us from different elevations”. By the end, what they had was the clearest proof so far of where the band is, after the basement recordings and the studio sessions and the years in between.
“It speaks to our evolution as a band,” Justin says. “From solo basement recordings to full band orchestration, it makes me feel confident about our ability to write rock songs.”
“Old Notes” is out now on Swimwear Recordings. The release party went down at Deep Cuts in Medford on the same night, with Cherubhead and Luddites also on the bill. Whether the next record takes another eight years is the kind of question Justin would rather leave open. He has the closing line, though.
“For me there is an implicit statement in this EP: That we take music seriously,” he says. “We all have our own personal lives, but I’ve always honored and respected the opportunity to play and write music with my best friends. There will always be an option to ‘walk away’ and be a full-time observer, not that there is anything wrong with that, but especially with this EP, we feel like we owe it to the songs to get them out there.”
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