Pop duo Summer Salt give us seven tracks of tight, to-the-point summery trop-pop with their new album Electrolytes. The project is their fifth LP, and it arrives via their new record label AWAL. The album was produced by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Cherry Glazerr, Cold War Kids), and it arrives ahead of the ten-year anniversary of their debut album’s (Driving to Hawaii) release in the Fall.
Of the focus track “Ribbons,” singer/guitarist Matthew Terry shares: “Love isn’t just a feeling but a choice, to navigate both the highs and lows with someone. ‘Ribbons’ symbolizes this commitment. We craft our love story with multicolored typewriter ribbons because love isn’t only a beautiful, unconfined emotion; truly loving someone means embracing challenges as well as joys. It’s a heartfelt love song, celebrating the resilience of enduring love. Tell me what’s on the menu and I’m in the kitchen, acknowledging faithfulness to the journey. Tongue in cheek lines, like ‘Creatures of the Living Room,’ convey the authentic, relaxed nature of a cozy, romantic relationship. One of the first gifts we bought together was a Remington multicolored key typewriter, allowing us to draw out our days in vivid color.”
“’Electrolytes’ is everything about us in the here and now,” adds Terry. “These songs stand as our manifestos as young folks trying to slow down and appreciate and nurture the world and relationships around us. Each song embodies a theme of nature in a different color or perhaps a different flavor as the sound of seven different songs. We wrote about our lives with multicolored typewriter ribbons, suggesting that nothing always goes according to plan and that we are ever changing. Living on the harbor, out the front door, over and over again, trying to remind ourselves, as mama cass said it, ‘don’t let the good life pass you by!’”
Electrolytes follows 2023’s Campanita, the band’s breezy, blissful, and intimate monument to love, family, and everything in between. Electrolytes is another bold step forward in Summer Salt’s skyward career arc, marking the band’s first LP created with touring members Winston Triolo and Anthony Barnett. This all began a decade ago, when Chung and Terry moved to Austin to start on this journey, and years of hard work and an increasingly dedicated cult fan community have combined to bring Summer Salt to this moment.
Giving this one a spin?
