New York City’s SKORTS has released their debut album Incompletement. Migrating the magic of their live shows from the stage to the studio, the album was recorded live across three Brooklyn practice spaces with friend and producer Teddy O’Mara. These are the songs that have blasted for blocks off of rooftops, blown minds in bars and swept past bouncers to wow strangers on city sidewalks —at long last, pressed into permanence.
With the album’s title, the group references the evolving nature of this very humanity and the freedom that can be found when you give up on the idea of arrival and instead embrace a state of flux. “Incompletement is a word we made up,” SKORTS shared. “To us, it means allowing oneself to live and create in an ever-changing state of impermanence.”
SKORTS is a product of creative chemistry and sweet serendipity. Since starting to release music together in 2023, on the back of chance encounters at guitar shops and outside of bars, Alli Walls (lead vocals and guitar), Char Smith (lead guitar), Emma Welch (bass) and Max Berdik (drums), have continued cutting their teeth together ever since. At their first show, an amp exploded — call it a freak accident or a catalyzing prophecy — either way, from there was born a band that refused to arrive quietly.
Incompletement opens with “Burden,” a soaring, pulsing song from the band’s early days that was almost swept under the rug until O’Mara challenged them to bring it back. One of the band’s most beloved songs, “Bodies,” was built off of a guitar riff Smith created as a warm-up for himself. SKORTS said that “‘Bodies’ expresses the nervous vulnerability that comes with new love.”
The album’s title is taken from the lyrics of “Eat Your Heart Out.” A song about incels dating AI bots and the weaponization of fear, Walls sings, “She’s so exotic, she was made for Incompletement.” A heavier moment, “Steal The Night” took three different drummers and three different rehearsal spaces before finding the sonic force to appropriately match the lyrical themes of sexual assault.
