How Does Charly Bliss Do It? An Interview with Eva Hendricks
Whenever I come across an album that I'm certain will appeal to specific friends, I keep it close to my chest until I'm presented with the perfect moment to shove it down their throats. On paper, the afternoon of December 26th, 2017 wasn't the ideal environment for the infectious bubblegrunge of Charly Bliss' debut album. Three of us were crammed into my car, hungover from the night before, driving a windy highway to another friend's house about an hour away. Oh yeah, my dog was there too, and she'd just devoured a ziplock's worth of chocolate-covered Christmas treats that we'd left in the backseat while we gassed up the car.
You ever had to force your dog to vomit on the side of the highway? The next 30 or so minutes weren't fun, but my dog emerged unscathed.
It feels silly to foreground us humans' self-inflicted ailments over an innocent animal's accidental minor emergency, but this frantic interlude didn't exactly improve our already-embattled states. One friend in particular was having an awful time in the backseat. But once the crisis was averted, I threw on Charly Bliss' Guppy. I had only recently listened to it—inspired, if I remember correctly, by a Twitter mutual accurately noting its similarities to early Weezer—and it only took a matter of minutes before I clocked it as auditory crack for these specific friends.
"Pat...," spoke a belabored voice from behind me, "What is this?" Given his tone, I thought his intent was more Turn this shit off than I want to download this, but against all odds, it was the former. He even demanded a replay after the conclusion of the 30-minute album. I was glad that my assumptions had proven correct, but then again, how could I be surprised that this delightful album was capable of getting through to even the most forlorn listener?
The next two years of Charly-mania were a blast. I caught a festival set with that same friend just a few months later at Sasquatch 2018. Shortly after CB released their lightning-fast 2019 follow-up, Young Enough, I took a friend who was going through some shit to see them in Portland, and once again their music proved resilient—even counteractive—to headspaces that aren't traditionally conducive to buoyant pop-rock.
The radio silence that followed Young Enough was to be expected, given the COVID-induced screeching halt that impacted the entire music industry. Then 2021 and '22 came and went without so much as a peep. Outside of a 2020 Christmas duet with PUP, Charly Bliss' first post-pandemic music came in the form of two non-album singles released in June and October, respectively, last year. I've gotta say, both left me a bit nervous about the band's trajectory.
CB's pop instincts have been strikingly obvious since day one, but they've leaned harder into them as time has gone on. Guppy's fuzzy rock gave way to Young Enough's shimmering synthpop, and the 2023 singles suggested an even more drastic turn towards modern pop music. When other bands follow this path, it often smooths down their edges, casting off idiosyncrasies in pursuit of lower common denominators.
Forever, the album that Charly Bliss are releasing next Friday, quickly dispelled any fear I might've had. It decidedly completes the full-on pop transformation, but it does so with intricacy, personality, and a ton of heart. Across life-drunk bangers, defiant "fuck you" anthems, and emotionally bare ballads, Forever is catchy as it is resonant in its reality-tethered optimism. Maybe it's just that the album is hitting me at the exact right time in my life, but I think it stands up to Charly Bliss' first two albums and reveals a sustainable path forward for them.
Frontwoman Eva Hendricks moved to Australia before the album's recording, and it's clear from her lyrics that that's only one of the drastic changes she's undergone since Young Enough. I caught up with her over Zoom to talk about those changes, the cross-global writing process, and Charly Bliss' pop DNA.
Inbox Infinity: Hey Eva, how's it going?
Eva Hendricks: Really good. I'm super jet-lagged, but overall, good.
Where are you right now?
I just flew from Australia to LA, so right now it's five in the morning tomorrow in Australia.
Yeah, that's a lot. What are you back in the States for?
I want to be here for the album release, and then we've gotta start rehearsing for the tour. But I'm getting married in October. So right after the tour I'll go back to Australia two weeks before the wedding, which is insane.
Wow, congratulations! I'm getting married in two weeks, so I also currently feel insane.
Congratulations! Oh my God. Do you have any tips from further down the line than I am?
Um... Ask me in two weeks. Just, you know, manage the stress. It's a lot, but it'll be fine.
My biggest fear is getting so caught up in the stress that I miss the whole point. But I feel like once you're there and you're seeing everyone from every possible walk of your life... How many people are you guys having?
130
Nice. 120 [for us].
So did you move to Australia because of this relationship?
Yes. I met my fiancé in 2019 when Charly Bliss was on tour in Australia. I was trying to go on Tinder for the first time, because my bandmates were like, if anything weird happens, you don't have to worry about bumping into this person again. So I did. And then just two weeks later, [my fiancé] Callum flew to America and we hung out more. A couple months after that, I went to Australia. Sam—my brother who plays drums in Charly Bliss—he and his wife were having a baby, so I already knew we were going to take some time off touring. So I thought, I'm gonna go to Australia for six weeks to test this relationship and see if it's not just, you know, fantasy. Like, Oh, it's so fun because we hardly ever get to see each other. I flew to Australia on March 3, 2020 and didn't leave for a year-and-a-half
because of the pandemic.
Wow. So obviously the pandemic threw a wrench into everything, but when did you all start talking about doing a new album, or even just talking about how to continue?
We were always talking about it. We had already started a few of the songs that made it onto the album—"Last First Kiss," "I Don't Know Anything," and "How Do You Do It" were written by that point. So we were already in the midst of writing the next album and starting to dream up what it would look like.
The plan was always that, while I was in Australia, we would be writing together from afar. We'll send files back and forth, we'll make it work that way. It just took much longer than we thought it would, but honestly it ended up being a really great way of writing. This was the most enjoyable writing process we've ever had for any of our albums.
Were there any initial challenges that you had to overcome to get to that point?
It's funny, because all of the real challenges were things we were already anticipating with Sam being a new dad and me being in a different part of the world. If anything, the pandemic made us all a lot hungrier to write. I wrote "Waiting For You" while watching videos of our live shows from before the pandemic and just being like, 'Oh my God, all of my dreams came true and I totally missed it'—sort of what we were just talking about with weddings. I was so caught up in like, How's the album, how are the sales, how are we doing, is this album reaching enough people? I realized that I missed the bigger point: my job is touring the world with my two best friends since I was 12 years old, and my older brother. That is so incredible, and I feel so lucky.
I think we were all feeling that to some degree, and it motivated us to continue working hard on this album. We would have writing sessions in the morning, my time, night time for them. Then I would work on lyrics, and the next day they would record rough demos. Then while they were sleeping, I would sing over the demos and record it back. Because of the time difference, every morning we'd have something exciting in our inboxes. That was pretty cool. It felt like we were like little kids again.
And the rest of the band were all in the same place, so they were able to record parts together?
Well, it was in the thick of the pandemic so no one was seeing each other. Sam got really good at production just out of necessity, so the guys would record all of their parts, send them to him, then work on them on Zoom. Sam would have Pro Tools open and they would all remotely work on building the tracks together.
Do you feel like y'all were burnt out before all this, just because of two straight years of touring? Like, maybe what you needed was a change of scenery to feel energized about writing again?
1,000%. It's sad, because so much of the music industry now is about how much can you make quickly—like, can you turn out an album in a year, in six months, in two years, or whatever. I'm not gonna lie, it was frustrating how long it took us to make this album, but I don't think we could've made it any faster. I'm not saying that we were constantly working every second of the five years that it took to get this album out. It's moreso just, yeah, I think you're exactly right: we were burnt out and we really benefited from space.
Even the way we recorded it—we would go to Minneapolis and record for a week, then we wouldn't see each other for a couple months, and then we'd go back out again for two weeks. What that allows you to do is sit with things, to listen with fresh ears and be like, 'Okay, this part's really working, don't touch that. But this part could hit harder.' You can't access that perspective when you're trying to work as quickly as possible. In some ways it sucked, it was really hard. Everyone was probably sick of hearing me be like, 'We just have to get this album out! Why is it taking so long?' But now that it's finally happening, I feel like there's no way that the album could've been made without all of that space.
Listening back to Young Enough with this new perspective, do you feel like parts of it were rushed?
Maybe not that it was rushed, but I what I hear when I listen to that album is how much pressure we were putting on ourselves. Like, 'It's our second album, we really have to hit it out of the park.' I love Young Enough and I'm really proud of it, but I do feel that the pressure that we put on ourselves on that album was the impetus for us wanting to actually enjoy making Forever. All we cared about on this album was like, How do we want to feel while making this? We wanted to feel playful, like how we felt when we were making Guppy and assumed that no one was going to hear it other than our friends and parents. That was the North Star of this album: how do we block out everything and just get back to what is the most fun about what we do?
Personally, I usually work better under pressure. But I can see how getting that North Star, as you called it, would help alleviate some of the uncertainty of not necessarily having a deadline.
Of course, now that the period of waiting is over and the album is coming out, it's easy for me to build it into a narrative of like, 'Oh, it had to be that way.' But it did not feel like that being in it. It felt very shapeless. Like, how do we create structure where there isn't any? It was really hard. But we [tried to focus on] enjoying it. Like, how do we maintain loving each other and giving ourselves room to bring our best selves to this album?
We worked with Jake [Luppen] and Caleb [Wright] from Hippo Campus, and Jake is the lead singer. The way he approached recording vocals with me was so different than anything I've ever done. In the past we've done all of the basic tracking first, and the last thing to tackle is vocals. That's so nerve-wracking because if everything else is done, I end up holding up the whole process if I lose my voice, or whatever. At the beginning of recording the album, Jake asked me what my relationship to recording vocals was and I was like, 'I fucking hate it. It's miserable. It's so scary.' He was like, 'I'm gonna change your mind, we're going to do it differently. And I can hear that on the album. I can hear that I was enjoying singing again for the first time in a really long time. So building the album around a different guiding principle got us to where we wanted to be.
I definitely hear the playfulness that you're talking about, both in the instrumentation and your vocals. But you're saying that you wanted this to be fun above everything else, and Forever still tackles some pretty difficult emotions. Like, it isn't all lollipops and sunshine. So how do you achieve both at the same time?
So much of what I'm trying to do in the lyrics is coming from a totally different place. As a writer, I strive to be very, very, very honest. What I'm drawn to as a listener is lyrics that take you through this tsunami of big feelings and knock you over. I try to mine my own experiences in the deepest way I possibly can, while not sounding like an idiot. It's still important to me to be funny and have a sense of humor in my lyrics, but the lyrics I'm drawn to seem to have a lot of adolescent feelings—first love, first heartbreak, first experiences with grief. I always want to be going back to my teenage self and that level of extreme feeling, and I think the balance between that and the buoyancy of our musical sensibilities is what makes a Charly Bliss song.
That makes sense. With teenage emotions in mind, I feel like there's kind of a shuffled, nonlinear timeline throughout this album. On one end of it, there's tumultuous stuff like "Nineteen" and "How Do You Do It." And then fittingly, you close with "Last First Kiss," which seems more in tune with where you are now.
"How Do You Do It" was the first song I wrote for the album. I wrote it the day I was going through a terrible breakup, and it felt very much like, That's my life at this point. But I actually wrote "Last First Kiss" early on as well, even before I met my fiancé. Now, of course, I see it as a love song about this amazing thing that happened in my life, but at the time when I wrote it, I was fantasizing about what I wanted for myself. My 20s had been such a dumpster fire of disastrous relationships. I was starting to dream about what would my life look like if it wasn't always chaos and I was in love in a way that was productive instead of totally destructive.
I can see how much was changing in my life throughout the process of writing this album. I mean, I moved across the world and started making friends for the first time as an adult. Like truly, I moved to Australia by accident and I didn't know anyone other than this guy I had met on Tinder, so making friends was really scary for me. I'm in a band with people I've known since I was 12 and I hadn't had the experience of putting myself out there in a really long time. It was very nerve-wracking and also so gratifying.
The song "In Your Bed" is about having a best friend for the first time in a really long time—that intimacy of a non-romantic relationship. This new, amazing person walks into your life and suddenly everything looks different because you feel so connected to another person. It was such an incredible experience for me to live in a very small town and feel part of a community, especially coming from New York [City] and being used to leaving every two weeks for tour. I'd lost sight of that part of my life. So yeah, I definitely see a narrative through the album of what I was like, the things I was very unhappy with and struggling with, and then where I've been led over the last five years. It's so gratifying. It's such a beautiful album in that way. I don't think your life changes that much over a year-and-a-half, so because of the scope of time that Forever covers, it's wild to see things laid out in the arc of the album.
I can see how that change would make it easier to access with those big, teenage-level emotions. You're talking about meeting new people like, first day of school type shit.
That's exactly what it felt like. It was very much, 'I am the new kid here.'
I'm curious how y'all view the evolution you've had between Guppy and this album. Obviously, some of the instrumentation has changed, but how do you feel that you've kept the band's overall vibe intact while not just remaking the same album over and over again?
I actually think of Guppy and Forever as sister albums, in that we wanted to get back to where we were when we were making Guppy—how we felt about each other and about making music and that innocent excitement around it. For that reason, I think these two albums are very similar. Yeah, some of the instrumentation has definitely changed. But we actually made Guppy twice. The first time we definitely were making a garage rock album. That was the guiding light. Then we heard it back and lived with the whole album that we had recorded and we were like, Oh my God, these are pop songs. And structurally, they are very much pop songs. So we went in and recorded it again, and the version of Guppy that was released into the world was us trying to highlight more of that and record in a way that was closer to Weezer and Fountains of Wayne. Those bands are, yes, technically guitar-based rock, but you can't tell me that "Stacy's Mom" isn't a pop song, or like, insert any Weezer song as well.
So as much as we've leaned more towards pop, to us it feels more so like we're continuing a thought. The most helpful realization was recording Guppy one way and then being like, Oh, that's not who we are.
Young Enough is more of the outlier in that, just amongst the four of us, it felt like we did lose a bit of the sense of fun and playfulness in making it. But overall, the four of us are so close as friends, as people in each other's lives, and that's ultimately what carries everything through from start to finish. Not that we're finished! But we've just gotten more secure about what our band is, what we're trying to do, what a Charly Bliss album is, and what it feels like when the four of us are bringing our best selves to making music. This album is the the highest form of that. I'm such a self-deprecating person and it's really hard for me to enjoy things that I've made, but I've never been so proud of anything I've worked on, and so proud of the four of us for being able to achieve what we set out to create.
Charly Bliss' Forever is out a week from today on 8/16. Pre-order it here.
BOI (Best Of Inbox) #37
Being Dead - "Van Goes"
Location: Austin // Genre: playfully deadpanned post-punk // RIYL: a Parquet Courts/B-52s supergroup // From: EELS, out 9/27
The Belair Lip Bombs - "Easy On the Heart"
Location: Melbourne // Genre: starry-eyed jangle rock // RIYL: '80s proms, "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" // From: Lush Life, originally released in 2023, just reissued via Third Man
Karl Blau - "Pasadena"
Location: Philadelphia-via-Anacortes, WA // Genre: indie lifer folk-country // RIYL: Bill Callahan, Jim O'Rourke, Bonnie Prince Billy // From: Vultures Of Love, out 10/18
Lutalo - "The Bed"
Location: Vermont-via-Minnesota // Genre: funky folk rock // RIYL: Cat Stevens recruiting James Brown's drummer // From: The Academy, out 9/20
Mariposa - "Myers"
Location: Amsterdam-via-Colombia // Genre: acrobatic Latin pop-rap // RIYL: Bad Bunny if he was more Young Thug than Future // From: INFRAMUNDO, out 8/29
Natural Palace - "Hard Cat"
Location: Atlanta // Genre: dance-inflected synthpop // RIYL: Hot Chip, Delorean // From: Reeling, out 9/20
Trace Mountains - "In a Dream"
Location: New York // Genre: synthy heartland rock // RIYL: The War on Drugs, The Killers' Imploding The Mirage // From: Into The Burning Blue, out 9/27
TR/ST - "Dark Day"
Location: LA // Genre: industrial dance-pop // RIYL: Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor was a freaky little goblin // From: Performance, out 9/13
All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.