Des Moines psychedelic rock band The Mesmerists is truly a DIY operation. In fact, siblings Dan and Grace Bartlett recorded their new album The Last Love in Dan’s basement studio with the help of their nephew Thomas Bartlett, who just learned how to play the drums last year. True to their nonconformist ethos, The Mesmerists is offering an exclusive bootleg recording of The Last Love to attendees of their album release show Saturday, July 19, at xBk Live.
“It's not that there's something wrong with establishment, but more so that our spirits don't line up, ever,” Dan said.
The Mesmerists began as the brother-sister act King Bartlett and the Royal Band back in 2016. In 2020, they released their first album, No Greater Sound, an endeavor Dan described as largely experimental. In 2022, they dropped The Electric Time Heist, a keyboard-heavy continuation of their genre experimentation. And just last year, The Mesmerists released The Way of the Sun, which captured the sound they were looking for but required a lot of production work.
“We kind of got closer to what we wanted for our sound, but it was like this, oversaturated, you know, 70 tracks per song, so much on there,” Dan said. “[The Way of the Sun] was like a wall of sound.”
On their upcoming fourth studio album, The Last Love, the Bartletts believe they have finally refined their ideal, unique sound.
“This time, we just took a totally different approach and said, ‘Let's just start from the ground up. Grace, you write songs on your own, I'll write songs on my own. We'll come together, we'll see what we got,’” Dan said. ”The song structures are way better, the lyrics are way better because they were written from that perspective of more of a songwriter perspective, and way more acoustic-driven. It totally feels like we're finally kind of grasping what it is we want to do.”
Despite bandleader Dan’s happy marital status, The Last Love is a heartbreak album, with much of the songwriting spearheaded by Grace. Grace was surprised by how in sync their lyricism was with one another as they penned the record; Dan and Grace alike tapped into their own past experiences with love and loss, as well as the relationships of the people surrounding them.
“As we started getting into it, all of this stuff from my past came back from when I was younger, just interactions I've had, and so I just really tapped into that emotion and sort of method, you know,” Dan said. "And it turns out, I read some of these lyrics and Grace would say, ‘How do you know that that's what's going on?’”
“It would be super weird, I literally had those same exact lyrics,” Grace said. “He's really good at stepping into someone else's shoes. So we tapped in. I think our frequencies tapped into each other.”
Thomas’s drumming is the newest component of The Mesmerists’ equation, but perhaps one of the most important. Dan has been recording his own music in his basement studio for years now, but has historically found drum tracking to be the most challenging part. On The Last Love, he believes the percussion is at its best yet.
“It was a crazy thing for even drums to do, because our last drummer in the past was like, amazing too,” Thomas said. “So it's like, ‘How do we at least match that energy?’ But we're more like, ‘How do we actually change this to more of a dynamic thing, to create our own thing again? Because we're not the same group as it was in the past album. We're more so figuring out how to make it our own thing again. So it's like, ‘How do we play more dynamically? [...] to have less with more?’”
The Mesmerists’ music combines lo-fi shoegaze elements with dreamy, psychedelic indie rock and some folk-inspired sensibilities. Their live performances are known to draw people in with shimmering guitar and emotional resonance. Dan urged listeners to pay special attention to The Mesmerists’ vocals during their album release show at xBk.
“We're going to focus really heavily on the dynamics of the melodies and the harmonies and lyrics,” Dan said. “It’s less so about how big the sound is, and more so about how intimate and engaging the lyrics and melodies are.”
Local bands The Sapwoods and The Bird Hunters will be opening for The Mesmerists at their album release show July 19. Fifty The Last Love bootleg recordings will be offered on CDs that look like vinyl. Tickets are available on the xBk website.
