Halfloves has been one of the most ascendant Iowa indie bands of the last decade. The Iowa City five-piece — comprised of lead vocalist Jeff Roalson, drummer Zach Zeimer and synth player Trevor Polk, with Nate Cooper and Lucas Adolphson swapping guitar and bass duties — pools together their disparate tastes into refreshing and layered rock. Within the quintet, personal preferences range from classical and heavy metal to emo and hip-hop.
“We were in high school in the late aughts,” said Polk, “and then were a burgeoning band in the early 2010s indie scene, which, depending on who you are, a lot of people think of the early 2010s as like this golden era of indie rock music and the indie sleaze sound. With our music, we have this sort of bipolar nature. You know, very poppy, sunshiny sort of stuff. And then we’ve got this great amount of darkness, heaviness, grittiness. A lot of us came from the mid-2000s hardcore, emo, pop punk sort of influences … as well as Radiohead and even more cinematic types of music.”
The band burst onto the scene with their debut album Halfloves in 2016 and found even wider success with their follow-up Dazer in 2019. Songs from the band’s sophomore album gained significant national attention, aided by a stellar 2020 Audiotree performance and a priggish, but “good critical” — according to Polk — review of their string-filled track “A Little Lie” from Anthony Fantano.
But they're far from a Radiohead regurgitation, and their spacey, electronic sound on Dazer is more Muse than Moon Shaped Pool.
Now they're getting ready for a big celebration: ten years together. They'll be popping out for a top-to-bottom performance of their debut record Halfloves on Friday, March 6, at their hometown hangout.
Halfloves / 10 years later...
Today, two-thirds of Halfloves have little ones at home, a far cry from 2017, when Adolphson would sharpie “Come to da show Friday @ Blue Moose” on his bare chest and stomach. Halfloves has outlived many of the Iowa venues they'd frequented in the 2010s. Still, the memory of their debut remains fresh.
“It feels simultaneously like it was yesterday but also a long time ago,” said Roalson. “We’ve never really stopped doing music, so in that sense it’s been a fluid thing. The whole Iowa City music scene was really different ten years ago. It’s definitely easy to feel pretty old [when] you’re in Iowa City and you’ve done anything for ten years.”
“I still feel very connected to where I was 10 years ago,” said Polk. “We've made a tremendous amount of growth and are completely different. I think replaying the album that we've been rehearsing for the upcoming show ... I think I had a lot more romanticism of the album at the time, because it's just so creative in a different way. It’s like the beginner's mind, where there's not as many rules in place, and so it's very chaotic in a really cool way that I super appreciate. But I can also appreciate the maturity of where we've grown from since.”
Halfloves’ debut album begins with a 38-second refrain called “Rounding the Bend I,” which, in keeping with its name, circles back into the narrative on track eight with “Rounding the Bend II.”
The traipsing piano and placidity of “Rounding the Bend I” quickly drops into the album’s first real rocker, “Not Too Keen.” Not quite heavy, but weighty metal guitars pulse throughout, creating a moody atmosphere for “It’ll Give You Stripes” to dance in the antigravity. Both songs scratch that dour, twenty-teens itch often assuaged by The Neighborhood or Arctic Monkeys.
“It’s Easy to Love,” the band’s first ever single, is much brighter and poppier than its alt rock antecedents. Perhaps this is where Iowa producer Brandon Darner, who’d helped launch Imagine Dragons into pop rock stardom with their debut, Night Visions, came in handy. Darner and longtime Halfloves engineer Micah Natera (both members of The Envy Corps) have a hand in every item in the band’s library.
At the top of “Mirror Mirror” (track seven), whirring alien radio waves run a quick scan before the synthiest of synth sections on the whole album. If Halfloves is a trip through cosmos, “Mirror, Mirror” is the wormhole, taking us further into the unknown.
Of all the songs on Halfloves, “Novocain” has endured the longest. Not only was it the lone selection off their debut deemed fit for Audiotree, it's also remained a constant on “95%” of the band's live show setlists since its release. Defying the classic pop song structure “Novocain” is like a video game with several different levels and a boss battle. Somehow, it manages to sound like The Smiths morphed with present-day Turnstile, especially when repeating the mantra “We’ll go on a vacation, shoot me up like Novocain.”
“Rounding the Bend II” is worth every second between its prelude and its slot on the album. The idea to tease its chorus at the outset came from former drummer Noel Nissen, inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s poem within To Pimp A Butterfly and the track “Mortal Man.” The song is so good, recounts Polk, that they almost cut the record short right there.
“I remember a producer was really pushing for [the album to] end on ‘Rounding the Bend II.’ ... But ‘Hex’ has one of my favorite parts: being that bridge, and just that energy and grittiness. It just seemed like we needed a little bit more of that.”
Cutting “Rounding the Bend II” would have deprived the world of Halfloves’ heel turn. Its penultimate track, “Ghost Variations,” is a wordless, spooky interlude just before the last song. Perhaps the song is a misty cruise across the River Styx, or a stroll through an old war town graveyard — regardless, the next and final stop is Hell.
“Hex” is an unpredictable, yet fitting end to a landmark Iowa indie album. The guitars’ commanding, hard-rocking ‘dun-dun’ and Roalson’s hypnotic vocals up the song’s creep factor, sure. But, the band’s flouting of a "normal" conclusion comports with the rest of Halfloves’ playful, explorative nature.
What’s next?
Studio One has been spinning Halfloves since 2015, when they were still going by their previous name, The Olympics. A lot has changed in the interim.
Halfloves hasn't released a full-length project since 2019, with one notable exception. The band participated in various ways on the 2020 independent short film Backlash, which starred familiar character actor Joel Murray, the youngest brother of Bill Murray. Halfloves produced the seven-track score and Roalson even acted in the project. Scenes from that film were supercut together to form the music video for Dazer’s “A Little Lie.”
But singles ... singles they’ve got. The band has released several singles in the six years since Dazer, including the sugary pop hit “Bass Drum” and their most recent, likely-to-get-a-knowing-nod-from-Jack-White rocker, “Just Wanna Sleep.”
“We kept writing songs,” said Roalson, “and were a little bit more loose with maybe some of the qualifiers or stylistic compatibility. Those conversations about, does this song fit with us? With these other songs? We were really open with it. And it was a fun process. We still play a lot of those songs live. In this past year and a half, we have more focused around trying to write songs, more specifically for a third album.”
With a third album in the works, we’ve got our eyes and ears firmly pointed at Halfloves.
The Halfloves 10th anniversary show takes place at Gabe’s in Iowa City on Friday, March 6, with openers James Tutson and Anthony Worden & The Illiterati. Both Polk and Roalson promise that, to close out their celebration of all things self-titled, they’ll be performing several never-before-heard songs.
