“Something crazy always happens in Philly! Not in like a bad way, but the last time at Johnny Brenda’s our drummer’s brother got really drunk and jumped up onstage with us, and then someone stole my chains off the stage,” says Angela Gail Mattson – one-half of Grand Rapids-based indie rock duo In The Valley Below, alongside husband Jeffrey Jacob Mendel – during a recent phone chat. She also tells me that the experience certainly didn’t sour the band’s (who have opened mega-sized venues for the likes of The Airborne Toxic Event, OMD, and Albert Hammond Jr.) feelings about Fishtown’s “mini rock n’ roll ballroom”: “We love it. It’s a whole different thing from the big theatres, which are so beautiful, but these are a little more intimate.”
I’ve been a longtime buddy of Angela and Jeffrey. Of their 2014 debut full-length, The Belt, I wrote, “In the Valley Below exist at an intersection of traditional Americana folk and blues and postmodernly intellectual art pop. They don’t sound like they’re from Mars… but they certainly seem to be aggressively refusing to fit into any genre. And in terms of subject matter, they would seem to take cues from both Genet and The Bible,” which they would go on to use as their bio for several years.
I’m speaking to Angela as the band travels from San Diego to San Francisco after the third date of In The Valley Below’s current tour, and on release day (July 12th) of their third studio album, The Black Moon, the follow up to 2019 LP The Pink Chateau. I joke with Angela that I had just realized that there’s officially been half a decade between each of their full-lengths, to which she responds, “We don’t really want to wait that long, but it keeps happening [laughs].”
The Black Moon’s second and latest single, “I Could Lose You,” an intoxicatingly dreamy indie folk tune, dropped early last month, and features a ten-ton-truck of a chorus perfectly suited to be scrawled on textbook covers (Do kids still do that?): “I could lose you / But I can’t lose to you.” “That was a song that I wrote on the acoustic guitar… It’s kind of about past relationships, where you’re too scared you’re gonna get hurt, so you get out first. You don’t want to lose at love, so you’d rather lose the person,” Angela explains of the track.
Curious if Angela and Jeffrey’s process of making music has changed over the years, on the 10th anniversary of The Belt and the fifth anniversary of The Pink Chateau, Angela tells me that there’s one thing that’s evolved significantly: “When we started, we wanted to just be a studio band, like, ‘We’re not gonna play live, we’re not gonna tour.’ We were tired of trying to make it and just playing shows for our friends… Now we like to write music for the live show.”
For The Black Moon, In The Valley Below also enlisted the help of Sam Cohen (known for his work with Kevin Morby, Karen O, and Pavo Pavo, the former band of our buddy Oliver Hill, currently of Coco), which Angela explains was definitely something new for the band: “We record them all independently, without anyone telling us what to do, in our recording studio in our basement in Michigan… This time we worked with Sam Cohen, in his studio in upstate New York, which got us out of the basement [laughs].”
In The Valley Below’s current tour will have the group returning to Johnny Brenda’s on Tuesday, July 30th (which Angela promises will include songs from all three albums). When I ask her how the first three shows have gone, she tells me, “It’s been really great, actually! We weren’t sure what to expect. It’s been a while, and we’re doing this whole projection thing, and we didn’t know if it would work, but it did… we’ve got this really great visual projection that covers the stage.” And she says that that’s not the only special treat fans can expect of this show: “We’re stripping it down a little at one point and, I won’t give it away, but we’ll be getting intimate with the audience.”
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