The members of the Hard Quartet, a new supergroup featuring some of the most revered names in the past three decades of indie rock, are passing a swelteringly hot summer morning in a serene garden in Manhattan’s East Village. Guitarist and songwriter Matt Sweeney acts as a kind of spokesperson, detailing their history with the narrative flair and self-awareness of a talking head in a retrospective documentary. Chiming in with the occasional commentary are guitarist Emmett Kelly and drummer Jim White, a pair who frequently perform together and seem to communicate mostly through their eyes. Somewhat removed from the proceedings is Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, as relaxed and boyish as ever, doing a sun salutation pose in the grass, where he spies a rolled-up leaf and holds it before his bandmates.
“This kinda looks like a blunt,” he deadpans.
By the time that Sweeney can identify its actual origins (it’s a Rose of Sharon), Malkmus is already riffing on what else it could be—a chrysalis about to release a butterfly, the overstuffed cigarettes that a mutual acquaintance is known to roll. Soon, the whole group is reflecting and laughing and offering a window into the free-wheeling process that informs their proudly leaderless new collaboration: an idea first proposed by Sweeney over the phone to Malkmus during the early days of the pandemic, and now introducing itself to the world with a riffy anthem called “Earth Hater” and a series of live dates in New York, Los Angeles, and London.
This first glimpse of the band’s sound—catchy and off-kilter, prone to intuitive stops and starts, and full of quippy, quotable lyrics (“The archetype of the narc is eternal,” Malkmus sings)—is an appropriate introduction. Each member speaks to the band’s early days with the same sense of joy and exhilaration. They kept the process improvisatory, low-key, and exclusive, surveying friends and family about the work-in-progress material to maintain its sanctity. “That’s the best feeling,” Sweeney reflects, “when nobody else knows.” Before he can embellish the thought, Malkmus cuts in: “And when your dreams haven’t been crushed by the marketplace.”
He’s kidding, but a firm, old-school indie mentality does sit at the center of these musicians’ Venn Diagram (alongside formative influences like Slade and The Saints, both of whom receive enthusiastic shout-outs during our conversation). In addition to leading the indie rock band Chavez, Sweeney has made two acclaimed albums with Bonnie “Prince” Billy in the duo Superwolf and played on albums by Cat Power, Iggy Pop, Adele, Run the Jewels, and Johnny Cash. Jim White, best known for his work in the instrumental rock group The Dirty Three, has also held down the kit for Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and Bill Callahan. Emmett Kelly, the youngest member of the band, records as The Cairo Gang, and he’s also played with Will Oldham and Ty Segall. If you are a fan of any corner of indie rock, it’s almost impossible that your record collection does not include something touched by each member of the band.
After collaborating in various permutations and running into each other frequently on the road, the idea of making music together—by nobody’s rules but their own, distinct from any industry trends or standards—felt like a no-brainer. Sweeney looks back in awe at the Hard Quartet's first week of working together, during which they quickly amassed nearly an album’s worth of songs and settled into an identity that felt distinct from any of their previous projects. (“This is not a project—it’s a band,” Malkmus says firmly. Sweeney responds with a triumphant, guttural, “Yeeeah!”) Even the band name—a pun that benefits from saying it out loud—was the result of an organic process via group text thread: “It’s focused and goofy,” Sweeney says of the dynamic. “No one’s been kicked out yet.” (Rejected name ideas include Glass Sarcophagus, Iron Chad, and Divorce Doulas.)
With a bounty of material ready to perform and the release of “Earth Hater”’s trippy claymation video, which Sweeney calls a “fully bent public service announcement,” each of the members speaks excitedly about the band’s future, which looks as open-ended and full of possibility as their origins. “There’s plenty of times that [bands] come in with luster and things just wither,” Malkmus admits. “But I don’t see that happening. If we’re digging it then it continues and blossoms.”