Massage - Coaster
€7.00 - €18.00
Massage - Coaster
€7.00 - €18.00
ALBUM OUT OCTOBER 10, 2025
It’s been four years since L.A. indie-pop mainstays Massage last released new music. Now, on Oct. 10, they return with Coaster, a masterful 10-track album that finds the band facing the upheaval and uncertainty of adulthood the only way they know how: together, five longtime friends, turning out one Perfect Pop Song after another.
The wait was worth it. Massage have always seen themselves as music fans rather than proper “musicians,” and Coaster — their third LP after 2018’s Oh Boy and 2021’s Still Life — still conjures memories of other eras: the braided rumble of The Cure’s “Pictures of You”; the radiant clang of Big Star’s “September Gurls”; the strobe-light sheen of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses”; the hazy strum of David Kilgour’s “Shivering”; even the post-Madchester swagger of prime Oasis, if you squint hard enough.
Yet while facets of Coaster might feel familiar, here they add up to something greater, and rarer — a band that finally sounds more like itself than its influences.
“We’ve been labeled ‘jangle pop’ and lumped in with ‘fog pop,’” says Andrew Romano, guitarist and vocalist. “We even called ourselves ‘college rock.’ But we never really fit in anywhere. I think Coaster is where we embrace that in-betweenness. We’re a pop group, plain and simple. We don’t want to just remind you of some other band. We want to write songs you can’t shake.”
The result is Massage’s finest full-length — a collection that can’t help but reflect how much its members have been through since Still Life. Bassist David Rager nearly lost his home in L.A.’s devastating Eaton Fire; he and his family have yet to move back. Romano’s father survived a serious cancer scare. Keyboardist and vocalist Gabi Ferrer married her partner Thaddeus Ruzicka, Massage’s resident photographer and video director, then had a baby boy last June. Alex Naidus (guitar, vocals) and Natalie de Almeida (drums) had a son of their own a few months later. Neither pregnancy came easily, or went exactly as planned.
“I guess that’s what growing up is — accepting you aren’t the center of the universe,” says Ferrer, who also created the album art. “That kind of became the theme of the record.”
No song better embodies Massage’s evolution than “Daffy Duck,” the first single off Coaster. It started as a wordless demo: just Romano’s Rickenbacker, his mumbled melody and a sampled snare. Ferrer wrote lyrics about that shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment all thirtysomething relationships eventually reach, then recorded her plaintive vocals late one night at home.
The track didn’t really take off, however, until the band assembled in the tiny rehearsal-space studio they shared with producer-composer Andrew Brassell (Susanna Hoffs) and started layering on hook after hook: pulsing synth, monumental bass, metallic guitar, vaporous keys and Ferrer’s pitched-up, Cyndi Lauper yelps.
The whole painstaking process took two years from start to finish, but it produced something both immediate and idiosyncratic: a maximalist anthem that evokes Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” New Order’s Technique, Orange Juice’s Glasgow School and even Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” … while still sounding like only Massage could have made it.
“‘Daffy Duck’ is probably the closest we’ll ever get to writing a ‘banger’,” Romano says. “But it’s a very us kind of banger — you don’t know whether to dance or cry.”
A music video stitched together by Rager from astronomical footage shot in 1928 will be released on July 23 to accompany the single and announce the LP.
The band’s warm, loose relationship with Brassell came to define Coaster’s sound. After recording de Almeida’s drums at the home studio of another close friend — artist and producer David “D.A.” Stern — Massage spent more than a year holed up in their Glassell Park space experimenting with Brassell’s endless collection of pedals and vintage studio effects.
That freedom — to waste time, to make mistakes, to hit reset, to try again — gave Brassell and the band the space they needed to treat each track like its own little sonic world: the orbiting arpeggios of “No North Star,” with its lyrics about losing your bearings; the headlong 12-string rush of “Without Your Love,” a before-and-after love song that straddles power pop’s usual subject matter; the lush acoustics and rippling Wurlitzer of “Hang On to that Feeling”; the sinuous VU guitar interplay of “Psychic”; the baggy cacophony of “Fading Out”; the Mellotron fragility of “Parrots of Rome”; the heartsick duet of “After All,” which ends the LP with a crescendo of melody and noise.
“Three of us write songs, and three of us sing,” says Naidus. “Gabi in particular sings and writes more on Coaster than ever before. There are definitely these stylistic swings from one track to the next. But that’s who we are. That’s what makes Massage Massage.”
When Massage started more than a decade ago, it was a weekend warrior’s affair: low-stakes, no big deal, even "anti-ambition," as Romano once put it. Naidus moved to L.A. in 2013 after leaving the band he’d co-founded and played bass in, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Friends from New York, Romano and Naidus reconnected and started bashing out songs that offered messy but heartfelt tribute to their chosen heroes — The Feelies, the Go-Betweens, Twerps, Flying Nun.
A tight-knit group soon took shape. (Ferrer is Romano’s sister-in-law; Naidus and de Almeida were already together when she joined.) Their goal was humble enough: escape real life for a few hours each week to recapture that suburban-garage feeling of making music for its own sake. Oh Boy was a document of the band’s ramshackle beginnings; Still Life was a step forward — an attempt to resurrect that brief, romantic moment in the late-'80s, right after post-punk and immediately before alt-rock, when it seemed like any scrappy indie band might stumble across a hit.
But Coaster is more like a culmination. It is the sound of a band from the edge of the continent. A band that has seen some ups and downs. A band that is learning to go with the flow.
You can even rest your drink on it.
Co-released with Mt. St. Mtn and Prefect Records.
