Mothers was an American band from Athens, Georgia, composed of Kristine Leschper, Matthew Anderegg, Chris Taylor, and Garrett Burke. They released only two albums before disbanding their debut “When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired”, released on Wichita Recordings in England to a lot of good press attention in February 2016. Their second follow up titled “Render Another Ugly Method”, was released in September 2018 on ANTI- Records.
Mothers were originally formed in 2013 as the solo project of musician Kristine Leschper. Leschper started making music while she was a student studying printmaking at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Over the next year, Leschper began to gather a large following alongside acclaim in the Georgia music scene. Leschper decided to recruit other musicians from Athens to form a full band.
Mothers garnered what Leschper considers a “small but devoted” following, some of whom were resistant to her decision to expand the project into a full-fledged band. One of those fans was Mothers’ eventual drummer, Matthew Anderegg, who befriended Leschper through the intimate Athens music scene. Both Leschper and Anderegg describe it as an everyone-knows-everyone kind of place; a city with a small-town feel. But Athens has a long, storied presence on the national radar as a place deeply grounded in the arts, and especially in music. That makes it a hard place to escape, and though Mothers intended on staying their Leschper expects to move on in the somewhat foreseeable future. “It’s so wonderfully cheap to live here,” Leschper says when I ask her to describe exactly what attracted her to the city in the first place. Sometime after they met, he invited Leschper to record in his home and the two started to add to her arrangements, eventually incorporating Anderegg’s drums and eventually inviting guitarist Drew Kirby in to work out the rest.
In November 2015, When the bands debut single “No Crying In Baseball” was released, Leschper said that it was a song about being willfully vulnerable, about showing your offender where it hurts without resorting to hysterics, about realizing that weaknesses can be shouted and celebrated and owned without embarrassment. It’s crafted like an argument, albeit an internal one, and its declarative, abrasive, unrestrained delivery introduced us to Leschper’s powerful presence and the heart she wears on a tattered sleeve.
Leschper developed new confidence in the months after recording her debut full-length, and the band began to pursue a more dissonant sound. Just two weeks after that first show, Kirby, Anderegg and Leschper booked time at Chase Park Transduction and started recording material for their debut album, “When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired”.
Explaining why she felt the album needed to be recorded so quickly, Leschper says, “It was important for me to make that record when we did for my mental health. I was struggling a lot personally, and those songs were all written when I was going to art school and trying to figure my shit out. I was trying to figure out what kind of person I was and what I wanted to put out into the world. It sort of feels like documentation of this time in my life.”
“When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired”
The initial 14 tracks for the album—the final release was pared down to eight—were recorded in just two weeks. Though their time in the studio was short, the members of Mothers all considered it to be a profound experience.
“It was a really, really intense process,” says Anderegg. “I think everyone was kind of freaking out the whole time. It was brutal. It was a very serious session for a very serious record. It’s not a lighthearted record at all. It’s the kind of record that requires prior commitment to some extent, in the sense that you have to be willing to dive in and take your time with it.”
Comprised mostly of Leschper’s previous solo material reworked and re-recorded live with a band, “Tired’s” push-and-pull between quieter moments and raucous guitar-and-drum breaks is a living document of Mothers’ slow and fruitful transition into a more collaborative project.
For lack of a better phrase, started blowing the fuck up. Features from The Fader, Brooklyn Magazine, Stereogum and Paste started hyping the band as “the next big thing,” and shout-outs from NPR and Spotify pushed the streams of their singles to well over 1 million plays—all before the release of that first album. At the time “Tired” was one of the most consistent and exciting records to emerge from the Athens music scene in at least a decade. It’s as emotional, beautiful and human as the band itself. On a local level, some already view Mothers as hometown heroes, and praise from national publications is just beginning.
Render Another Ugly Method
Mothers scored one of the best albums of 2016 with their full-length debut, “When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired”. The follow-up LP, “Render Another Ugly Method” through ANTI- Records, the effort spans a total of 11 tracks and features production from Grammy-winner John Congleton (St. Vincent, The War on Drugs). “The first time I heard Mothers I knew it was a band that I wanted to work with,” Congleton shared in a press statement. “So special and idiosyncratic, it is impossible to ignore their point of view. I loved making the record and seeing them work.”
The first single released is “Blame Kit”, which frames “the body as an object that can be expanded or collapsed, inhabited or deserted,”
“Pink” is the second track to come from the album, after “Blame Kit”.
““Pink” deals with the passage of time,” explains Mothers lead singer and songwriter Kristine Leschper. “It describes a series of memories within cars – cars of my childhood, recent past, and present – and subsequent feelings of childlike removal and helplessness. The video aims to reciprocate these three vignettes of idling, through limited actions and minimalist set design divided into three parts.”
Mothers attempt to exist in two places at once – both singular and collaborative, sprawling and concise, present and distant. Kristine Leschper, songwriter and founding member of the project, explains that it is in the space between opposites that she finds herself. The multifaceted is, by nature, fragmented – each facet reflecting a slightly different perspective of the whole. It is in this way that their latest record, “Render Another Ugly Method”, attempts to gain an expanded view of its surroundings through splintered sound, thought, and image. By conversing with her own experiences of attempting to validate herself through work, Leschper moves toward understanding the harmful and often indulgent nature of inextricably coupling the quality of your creative output to your right to exist.
The Fat Angel Sings 