In the self-styled “zero-gravity” atmosphere of Ryan Lindsey’s right brain, bits of sounds and songs float like pollen in the breeze. When they come his way, he has one responsibility: show up. “Something comes,” he says, sipping a Tina’s martini. “And I try to make sense of it.”
“Plans never work with me, so it’s better to not have a plan,” the BRONCHO songwriter says. “Whether that’s leaving the bedroom in the middle of the night to not wake anybody up recording a voice memo in the far corner of the house, or just trying to whisper-hum an idea.” He mimes hunching over the edge of a bed. “It might make zero sense later when I listen back to it. That doesn’t matter. The science is out on how anybody comes up with anything.”
Listening to the new BRONCHO album Natural Pleasure evokes that sense of weightlessness. (The cover art is, incidentally, a bee collecting pollen.) The record carries on BRONCHO’s tendency toward songwriting more in feelings than in declarations, erratic guitar tones or driving bass lines filling in the blanks, with rhythmic utterings crystallizing into lyrics only on repeated listens—and even then, only sometimes. Lyrically, he operates in the reverse of saying a word over and over until it sounds like gibberish; the gibberish feels like it’s been a word all along.
“What tends to happen is there's a melody that's just in my mind and it's just consuming me, it’s on a loop, and I'm just thinking about it,” Lindsey says. “Through that I'll start mumbling whatever, and words will kind of appear through that. Sometimes it takes forever because it doesn't become obvious to me.”
Longtime fans will know the “doo doo doo doo doo doo” refrain of “Class Historian” (from 2014’s Just Enough Hip to Be Woman) as maybe the most famous BRONCHO “lyric.” It’s echoed in the “ya ya ya ya” of new single “Funny,” during which Lindsey drags out the “funny / funny / funnaaayyyyyy” with the languidity of someone who has nowhere in particular to be.
And he didn’t, for a while. We haven’t seen much of BRONCHO since 2018’s Bad Behavior, which the band finished touring in early 2020, just ahead of everything else stopping as well. He was celebrating a post-tour birthday on March 11, 2020, the day the NBA called off its regular season, and he remembers the time travel-ish feeling of that abrupt suspension of activity.