“A Container of Time:” Shawn Marom of Cryogeyser on their New Self-Titled Album
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY ALEAH ANTONIO ☆
Credit: Marlon Lenoble
“I LEARNED FROM A POETRY TEACHER in college that being ultra-specific makes it really universal,” Shawn Marom of Cryogeyser tells me. “Everyone thinks poetry is about being vague, but that makes it boring as f*ck. I’m like, ‘This one’s for Rachel.’ Everyone’s like, ‘Who’s Rachel?’ You’re never gonna know who Rachel is. I’m gonna know who Rachel is, but you’re gonna know what it feels like to dedicate something to someone.”
When Marom tells me about their newest self-titled record, they mention that if a Cryogeyser song is about you, you’ll definitely know. It’s like reading a subtweet, or putting pieces of somebody’s lore together. Marom puts “easter eggs” in their songs for themselves, picking details from their notes app and integrating them into lyrics like a signal.
Credit: Marlon Lenoble
Many of the songs were written years ago, while the band’s lineup shifted over the years—Will Kraus (Kraus) and Nicholas Santana (Slow Hollows) joined for some of the Cryogeyser-making process. The band is now comprised of Marom, Zach CapittiFenton, and Samson Flitsner. The songs on the record, even if chronologically distant from Marom, still capture a part of themselves that’s lived through something significant in this life. Each song speaks directly to someone, and being a listener feels like an intimate experience.
“I recorded this with my best friend, and he also happens to be somebody who healed a lot of what I was going through in all those songs,” Marom says. “I almost feel like I relate to the emotional stuff in this album as a big sibling to myself.”
Cryogeyser indeed feels like a big-sibling album. Just as self-titled records are, these songs are all-encompassing and self-assured. Produced by CapittiFenton and mixed by Sonny Diperri (julie, DIIV), their sound departs from their airy and moody debut Glitch, and trades it for expansiveness and grit. Each song on Cryogeyser is full of love, or anger, or both. “Cupid,” the record’s standout song, blooms with the hope of a new relationship: “Don’t you want to say I’m in the way? / I would never treat you that way.” The closer, “Love Language,” is about transforming the pain of loving someone into the freedom of leaving them.
“I guess I relate to this being like, you really have a capacity for longing. I also see half of the album as, you really have the capacity to tell yourself ‘no more,’” Marom says.
After releasing Glitch in 2019, Cryogeyser released a double album during the pandemic, Love is Land/timetetheredtogether. The time between that release and this one was a frenzy. Bandmates came in and out (“It broke my heart. I was broken-hearted all the time,” Marom says). Marom worked a random assortment of jobs to keep their music career going. Eventually, CapittiFenton and Flitsner joined, and they’d go on tour with bands like Pond and Horse Jumper of Love.
One of the Cryogeyser singles, “Stargirl,” is one of the oldest songs on the record, written very soon after their last record. In the album’s press release, Marom says that “everyone [they have] ever loved has had their hands on it.” It’s emblematic of the album as a whole. It showcases Marom’s vocal talent, calling and responding to herself in croons and screams during the chorus. They sing ethereal melodies to break between their crushing riffs. Even the lyrics confess the emotional chasms in the record: “You don’t want me to stay, you don’t want me to go / It’s hard to mean something but nothing at all."
Credit: Marlon Lenoble
During our conversation, Marom emphasizes her emotional distance from the record. She describes Cryogeyser as a time capsule – one to bury, to shelve. Take the memories that come with the song and tuck them away. However, in each song is a fondness. On Instagram, they speak of each single tenderly. The last one to come out, “Mountain,” features Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, a good friend of Marom who had just joined Cryogeyser on a double-solo tour this past winter.
“She was just hanging out in the studio and she’s like, ‘Can I sing on it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ One take. Maybe two takes. Insane. That’s the magic of Karly. Her whole heart’s in it, but she saves it for that moment,” Marom says.
Cryogeyser and Wednesday have a lot of overlap, so it’s no surprise that the two are friends. Both have a sound that is shoegaze-influenced yet more rock-leaning. Both bands sing about grief—heavy, yet survivable. Love lost, then found, then lost again, and surviving that, too.
“I had to pivot so many times with [the album]. It’s taken years, probably a year and a half working on it with me, Zach, and Samson and everyone else who was involved…For me, the emotional attachment to it changed so many times that it really became about doing it with my band,” Marom tells me. “For me, what has carried through is my songwriting and my emotions that I’m sharing. For me, the album is just a proliferation of making it with my band, which is incredibly emotional on a personal level.”
To Marom, there’s a dichotomy of being the main songwriter in a band. “[Cryogeyser] really feels like my band, but there’s this temporality in it. It’s really lonely to be a songwriter, in a way. No matter how much people try to say it’s their band, it is, for the most part, one person in a room writing songs” they say. “It can be a really lonely position and it can be the best position ever.”
Next month, Cryogeyser embarks on a full North American tour starting in Santa Ana. After years in the making, many of these songs will finally come to life on stage every night.
“These are probably the last songs about the person I wrote nearly all that music about. It’s kind of crazy to put those into it and be like, what the hell comes after this one?”
