True Mountain Laurel Is Serious About Having Fun
Haley Blais and Sam Lynch turn childhood nostalgia, folk tradition and a little make-believe into their debut album, Angel So Bad.
By Bridget Wadden
Photos by Charlie Pief
- Published on
“Can we join them?” Lynch asks.
Blais, pointing out one kid putting exceptional energy into his performance, says: “And you know what? You’re killing it at not really moving anywhere.”
A public park with a splash pad and swings feels like the perfect setting for Blais and Lynch, who enter any space ready to engage with each other and their surroundings. Sitting on a blue and white checkered picnic blanket, sunglasses on and shoes off (at least for Blais, who’s particularly excited about her Crocs made to look like ballet flats), they’re ready to play.
“The ethos of the project was: we want this to be fun,” says Lynch of her and Blais’ new album Angel So Bad, which comes out Aug. 28. Both artists have thriving projects of their own, but after growing closer while touring together in 2022, they began making music as True Mountain Laurel. Angel So Bad marks their first full-length release together.
They’re not nervous for the record to come out because the project as a whole feels like “a bonus,” one refreshingly free of expectations. “Two people could listen to it,” Lynch says, “and it’d be like, that’s awesome. We actually had the best time.”
Alongside their desire to make something with a throughline of “playfulness and freedom,” as Lynch says, the duo also wanted to encourage an “understanding that fun does not necessarily need to mean silly, or frivolous, or… stupid.”
That distinction runs throughout Angel So Bad. For Blais and Lynch, playfulness isn’t an escape from sincerity but another way of accessing it, allowing the record to have fun while still engaging thoughtfully with the traditions of folk music.
Rather than pulling from the wells of brutal emotionality that typically inform their solo projects, the friends leaned into folk traditions of fiction and storytelling, returning to the music they listened to as kids.
“We both kind of went back to the archives of our childhoods… The Rankin Family, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell,” Lynch laughs. “All of the founding fathers.”
Returning to the archives of play was similarly crucial to the writing process. When asked what they were like as kids, Blais, without missing a beat, says: “I was awesome.”
She’s sitting, arms around her knees, rocking back and forth with a slight smile. Lynch describes herself as having been “a balance of weird and very serious.” They played mermaids, fairies, witches, and house, and this hasn’t changed.
“We were in the pool recently playing mermaids,” Blais says, with a hint of pride.
When they talk about recent photoshoots, they describe them as playing dress-up. Playing pretend, it seems, remains vital to their friendship—and, by extension, to their project.
When it came time for production, Blais explains that they started to ask themselves: “Why are we spending this much money? Remember when we used to not spend any money?”
And so, they recorded and produced the whole album at home.
“I’ve learned the most out of my entire career recording this album,” says Blais.
For both of them, the process became an unexpected exercise in confidence. Lynch says she’s now “confident in the things that I do know, and very aware of the things that I don’t know, but not allowing that to stop me from trying.”
Lynch emphasizes that the goal with their collaboration was never to say, “It’s never been done before!” And Angel So Bad isn’t trying to revolutionize folk or indie music. Instead, its intimacy comes from recognizing the traditions it belongs to. Warm guitars and tight-knit harmonies carry wildly visual stories, while its homespun production makes the record feel less like an attempt to reinvent the past than an invitation to play around inside it.
Recognizing that they are writing within a musical canon rather than trying to break it open, Blais says, “Everything comes from something, and we’re definitely paying homage to stories before,” as well as to their younger selves.
In the end, they are looking not only to the past, but to the future as well.
“We’re both very inspired by nostalgia and pastiche… so this is in no way a new sound,” Blais says. “But what will be? Does that exist anymore?”
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