We live in a fast-paced world, one that isn’t afraid to leave you behind. Jamie Saylor and Kendal Abeln experienced this firsthand when the factory that employed them suddenly cut ties with every human employee who graced the establishment, kicking them to the side in favor of cheaper, faster artificial intelligence (AI) robots to complete the labor.
They didn’t let this stop them, though. The longtime friends stayed inside the factory, living alongside the machines unnoticed while life passed them by. At first, it felt freeing; exciting to live with no rules inside the limitless building. Soon after, isolation struck hard. If these robots can do a human’s job with more efficiency, then what’s our purpose anymore?
While this specific story was born out of a dream Saylor had, it was inspired by the unfortunate and countless similar events that have unfolded in our world in real time. AI is stealing jobs from artists, and Four Degrees Colder is standing up to the system in their new album.
St. Louis indie pop-rock band Four Degrees Colder — the duo of vocalist Saylor and drummer Abeln — has released their debut album, Nothing To Do, an extremely relevant concept album exploring the surge of AI across the globe, diving into exhaustion, loss of purpose and the fear of being replaced across 10 synth-laced tracks.
At its core, Nothing To Do is a bustling rock album that hits listeners in waves; some tracks feel big and brooding with intense outbursts (“Don’t Leave Me,” “The Factory”) while others wrap listeners in a sonic isolation, growing in intensity and vulnerability (“Crash Out,” “Decay.”) The album particularly excels in its storytelling element, as Nothing To Do takes listeners on a journey from feeling carefree and unbothered to starting a revolution that breaks the cracks of the establishment.
Intro track “Reminisce” is on the shorter side, but works perfectly as an introduction to the barren factory’s setting. Monotone verses feel robotic as listeners, along with Saylor, wake up in the factory, taking everything in — including no rules, no schedule and no supervision.
Through the next few tracks, Saylor slowly begins to feel the weight of the factory and the robot’s true mission: eliminating human labor entirely. Lead single “Bouyancy” is for sure the happiest-sounding song gracing the tracklist, while “The Factory” is our first in-your-face glimpse into the album’s theme of toxicity within the workplace. The catchy, co-dependency-laced track “Don’t Leave Me” follows, playing into Saylor’s fear of isolation.
“Yet again in a chokehold / Have to remind myself / Pretty pennies taste of blood / In this factory we die,” Saylor sings in “The Factory”
The title track, “Nothing To Do,” starts the switch-up in the album, with Saylor and Abeln realizing they are, in fact, worthy of respect, especially in the factory. The repeated lyrics of “Look me in the eyes there’s room to hide / Feed the system or break condition / Our blood means something more than nothing” overtop of addictive drums and poppy synths reinstate what our narrators are now remembering: they are reclaiming their lives and autonomy.
“Burn Out” follows, an emotionally beautiful track that features Saylor’s vocals coated in the perfect amount of autotune to portray the inevitability of exhaustion and how that affects the mentality of those facing it.
Four Degrees Colder differs from others in similar scenes with their prominent characters that are reminiscent of real-life people. One of these characters, Stanley, is a yellow robot in the factory — one of thousands the greedy owner, Florence Russell, used to replace our narrators.
“Stanley’s Friends,” the robot’s dedicated track, stands out with its interesting concept. Saylor talks directly to Stanley, convincing him to leave the factory with them and help burn the place to the ground.
“Stanley, my friend, we’re a revolution / Starting with you”
“Crash Out” and “How Loud” are some of the most intense tracks on the record, with the former especially featuring a stand-out drum moment from Abeln. “Crash Out” sonically feels exactly what the title suggests; it’s a four-minute musical outburst about how nothing will ever get life back on track, no matter how hard they try. It’s also the song that the band is most excited to play live, and brought one of my favorite lyrics from the entire record: “My dream will outdream your dream”
“Decay” closes out the album; it’s a 5-and-a-half minute song that wants to be above what tries to drag you down — and it feels particularly revolutionary. Saylor’s reverbed vocals are full of emotion as she sings of a life where she doesn’t have to bend at the will of a power-imbalanced individual; instead, she wants to watch it all “decay.” Abeln’s drums push the narrative along perfectly, giving Nothing To Do a sonic explosion of a closer and leaving listeners wanting to know what happens next to the world they have been immersed in for the 30-minute album.
“I don’t wanna live a life / If it isn’t truly mine / As it all just falls apart / I wanna see it decay”
While Nothing To Do is an album that is very of its time — with its intense themes of AI and workplace ethics that cover our news screens quite often — it is one that is bound to grow more relevant as the years go on. It feels like a piece of work that will be uncovered and studied in the future; a perfect snapshot in the unfortunate reality of many today, and even more a decade from now.
Four Degrees Colder doesn’t feel like a DIY indie band; they have the talent and drive of those that have graced the industry for years. For an album that worries about their purpose for thirty minutes, I think it’s clear both Saylor and Abeln have found theirs perfectly: cohesive storytelling that simultaneously sparks an inner joy and an inner rage, one that protests the matrix-like future society is trying to push.
Before the album dropped, Crave was able to sit down with Four Degrees Colder to discuss Nothing To Do, their live show and why all songs should be ten minutes long.
CRAVE: Congrats on the album! What have you been doing this week to fully prepare for the drop?
SAYLOR: That’s funny because I feel like most of our preparation was done like months ago.
ABELN: Yeah, outside of the show. We’re practicing for that.
SAYLOR: We’ve got the show in two weeks, which is, I think, way more scary than the album itself coming out. But yeah, it’s weird because I feel like we’re both very busy with stuff, and I kind of forgot we have an album coming; I don’t know. It’s scary, and it feels very unreal, and it’s like “Oh, it’s happening.”
CRAVE: This album is very purposefully put together. “Reminisce” feels to me like waking up in the factory, looking around and taking it all in, where “Decay” wants to watch it all burn.
What inspired the theme and overall storyline of the album?
SAYLOR: So, the story is not complete. I will say that this is not a complete story; there’s more to come. We’re both art people, and AI is a big thing right now. It’s really kind of threatening a lot of things and just the world in general. So, Mr. Stanley, he’s there. It’s just a very prevalent theme, and the crash dummy imagery and everything, like the idea of a factory you work in and then these robots replace you and everything…it’s very relevant to the real world we feel.
CRAVE: Did the songs shape the storyline, or vice versa? Or a combination? Did you have to storyboard the album?
ABELN: There were certain songs that happened, and then it was like, what do we need to connect not even just narratively, but also with the sound. Because [the album’s] all over the place, but it works.
SAYLOR: Yeah, it felt like there was an image and then there were gaps that needed to be filled, and then that’s when the other songs. So it was weird because some songs just happened, and then some songs were written to happen.
CRAVE: The song “Nothing To Do” was one of the ones that stood out to me immediately on first listen. It feels like the perfect title for the album, but I’m curious about your reasoning on why you settled on this as the album title.
SAYLOR: That was the first song that was written, and I remember the album name came to me in a dream, actually. I had a dream that some band made this album, and there was a ton of yellow and TVs; I think they were like crash dummies, I don’t know, it was a dream. I woke up, and I just remembered the phrase ‘nothing to do,’ and I was like, that’s a cool phrase, let me keep that in my head. And then, it kind of just fit into that song “Nothing To Do,” and that was kind of what started the whole album and everything. It’s the title track because it was the first song, and I was like, I’m just gonna write something with this ‘nothing to do’ phrase and see what happens and makes sense.
CRAVE: Which song took the longest to write?
SAYLOR: Technically speaking, “Burnout,” the hyper-pop one. That one definitely took a while on the production side, just trying to figure out where to take that song, and it’s just also a very technically hard song. I don’t know which one took the longest to write; I want to say “Decay.” I think “Decay” actually started really early, and I had an idea and then I couldn’t figure out what it was. I couldn’t figure out where to go with the intro, and then I think we got to a point where I was like, OK, we need a closer song, and I went back to that idea. Trying to figure out where to take that song, I think, took the longest.
CRAVE: “Decay” is the longest song for sure. What’s the runtime on that song?
SAYLOR: I think it’s like five-and-a-half or at least five minutes. I think almost every other song on the album is three minutes or less. I felt like we should just make a longer outro song just to compensate for how short everything else is.
ABELN: I love a good, long song.
CRAVE: We really are losing the art of long songs nowadays.
ABELN: To me, it’s just like a song is good, and then it’s got seven more minutes left. It’s just more room to make this song even better. You can’t let someone down on a time investment that long.
CRAVE: So now I know whenever you guys drop a 20-minute song, whose idea it was.
SAYLOR: I’ll be in the car, and Kendal will have aux, and all of a sudden there’s a 10-minute song in the queue.
CRAVE: “Stanley’s Friends” is probably one of the best song concepts I’ve heard in a while. Can you just walk me through what this song means to you and how it all came about?
SAYLOR: That one was one of the songs where we just needed to write something else. That was definitely one of the last songs we wrote.
ABELN: I think it might have been the last one.
SAYLOR: Actually, I think she’s right; I think it was the last one written, or at least finished. I remember I was really into a Spoon song; I think it’s called “I Turn My Camera On,” and I was really into it. I was like, “Man, I just love Spoon,” so I wanted to try and write a Spoon-esque song. And we should probably talk about Stanley — he’s a big part of the album and stuff, and I wanted to be a little bit more direct with this song. I feel like the other songs are not super on the nose, but “Stanley’s Friends” I was like, let’s just spell it out and let’s make it weird. So that one just happened, and it was like, let’s write a Spoon song.
CRAVE: “How Loud” feels very revolutionary to me, and I’m just really impressed with the way you are able to convey such emotion through tracks with different vocal techniques and the swelling drums. How do you pinpoint emotion in tracks when writing or producing? What are things you look for?
SAYLOR: I feel like we’re always thinking about how it’s gonna be live — that’s like the main thing. We’re not gonna write a song and then be like, “How is this gonna happen live?” you know. “How Loud,” I think, was definitely a last-minute-thought song. We just needed another song, and I was like, let me write a slower or a less loud, less in-your-face kind of song, more chill. A lot of the songs were written, and then we were like, “OK, what needs to fill the gaps? So kind of just navigating what we have touched on and what haven’t we touched on.
Honestly, I personally felt like [“How Loud”] was a filler track at first, but as it developed, it kind of grew, especially the end part where it’s got that random little vocal melody riff.
CRAVE: At what point in the song writing/recording process does Kendal come in? How do you guys bounce ideas off each other musically? What collaboration processes work best for you?
ABELN: It’s kind of all over the place, especially because a lot of the album — pretty much all of it — happened during my senior year of college, so I was busy with that. There was never really a set time I’d come in on the songwriting process; I would kind of just show up at points and be like “I think this would be cool.” Even in the studio when we’re tracking drums, it’s just like, “Maybe this would sound good,” and so we throw it in.
SAYLOR: I feel like also we just struggled a lot of time and making time for things, and it was like: Let’s just let’s just do things and see what happens.
CRAVE: What can people expect at the album release show? How are you preparing?
SAYLOR: Practicing these are all brand new songs is scary; it’s so scary to play new songs live because you’re just unfamiliar with them. There’s a lot of new stuff, but that’s good because we’ve been playing the same setlist since we started
ABELN: Not that it’s boring, but yeah, I’m excited to mix it up.
SAYLOR: There’s only so many songs you can play with an EP out, but we also have lights that we sync to the music; we did all that. We synced all the lights to the new songs, programmed them, and then we’ve got some stuff planned where Stanley’s gonna be on the stage, but like the actual whole thing. We’ve got some transitional monologues and stuff of Stanley talking, and yeah — we’ve got secrets!
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