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⚘ Bio ⚘

Four years ago, Spencer Peppet–lead singer and songwriter of Cincinnati-born quartet The Ophelias–found herself living in a personal hall of mirrors. Old ghosts were popping up from her past, or else being actively summoned: she heard from people she hadn’t heard from in years, reached out to people she didn’t talk to anymore, and found herself dreaming vividly of ex-lovers, ex-friends, co-workers and acquaintances. “My dreams tend to be casual to the point of the uncanny—they feel like having real conversations, except the person on the other side didn’t experience it,” she says. “It’s just me, left with this sense that I have more to say.” At times, those conversations were ones she literally had with herself, pointing to an internal dissonance that gave her pause.

The collection of songs that emerged from the echo chamber of this time–the band’s fourth full-length album Spring Grove, named for a cemetery in Cincinnati–is in part Peppet’s response to these ghosts, a chance to say what was not said. “There’s so much more beyond heartbreak to write about,” she says, emphasizing that there are “zero songs about break-ups” on the album. Rather, across thirteen tracks that alternately rage and soothe, Spring Grove picks at the nuanced textures of relationships and the multifaceted nature of personhood, smashing through the infinite refractions of the self to find clarity and new perspectives. The result is a marked evolution in The Ophelias’s sound and storytelling, a luminous document of facing the visages that haunt us–whether those of others or our own.

The band was sitting on a mountain of archival material in 2020–quarantined between their homes in Ohio, Maryland, and New York, and unable to tour their latest album, that year’s Crocus–when they got a fateful call: Julien Baker wanted to produce their next album. Baker had collaborated with The Ophelias before, singing harmonies on Crocus, but this was the first time the Grammy-winning songwriter was taking on the role of producer. After sending demos back and forth and ranking their favorites, Baker and the band–including violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes, bass player Jo Shaffer, and drummer Mic Adams, in addition to Peppet–spent ten days tracking at Young Avenue Sound in Memphis, TN, in 2021.

Whereas the orchestral Crocus featured many collaborators and friends, the idea with Spring Grove was to distill and pare the process down to the four members, in addition to Baker (who sings harmonies on a number of tracks) and engineer/mixer Calvin Lauber. The resulting sound is no less lush or huge. In fact, Spring Grove is the band’s most dynamic offering yet, confidently wielding the swagger of songs like “Salome” and “Sharpshooter” against the spectral strains of “Forcefed” and the shimmering outro of “Cicada,” which bleeds out into a voice memo of thousands of buzzing cicadas. These dynamics and imagistic touches create cinematic moments across the album, leading to a sound that the band refers to as “movie music,” inspired in part by Shaffer’s experience making horror films. (Peppet and Shaffer–who are engaged–also co-direct all of the band’s music videos.)

To create the bedrock of this visual language, and drawing inspiration from the production style of Rostam Batmanglij, Baker brought her pedalboard to the studio, dialing in Peppet’s guitar sounds to smear a wash of color across the songs. In place of lead guitar, Gutmann Fuentes’s violin became a colorful additional voice, with commanding countermelodies and call-and-response motifs that interweave with Peppet’s vocals. Shaffer, inspired by the attention to tone often found in doom metal, explored melodic lines higher up on the bass, sometimes playing multiple notes at once.

There’s a simultaneous intensity and delicacy to the way the dynamics are treated on Spring Grove, and a large part of that is due to Adams. This was Adams’s first album after coming out as transgender. Playing drums within this identity meant a different approach to musicality. “In the studio,” Adams says, “they would say ‘play as loud as you can’—I don’t think anyone had ever said that to me in a non-condescending way before. They were giving me permission.” But even though he no longer identifies as a woman, he continues, “I still feel like I play for that team. I feel most represented by women musicians. It’s the only time I’m comfortable being perceived as feminine.” You can hear this intricate push-and-pull in the rhythmic and textural variation of his playing–from the urgent breakbeat of “Say To You” and machine-like precision of “Salome,” to the ambling shuffle of “Parade” and tender ricochet of “Gardenia.” Adams credits Baker with creating a safe and supportive space for him as he explored these new shades of his identity and musicality.

While the Ophelias began as an “all-girl” band, they have since shed the reductive mantle of that label. With one queer and two trans members (Shaffer is a trans woman), these four individuals have collectively explored a vast terrain of womanhood, dancing around the center of that identity and what it means to move through the world under–or out from under–its banner. To that end, the songs on Spring Grove are primed to tackle a wide array of relationship dynamics, emotional negotiations, and power imbalances. “Parade,” for instance, is a waltz through the complexities of deep female friendship, feeling like you aren’t treated the way you want to be treated, while teeth-gnashing “Salome” uses a Biblical story as a lens through which to view the experience of getting involved with an older man (“I want your head on a platter”). Lead single “Cumulonimbus”–one of the first songs written for the album–looks back at the dissolution of a relationship with compassion and regret. “The things that I didn’t say are always going to / Hang above you like a cumulonimbus,” Peppet sings, one of many instances where nature becomes a mirror for lived experience. Like the carrion-loving vultures depicted in the atmospheric, folktale-esque “Vulture Tree,” Peppet’s lyrics are an act of scavenging, picking at the viscera of the past as a means of ultimately feeding and healing herself. As she sings on “Forcefed,” “I’m eating my organs and / I will let them sustain me.”

Having a body–being a body–is exhausting, especially when it’s bound by illness or fettered by the expectations of being a woman. At the time she began working on the songs for the album, Peppet was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, which she says created “a hyper-awareness of the body, a sense of removal where I could see myself from outside.” The lyrics abound with references to premonitions, future-telling, and prophetic dreams. In his book How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee writes of trying to know his future: “I wanted one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life.” Like Chee, Peppet is drawn to mirrors and reflections throughout Spring Grove, both as a way of looking inward and as a way of seeing beyond, outside the boundaries of the body.

By album’s end, though, she’s done trying to disentangle the past or decode the future. She’s come to terms with where she’s at, freeing herself from the distorted funhouse of her mind and from the tethers of the specters that haunt her. On album closer “Shapes,” she vows to “try my best to let things pass just as it is.” What’s to come is not ominous or anguished or even all that unknowable. “I see what’s coming after,” she sings, clear-eyed, as the drums crescendo and crest, gradually receding into a placid froth of sound. It’s simply “a reflection in the water. / I am rippling forever.”