Bowling Shoes - Factory Pop

“Channeling the same diverse alt-pop sound as acts like Glass Animals, the DoomScroller EP makes for a fun and uplifting collection from start to finish.” – Mystic Sons

Melding innovative art-pop experimentalism with indie-rock nuance and arena-ready hooks, Boston, MA’s Bowling Shoes craft eminently catchy music sprinkled with delightful touches of subversive noise. “Rewards repeated listens” is a well-worn industry trope, but in the case of their LP Factory Pop it rings true. This is a band unabashedly in love with hooks; at first blush their music hits hard and buries deep into your subconscious. Really, you’re welcome to leave it at that. This quintet can hone a chorus to a razor edge (a song from their debut EP Currently sits at over 9 million streams on Spotify and climbing). Listen deeper, and you’ll discover a glittering jewel-box of a record, filled with impeccably intentioned, expertly executed nuance.

Jeremiah Bermel, Jake Lutter, and Ben Walker met and formed Bowling Shoes at Massachusetts College Of Art & Design in 2017. Growing up in the New England DIY music scene (from which they recruited Dimitri Christo and Josh Kuhn), they all knew of each other and each other’s projects. Following graduation, the band leaned fully into their career as artists. After releasing the Doomscroller EP in 2021 they played a handful of shows in New England but mostly kept quiet to focus on writing and recording Factory Pop.

A self-produced labor of love, the record was tracked at Dead Moon Audio in Somerville MA, a garage in Quincy, MA, and at a makeshift recording studio within a rented office suite in Fall River, MA. It was mixed by Darren Lawson (Glasvegas, Spiritualized) and mastered by Felix Davis (Lana Del Rey) at Metropolis Studios.

Thematically, Factory Pop is a very self-aware record, a tongue-in-cheek paean to the unhealthy habits created by the break-neck pace of modern living. “When writing the record, I felt I was missing out on things as a young person” explains Bermel. “It was all happening at the accelerated dawn of adulthood.”

Transparently and with a refreshing bluntness, the record charts the sudden and frightening transition into adulthood. “Still feeling like a child but taking on the real world is unsettling” says Bermel. “This pervasive disassociation and de-socialization. Feeling like my exhaustion and individualism has rotted away my ability to socialize – to just be a person – as well as I use to. Factory Pop is a non-sophisticated critique on lifestyle under neo-liberal capitalism. Nothing any more intelligent than that. I don’t know if I want to make a drastic change in the world, I just want my people and I to be doing a little better.”

A classic coming of age record for this very atypical moment in reality, Factory Pop is centered on the dichotomy inherent in a life in transition: The need to slow down, but to grow up. The need to relax, but to be healthy. Factory Pop is a record for anyone who is going through a major life change or a period of uncertainty and instability (so, pretty much everyone). “I wrote these songs during a time of great change in my life, and I hope that listeners and fans can find cathartic release in listening to this record” says Bermel. “If hearing me sing about my woes provides any comfort – or if the riffs bring even a touch escapism whatsoever – I have done my job successfully.”