The Vaughns - Egg Everything

When it came to their second full-length, Anna Lies and Ryan Kenter wanted to do something special. And so the pair, who formed The Vaughns back in New Jersey in 2014, decided that instead of approaching it like a traditional record, they’d treat it like a mixtape. It’s actually an idea they had a number of years ago, but it was only more recently that all the pieces started falling into place. Including its peculiar title. And while titles don’t often mean very much, the synergy of this particular one (and the album as a whole) is worth pointing out.

“At some point in the last eight years,” says Kenter, “Anna and I had this idea of doing a sampler album, like the kind labels would hand out of their rosters back in the day. We thought it’d be a cool concept to put out an album that was a mixtape, but by one band. We were actually just going to call it ‘Sampler’. “Then one day,” adds Lies, “Ryan was in a bagel shop, and he just texted me ‘Egg Everything’ as a title suggestion. It’s a type of bagel a lot of places offer around us, so it’s a bit of an ode to our home state. I also really like it as a verb, the idea of throwing eggs at everything, because I felt that summed up the lyrical themes on the record. Plus, the word ‘Everything’ points to the sampler idea. It was the perfect title.”

The concept of a one band sampler may seem like an ambitious idea, but one listen to Egg Everything’s twelve tracks—ten actual songs and two brief, joyous interludes—and it doesn’t seem crazy at all. Ambitious, maybe, but not crazy. Besides, The Vaughns have executed it to perfection. The follow-up album to their debut self-released full-length, F.O.M.O., this record was engineered and produced by Hop Along’s Joe Reinhart, who was also at the helm for the band’s 2021 EP (and debut Equal Vision release), rom-coms + take-out. The idea with this set of songs was to bake in the band’s history while also simultaneously experimenting and expanding with hitherto untried ingredients. As such, there are elements here of both the dreamy indie-pop and the effortlessly cool surf-rock/power-pop hybrid they made their own on those releases, but it doesn’t stop there. Rather, while using their music as a vessel to express their innermost emotions in more depth than ever before, they’ve also explored the limits (or lack thereof) of that music.

The result is a record that runs the gamut of genre—whether that’s the smooth, wistful alt-pop of opener “Dimes,” the gently up-tempo rock’n’roll bounce of “Turnaround” or the jittery post-punk swagger of “Gizzards.” Elsewhere, the gentle lilt of “Bop Star” manages to turn melancholy into an inspiring indie rock anthem, the dreamy jangle of “Mancala” is a rumination on a lost loved one, that implores during the song’s intensely quiet breakdown, ‘we were happy crying together in this God-awful time’ before the song swells into a gorgeous, string-laden crescendo. But then there’s also “Sixties,” which travels back in time lyrically and musically to the cool, smoke-filled venues of that decade—replete with backroom bar sounds and a smattering of a Hammond organ to really nail the mood—and the off-kilter riot pop of “Excuses.” Yet despite the disparate sounds, it works together as one cohesive whole, and on two distinct levels. For a start, it keeps you guessing, interested, excited—like those old label samplers used to—from track to track, start to finish. Not many albums can say that these days. Two, it’s all underpinned by the tangible intimacy that’s at the heart of these songs.

That vulnerability was something Kenter and Lies decided to focus on more after writing “Raina,” a love song for Lies’ partner on the rom coms + take-out EP. “We knew we needed to do that again on this record,” Lies states. And they did, especially on “Day by Day,” a song about Ryan feeling helpless consoling his wife while her mom was sick with cancer. Kenter notes, “Lyrics would come from conversations we had while dealing with stuff, or from direct texts. We both brought honesty to this record, and it was cool to share that together.”

While the core of the band is Lies and Kenter, Egg Everything was made with invaluable contributions from lead guitarist Jordan Smith and bassist Brian Hughes, with whom Kenter and Lies have been playing live for a couple of years now. Combined, the four of them have all the elements—Fire, Earth, Air, Water—of the zodiac represented. Whether that’s coincidence or the star signs aligning is anyone’s guess, but it seems to have added a tangible creative freedom to these songs. (“It’s silly,” Lies notes with a chuckle, “but we do have a pretty balanced energy between us.”) (continue reading full bio on DISCO)