Melt: Just Like Heaven
When the New York indie band Melt was preparing to release its debut album, If There’s a Heaven, last year, singer Veronica Stewart Frommer and guitarist Marlo Shankweiler set up a little shrine in their shared apartment to two of their musical heroes—Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell.
“We had their books and a bunch of candles and flowers,” Stewart-Frommer says. “Every time a single came out, we would just be like, ‘Patti and Joni, please give this song a good passage into the world. Patti and Joni, please bless the algorithm.’”
Likewise, another ‘70s icon, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, inspired the album rollout’s visual aesthetics, including Stewart Frommer’s dyed blonde hair.
In December, Stewart-Frommer and Shankweiler booked a last-minute flight to Miami to play an acoustic set at Art Basel as part of the “Made in New York, Made in Miami” pop-up exhibition, which featured the cover art of If There’s a Heaven—a magnetic photo of Shankweiler’s mom taken by photographer Andy Sweet at a Jewish summer camp in the 1970s. On one side of the room was Sweet’s photo; behind them were photographs of Smith and Harry.
“It was definitely a moment of serendipity that we got to do that,” Stewart-Frommer says.
Melt’s DIY rise has been full of that kind of cosmic kismet (and a little luck).
Just look at the album cover, which nobody in the band—not even the subject of the photo, Shankweiler’s mom Tara—knew existed until 2022, nearly 50 years after the photo was taken. One of Tara’s friends saw a 2020 New Yorker article about Sweet that featured the photo prominently, recognized her and sent it around. In the photo, a bespeckled Tara poses with a tennis racket, an awkward scowl and a green T-shirt that reads “SEXY.”
The Melt group chat started lighting up over the discovery. “A lot of magic came together to bring us to that photo,” Stewart Frommer says.
“We realized it was my mom and it became an instant sensation to us all,” Shankweiler adds. “This photo was lost for many years because the photographer Andy Sweet died pretty young and he’s had posthumous fame.”
When they went into the studio the next year, the band members started joking around that it should be the cover. (Shankweiler’s mom thought, understandably, that the cover should be a photo of the band.) “We were recording to tape and it had this ‘70s musical vibe,” Shankweiler says. “It made so much sense to use the photo, which kind of looks like the sound of the record in a big way.”
That sound signals an evolution for Melt, shifting away from the catchy, horn-enhanced R&B that marked the band’s earliest recordings. The self-released If There’s a Heaven is bigger, bolder and more expansive, maintaining a pop sensibility but leaning into a more mature, vintage vibe that still feels very modern.
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Formed in early 2017 when Stewart Frommer, Shankweiler and co-founding vocalist/keyboardist Eric Gabriel were still in high school, Melt entered a battle of bands and won. Two months later, they used the prize money to book some studio time in New York and recorded “Sour Candy,” a poppy R&B groove highlighted by Stewart Frommer’s soaring, sassy vocals. They filmed the session and posted it on YouTube, mere hours after deciding to change their nascent band’s name from Big Deli Chain to Melt.
Their moms and high-school friends shared the video, which documents the teenagers’ earnest excitement at playing in a recording studio for the first time, on Facebook. To everyone’s surprise, “Sour Candy” soon wound up on the front page of Reddit and started climbing up Billboard’s viral chart.
“There were no stakes when we recorded ‘Sour Candy,’” says Gabriel, who co-wrote the song with Stewart-Frommer. “That first time we recorded a song, we had no expectations for it. So I think we were just able to play, have fun and really just lock into that space together.”
“There was this very magical element where it was like, ‘We’re in this special place to do this special thing,’” Stewart Frommer adds.
Most bands who have a brush with viral fame would rush to capitalize on their success. But Melt, who soon added bassist Lucas Saur to flesh out the core lineup, took a more scenic route. Everyone went to college—Stewart-Frommer to Tufts in Boston, Gabriel to Georgetown in D.C. and Shankweiler and Saur to NYU and The New School, respectively, in New York. Yet, while earning their undergraduate degrees, they continued to meet up on weekends and during school breaks to write, record singles and play gigs.
“I think we put out maybe a song a year for the first four years we were a band,” Gabriel says. “We would all joke that we were having our Hannah Montana moment because I was in school in D.C., and on a Wednesday, I’d take the bus or a train to New York, meet up with the band Thursday morning, drive up to a show and then I’d wind up back in school on Monday. And no one would have any idea what the hell was going on. It was the most fun thing to do.”
During Melt’s college years—in which the pandemic eventually offered unexpected opportunities for the quartet to quarantine together and woodshed for extended periods—the ensemble built up a small but loyal following, interacting with fans via GroupMe, a connection that carries on with the band’s Discord server. The group’s energetic, participatory and jam-forward live shows—you can hear many of Shankweiler’s virtuosic guitar solos via the streaming service nugs—helped grow that audience across the country. Melt even recently discovered their first fan-run stan account on Instagram: @meltromantic. “It’s so sweet and so cute,” Saur says.
“We’ve always said that Melt is a separate entity,” Stewart-Frommer. “It’s like the fifth person in the band. We all have always shared a respect and dedication to Melt as an entity. We realize that it’s something much bigger than the four of us. We still see some of the same faces in the front row in New York that we did at that bar on the Upper West Side at our first show—truly.”
As Melt started to plot out its years-in the-making debut, they went upstate to the Catskills to record with Sam Evian—an accomplished guitarist and singer-songwriter in his own right—at Flying Cloud, the cozy studio he runs with his partner, singer Hannah Cohen, where Big Thief, Palehound and Courtney Marie Andrews have tracked material. The first session in April 2023 felt like a trial run: Melt gave Evian a bunch of demos and he picked the anthemic “Plant the Garden,” a song the band liked and played live but could never quite crack.
Recording to analog tape, live-in-the studio without any isolation booths (not even for vocals) and minimal takes, Evian challenged the musicians to lean on their strengths while covering new sonic ground—encouraging Shankweiler to play 12-string acoustic guitar and Gabriel to try harpsichord for the track, which added a new dimension to the years-old song. “I pushed them a bit further into this bright and almost manic ‘Dancing Queen’ kind of feel,” Evian says. “The acoustics and the harpsichord really take it there for me. It was a great way to get to know each other a bit and introduce them to the way I work.”
For the next eight months, Melt continued to tour, fine-tuning their songs in preparation for a full-length LP. That December, they returned to Flying Cloud for 10 days to knock out what would become If There’s a Heaven. (Touring drummer Andres Valbuena and former sax player Nick Sare also contributed to the sessions.)
Evian recognized that the band was at its best playing live and wanted to capture that vibe in the studio. “They are all incredibly accomplished on their instruments—almost too good,” he says. “So the slight risk of live takes, tape and no isolation helped shape a workflow that felt immediate and present and was a fun new challenge for all.”
For Stewart-Frommer, a dynamic, booming vocalist, it was freeing. “I didn’t wear headphones to record any of my vocal takes. It was a godsend,” the singer says. “It was really fun because it felt like performing. I had the bandmates sitting around. I’d just rip a couple takes, get the vibes right and then it was over. The ethos was kind of like: ‘Don’t overthink things.’”
That approach inspired more serendipitous moments. “The Idiot,” a tune about what happens when you grow up and start taking life—and the world at large—more seriously, wasn’t going to make the album because they couldn’t finish it. On the final night, the crew went out to dinner to celebrate the sessions and decided to give “The Idiot” one more shot. “Sam blasted it through the monitors and Ron sang with zero isolation so loud over that music, just to get it out,” Shankweiler recalls.
Suddenly, it all clicked. “It was like a triumphant victory lap,” Saur adds.
“The Idiot” is one of a handful of songs on If There’s a Heaven that Stewart-Frommer co-wrote with friends Kit Conway and Sky Sherer of the band Stello. The hook of standout track “Heaven”—“It’s all gonna end as it begins/ If there’s a heaven everybody’s getting in”—came from a tossed off line in Conway’s Notes app and reshaped the song’s meaning. “I am someone who really has a fear of doing something wrong or being wrong, and I make a lot of decisions that way,” Stewart Frommer says. “Heaven” asks, ‘What if you just don’t care about that so much? What if we could just trust that if there’s a heaven, then everybody’s getting in?’ You just focus on what your gut says, what’s happening now and how you can be your best self.”
Like many musicians in their 20s, most of the songs deal with the ebb and flow of relationships and friendships (including Gabriel’s lone vocal take, the airy, synth-driven “Happy to Be Here”) but there’s often a deeper, headier meaning, too. “‘Plant the Garden,’ ‘Fake Romantic’ and ‘Communion’ are all about how I see the world in parallels a lot of the time,” Stewart-Frommer says. “I went to school for nuclear weapons policy and I studied negotiation as well. Through those experiences, I got super interested in the idea that what’s happening at a global level between states is really the same dynamics that are happening between people and maybe the solutions also come from the same places. No one is really taught how to make amends, love each other well and build trust. As a society, we’re not really good at those things. How can we expect our leaders to build those same structures on a broader scale? ‘Plant the Garden’ is very much about that. I think it registers as kind of a relationship song, but it’s more doom and destruction.”
For Saur, whose bouncy basslines are the engines driving songs like “Veronica’s Apology,” it was a dream come true to work with Evian. “It was super helpful having Sam as a tiebreaker because we can all be really opinionated, and the creative process is often really messy,” says the bassist, who is a longtime fan of Evian’s music and production work. “Sam is very chill and relaxed in the studio, and he brought us down to earth a bit. It was nice for us to be able to just do our thing and play in the room, like it was rehearsal, or like we were writing a song. And it was nice to have Sam to guide it and also shape the sound and sonic palette of the record, which turned out to be a retro ‘70s, Fleetwood Mac, dancy pop kind of hybrid.”
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If There’s A Heaven was a long time coming for Melt. “It took us seven years to record the record in 10 days,” Shankweiler jokes. And in many ways, making this album took the band back to that first session in 2017.
“The funny thing about how our career started—and ‘Sour Candy’ just resonating with people out of the blue—is that it’s almost like, the harder you try, the more you lose sight of the accidental magic that really makes music exciting and really makes us live music fans. That’s why we like to go to a show and see what happens,” Stewart-Frommer says. “The beauty of this album is that we kind of went back to that. We said, ‘Let’s just see what happens in the studio and see what magic we can capture.’ Brandi Carlile has this great quote: ‘Rock-and-roll is a risk, not a genre,’ and we really try to live by that.”
Saur and Gabriel now run a studio and rehearsal space in Brooklyn called Little Lot, and the band is already writing and sound checking new songs. Melt’s next big goal is to tour—and maybe even start recording LP No. 2—in Europe. For now, the group is just enjoying the ride—while making sure not to lose that spark you can clearly see in the “Sour Candy” video. “This is such a funny industry,” Stewart-Frommer says. “You can try a million things and have it not work and do one silly thing that you just find joy in and it resonates. So why not just have fun and just do that?”
