A Well-Worn Welcome Mat

“We want you to walk away feeling changed for the better,” says Jana Hunter of Lower Dens. “We’re always trying to present something that feels and sounds better than before—better than we do on record. [Our music] feels like home—it also feels dark and secluded. It’s a well-worn welcome mat.” She describes the Baltimore-based indie-rock quartet as “warm, full, clean, electric” and says that for their latest release, Escape From Evil, they wrote basic sketches together, which she later filled out and arranged. Hunter tried to cull inspiration from her childhood (Smiths, U2) but also incorporate “influences like the precision, dynamics and space of more modern electronic music—I’m a big fan of dance-music production.” Her creation process is inspired by “boredom and restriction, the need to express difficult feelings and the love of sound craft.” Lower Dens started playing music together in 2009 and met through mutual friends in Baltimore—“It’s the kind of place where you have to make do with what you got, so there’s a higher value placed on the work you put into what you do,” she says. Looking ahead, they’re excited to tour: “The band feels really good and the live show is gonna be miles beyond what we’ve been able to do before, so we’re eager to get it in front of people. I want to make more music soon, but we’ll see.”