Lifeguard’s story sounds straight out of a coming-of-age film. Before graduating high school, the trio got signed to storied indie label Matador, following word-of-mouth success in their local Chicago scene. Thriving from a young age isn’t that surprising anymore. Artists like Billie Eilish, Yung Lean, Justin Bieber, and beabadoobee reached fame by sharing music online before turning 18. But Lifeguard stands out as something special, with an approach to their artistry so advanced and throughout that you’d think they’ve been around for over a decade.
When I catch up with Lifeguard over Zoom, singer and guitarist Kai Slater, 20, is joining the call from a small town outside of Bilbao, during his European tour for his solo project, Sharp Pins. It’s midnight for him, but he doesn’t mind, as he had been watching the UEFA Europa League final anyway. His bandmates, drummer Isaac Lowenstein, 18, and bassist and co-vocalist Asher Case, 19, are calling in together from Chicago. Lowenstein, the only member still in high school, skipped class the day of the call but joined after getting a haircut. Case, who is enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, had just looked at an apartment he and Lowenstein might be moving into, close to Illinois Tech, where Lowenstein will be studying engineering.
Lowenstein tells me he’s had to “skip a lot of class” during his final high school years to fulfill band duties. But being in school hasn’t been as much of a burden as you’d expect for a member of one of the buzziest new indie bands. “It’s been nice to sort of use school to pace the whole music thing a little bit, to not have to go full forward with everything and get stuck constantly touring,” he says. “I feel like I would kind of burn out if I did that.”
In February 2023, Matador announced it had signed Lifeguard, bringing them to a larger audience than their local Midwest scene. But in the three years leading up to that moment, the trio had accomplished plenty as a teenage DIY band. In the fall of 2020, they released their self-recorded debut LP, Dive, which was only available on cassette and Bandcamp. They also had two EPs and two 7” singles out, released on their own and through small, independent labels Chunklet Industries and Born Yesterday. When it came to planning what would become their debut studio album, Ripped and Torn, the band wanted to take their time with it and perfect every detail to make it the best introduction to Lifeguard possible.
“We had all this space to think about what our debut would sound like,” says Slater. “I think it allowed us to really be able to stylize it and work on it and arrange it in a way that felt super meaningful to us in a very different way from all of our past stuff, like the way that we worked in a studio and the way we kind of approached the album as kind of being a more immediate capturing of what the band can be at its current stage.”
Lowenstein notes that for their debut LP, Lifeguard wanted to make a “listening album that you can play on the stereo.” Instead of going for the “cleaner, more digital sound” from past releases, the group wanted Ripped and Torn to “feel DIY and more tape-y.” Ripped and Torn sounds like a record pulled out of your parents’ vinyl collection, with the essence of bands from the ‘70s post-punk era. Case explains that, for recording, the band used analog equipment and recorded effect overlays with practical analog techniques instead of adding those effects in post-recording, making the album feel more old school. “When we were making a record, we were all just really invested in being in the studio and tracking and having it feel not something super digital or super removed from the recording session,” he notes. “Everything was just happening then because we were having the ideas, and then I think that’s why it sounds like that.”
Ripped and Torn not only features a sound quality that feels like an old record, but it takes heavy inspiration found in post-punk, krautrock, and dub. Lowenstein recalls Slater introducing his bandmates to ’70s English mod punks The Jam, which led to them covering “In the City” during sets (the band ended up putting it out as a single in 2023). “Several of The Jam records for me were super important for that raw energy,” Lowenstein explains. “Seeing videos of them playing live, it’s like, ‘Oh, they play these songs way faster.'”
“I thought a big thing about The Jam is that their stage presence is very not in vogue with a lot of rock music,” Slater chimes in. “The whole kind of fruity jumping and synchronized harmonies and stuff like that, it’s very, could be considered dorky or not cool to a larger kind of indie rock thing of looking like you don’t care, or kind of being like, ‘Whatever, man, I’m not going to move at all.’ It’s like, ‘I’m too cool for this stage move.’ A band like The Jam just were so focused, and that energy really carried into this specific energy that we were inspired by as a trio, I think, in a live sense.”
For this record, the band also decided to “hone in” on their dub influences. “Largely, not only musically, but on the production side, I think why it kind of maybe sounds ’70s in that way is that we were kind of going past these post-punk bands and seeing the actual sources of where they were coming from with the way they were playing their instruments and recording drums and stuff like that,” explains Slater. “So, really getting into the dub records and stuff like that was a big part of the sound.” Lifeguard bonded over their shared love for dub greats like King Tubby, Mad Professor, and Lee Perry. “It definitely felt like an obsession,” Case admits. “When we were making Ripped and Torn, Isaac and I were still in high school together, and it would be like, we’d meet up with each other for lunch or whatever, and then be actually just showing each other a bunch of songs, and that would happen at practice too.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Horsegirl guitarist Penelope Lowenstein, who is Isaac’s older sister, said that she noticed that the crowd at their shows started skewing older because they identified with their sound, calling back to alt-rock’s glory days. When I ask Lifeguard if they’ve seen this shift as well, Lowenstein notes that while they’ve taken on a production aesthetic and songwriting cues from bands that came up in the ‘70s, that “shouldn’t mean that we’re making music for 50-year-olds.” He adds, “I guess now, sometimes playing music with guitars will sort of [bring in an older fanbase], and people will react and be like, ‘Thank you for doing this for me.’ It’s like, ‘No, I’m making this for my friends back home.'”
While other bands may be cashing in on the nostalgia factor, Lifeguard isn’t trying to follow or start trends with their vintage-inspired sound. Instead, they’re just making music that reflects what they listen to and love. “We’re making this for our friends and for ourselves, who are actually just interested in that because it’s fun. Not really because it’s this retro thing, not because it’s this sort of way to separate ourselves,” Case says. “It’s just what we’re into, so it’s very natural.” Lowenstein interjects, “And no hate to the punk geezers. We appreciate them coming out to the shows and stuff, and come hang out, but just don’t stop the dancing in the front. That’s all we ask.”
Besides Lifeguard, all three members have solo projects, each representing their distinctive tastes. Case performs as Laurie Sara-Smith, making psychedelic noise-pop in the same vein as Cindy Lee. Meanwhile, Lowenstein has Donkey Basketball, which is pure techno. The closest-sounding one to Lifeguard is Slater’s mod-inspired project Sharp Pins, whose 2024 album Radio DDR ranked 24th on our year-end list. “I think it’s a better use of creative energy to break up where it goes. And so, I feel like none of us are super feeling like we have to put every ounce of ourselves into Lifeguard because I think that would generally cause a lot of disagreeing and fighting,” says Case about the members’ need to balance Lifeguard with their respective projects. “I feel like the way that solo music works for us is just to be the sort of catalyst for our interests that we have, and then there’s not the pressure to put that into this collective thing. It can just stay kind of in ourselves and we can also just, because I feel like all of your different practices inform all of your other practices, and so it’s like to sort of carve out the space for a Lifeguard to be what it is and then have still this separate existing thing is just better for the creative process.”
Combining their individual tastes and talents, you get a band that is fully realized, with each member contributing equally and individually while still making Lifeguard feel refreshingly cohesive. When I mention that Lifeguard has figured out their collaborative dynamic in a seamless way that takes other bands five years or more to attain, Lowenstein reminds me that the trio has been playing together for that amount of time. “We were just very little when we started,” he says. “But although this is kind of the debut, it’s like we’ve kind of been working together and writing stuff and releasing stuff for a very long time, since we were kids, basically.”
Case, whose dad Brian is in the experimental band FACS and previously was in Disappears, had an early interest in music because he was “very surrounded by it growing up.” Though he was never classically trained, he learned at home, beginning to play music in the fourth grade. On the other hand, Slater didn’t grow up in a musical household and instead had aspirations to become a novelist, with his first love being writing. He also took on acting until he ultimately got into music, learning how to play instruments in his early teens. “I was just listening to a lot of records, and I wanted to be the next Paul Simon, originally; I went through many phases,” he shares. Those phases included being into obscure acts that the average teen wouldn’t know much about, like The Residents, R. Stevie Moore, and German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (which Slater remarks he only listened to for a year before moving on to his next fixation).
Lowenstein’s interest in music came after his sister Penelope was enrolled in guitar classes. He recalls crashing her lessons and banging on drum kits at her music school. “My parents were like, ‘I guess we need to get him to get his energy out somehow,’ so maybe I was born a musician or something, since my 6-year-old brain was really interested in hitting shit with some sort of rhythmic pattern,” he says. The siblings would have jam sessions, which led to him sometimes playing with Horsegirl.
Case and Lowenstein grew up living close to each other. They met Slater at a “best of” youth open mic night in 2019, organized by Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, where Lowenstein and Case happened to be filling in for some of Horsegirl’s members. Slater, who at the time was fronting his previous band Dwaal Troupe, impressed his soon-to-be bandmates. Meanwhile, Slater was also in awe of Lowenstein and Case’s talents. After connecting at the show, they decided to start making music together. “I met these guys and it was like, they got me,” says Slater. Lifeguard found instant chemistry working as a trio, which Lowenstein says took him to new heights “technically and creatively.”
“I remember feeling a crazy sort of burst of new energy,” Lowenstein recalls. “Even in our first couple of shows, I remember being like, ‘Oh my God, I’m getting so much better.’ There was this moment of rapid growth.” Case adds, “None of us were in music school or being taught how to write songs outside of each other. So, it’s a really specific type of growth into this, and I think it’s like nothing else could have made that happen except for meeting when we were young and then just staying, doing this thing for five years.”
With the changes that come with breaking out of Chicago and becoming a buzzy band, Lifeguard is striving to maintain that sense of community from their scene that inspired them to be a band in the first place. “Being at home and sort of just staying with your friends, and going to punk shows three times a week, it’s good to remember that that’s what this is about,” Lowenstein says. “It’s good not to be sort of friendless in the face of putting out your debut on Matador or whatever.”
Besides fostering a sense of community through their role in Chicago’s booming DIY music scene, Slater has also been working on his zine, Hallogallo (named after the NEU! song), since 2020, which started as a way to spotlight local and up-and-coming bands. It has since expanded, even featuring interviews with bands Slater looks up to, like NEU!’s Michael Rother and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. Slater started the publication during the COVID lockdown in 2020, as a way to “build more community within Chicago,” distributing it for free in train stations and park benches. But as Lifeguard’s popularity grew and word about the zine spread, Slater began getting orders from countries like Japan and Switzerland.
“I think through interviewing cool artists and really working to find cool people that had the punk ethos and stuff that would be equally cool and novel, but also relevant to young people in the DIY culture, that really connected with people,” he says. “I started getting a lot of emails and stuff from people who were inspired by what we were doing in Chicago and the music. Obviously, a zine is an amazing thing, but taken from the outside it’s even more amazing because it seems so mystical sometimes, and these people are amazing and this scene is so special because it’s just like, if you’re not there, for us, it feels so natural and it’s just friends to being friends and making music.”
Slater shares that he received an email from readers in Portugal who started a youth collective inspired by his work with Hallogallo. “I thought it was really amazing to hear how they interpreted what was happening and turned it into their own collective liberation as young artists and stuff like that. It’s been amazing to just see people be inspired by it, and it really was, originally was not even in my sights at all. It was just kind of like, let’s see if we can create some type of image for ourselves. But there was no thought of a global thing.”
What makes Lifeguard stand out is not their quick rise to the ranks of artists like their labelmates Car Seat Headrest and Matador alum Lucy Dacus, who started out with DIY roots and became part of the new class of influential indie rockers. Instead, it’s the reason behind their dedication to their craft. They’re not in it for the fame; they just want to have fun and connect with other young musicians who share the same enthusiasm for their interests. And sometimes, that’s all you need.
Tatiana Tenreyro is Paste‘s associate music editor, based in New York City. You can also find her writing at SPIN, NME, PAPER Magazine, The A.V. Club, and other outlets.
