Pool Kids Are Never Gonna Change

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“When it rains, it fucking pours,” sings Christine Goodwyne at the beginning of Pool Kids’ third album, Easier Said Than Done. It’s a maxim as old as time itself; some may even call it trite. But when the emo frontwoman belts it, summoning all the energy in the world, it resonates like a novel truth. It really does fucking rain when it pours, doesn’t it? The four-piece’s canny blend of melodicism and trenchant phrasing is the perfect kind of pairing, one that has practically launched them to the upper echelons of contemporary emo that also places them in the well-respected world of indie rock.

Even when the catharsis feels expansive, it’s often situated in niche, highly specific circumstances. Take a song like “Tinted Windows,” a snapshot of the Florida natives’ life on the road when bassist Nicolette Alvarez tested positive for COVID-19, upending a solid chunk of a tour. As Goodwyne sings, Alvarez was “crying on a curb outside of CVS / in the middle of Missouri and you’re holding a test.” Witnessing her bandmate’s dreaded double-line test result, she briefly thought to herself, “Ooh, that sounds like a lyric right there,” so she quickly scrawled it into her Notes app. Such is her typical songwriting process, transmogrifying everyday incidents on the road into art, “which sometimes feels inappropriate,” she tells me over Zoom from her place in Miami, admitting to her impropriety with a laugh. “Like, my friend is crying.”

To demonstrate the extent of her Notes app scribbling, she pulls out her phone, faces it toward her camera, and starts scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. It goes on for probably 20 seconds, no hyperbole. She’s been updating it over the course of many years, since before their 2018 debut, Music to Practice Safe Sex to. “I’ll get a one-line thought, and I’ll just jot it down,” she says. “And then when I’m actually home, ready to flesh something out, I’ll reference that, and I’ll take a few random lines that I’ll pull from there, and then I’ll see what I can extract further.”

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Although her drafting process adheres to a first-thought-best-thought praxis, the actual construction of the songs themselves is far more deliberate. It’s probably how Pool Kids has grown most as a band since their formation. Their debut was a charming, concise package that distilled their live-wire math-rock tendencies into a relatively breezy listening experience despite the convoluted twists and turns the music would take, detouring from one noodly, tapped guitar lead to another on a whim. At the time, Pool Kids was recording as a duo, comprising Goodwyne and drummer Caden Clinton. When they got around to making their 2022 self-titled album, they had doubled their membership. That four-year gap proved to be a notable level-up; all 12 tracks were densely layered with luxe textures, swoonworthy guitar tones, and heightened production value.

Pool Kids was something of a skeleton key for the group, as they unlocked what works best for them. When I ask Goodwyne if they were trying out any new songwriting processes or recording techniques for its follow-up, she says they were “churning [songs] out” like a “well-oiled machine.” To be perfectly candid, she feels like Easier Said Than Done is more of the same, at least in terms of its creation. “With the first record, I was just rushing myself, and I didn’t explore with the songs at all or pull them apart or really try to make sure they were as good as they could be,” she explains. “I would poop out an idea and just be like, ‘That’s it. That’s a song. Let’s just record it the way it is. Caden, just add drums.’” Now, she takes a step back to look at matters more holistically: Is this chorus as good as it could be? Should this song be a hype-induced floor-filler or a mellow, contemplative ballad?

That sense of careful thought seeps into the actual themes of the record, too. “On this record, there was a lot of self-reflection and talking about things that I wish I could change about myself, but I have been unsuccessful at changing and the frustrations with that,” she says. Ultimately, it’s the connective tissue that holds the album together. “Tomorrow can’t come any sooner / But we both know that I’m not gonna change / I told you I know how to have fun / If only I could let go, it’s easier said than done,” Goodwyne sings in the chorus of the title track, invoking the album’s name to encapsulate emotional stagnation and the fear of what moving forward would entail. Fittingly enough, a similar sentiment surfaces on the closer, “Exit Plan.” Like many of the songs that precede it, it chronicles the indelible memories made on the road, playing countless shows with your friends and the post-tour depression that insidiously settles in, like a scratchy throat signaling an imminent cold: “Is it a crime that I get so attached? / Now every time, it’s a serotonin crash / When I get home, history repeats.”

An itinerant lifestyle and introspection can go hand in hand, the former fueling the latter in a symbiotic chain. Goodwyne is the type of person who always has to be on the go, and life as a touring musician begets a hectic schedule, but there are also moments of stillness: idly sitting in a van, gazing at rural countryside while cruising down desolate interstates. If there isn’t a place for her mind to wander, then she can enter what she calls a “rumination loop.” “It’s so dangerous because I have OCD, like, actual diagnosed OCD,” she continues. “If my mind isn’t occupied by something, then I just get in a rumination loop.” When I ask how that materializes within her career, she responds by saying she has already begun writing Pool Kids LP4.

This can be another type of loop, where the patterns of tour-record-release become pitfalls for indulging detrimental behaviors rather than fulfilling creative aspirations. But it’s touring that has long granted the band their financial wherewithal to fund their recording sessions. Because streaming pays paltry portions of pennies, the rigors of cross-country travel have become many indie artists’ primary source of revenue. “We’re living in a time where we’re basically a traveling T-shirt sales company,” she says, referring to how their peers (and themselves) make more money off of merchandise than ticket sales. “Now we have a record deal with Epitaph, so we’ll have help there now, but we funded this one up front.” A tangible contract should provide some kind of monetary cushion, and, as I mention this, it dawns on Goodwyne in real time that she doesn’t have to worry about lucrative merch sales quite as much as she once did. “They have to give us a certain amount of money to record our next record,” she says. “It’s like, damn, if we didn’t sell enough T shirts, then what would we have done?”

Easier Said Than Done finds Pool Kids at their apotheosis, breathing new life into universal feelings. Financial anxieties; ill-timed illnesses; the restlessness that arises out of inertia. This is a record, more than anything, about being in a DIY rock band and all the inevitable thrills and hardships that ensue. In the album’s final moments, Goodwyne wonders if those high highs are worth weathering the low lows: “I don’t know if the end is worth the means / Oh, is it?” As the instruments fade out, all that’s left is her voice and the empty space surrounding it, like the eerie quietude of an apartment that’s been vacant for months while you’re playing gigs night after night. There’s an equal balance of resolution and ambiguity, the summation of a long-winded event and the uncertainty of whatever the hell happens next. Yet, by the stroke of this record’s very existence, Goodwyne seems to answer her own question.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.

Pool Kids Are Never Gonna Change

Frontwoman Christine Goodwyne spoke with Paste about the thrills and hardships of touring, signing with Epitaph, and the emo band’s third album, Easier Said Than Done.