Kai Slater is gonna save rock and roll, one Sharp Pins album at a time

Kai Slater’s parents gifted him a bass guitar for his 13th birthday, when he was beset by the godly fingers of Cliff Burton and John Entwistle, the “heavy hitters with Solid State amps, just fucking ripping it.” A month after, he went to an open mic at Old Town School of Folk Music and ran into Rylan Wilder, who was doing a two-piece getup with a buddy—a pop-punk thing called Monarchy Over Monday. They needed a bassist. Slater told them, “I’ve been playing my whole life. I’m probably the best bassist you’ll ever meet” and forked over a couple videos of him covering Metallica songs. “It was enough for them to be convinced that I was pretty good,” he remembers, chuckling over the phone. “I really had to get my chops up, and it really got me to be a better player.”

But being a pop-punk bassist was too restrictive for Slater, who was already starting to write his own stuff, most of which had a pretty hefty pop bent. He brought a song to his bandmates once, and they started hammering away on it until Wilder’s dad came into the basement and blurted out, “What the fuck is this, ‘Season of the Witch’ or something?” Slater didn’t know a thing about Donovan, but it pissed him off. The real turning point came later, when Monarchy Over Monday contributed a cover of Wilco’s “Outtasite (Outta Mind)” to a compilation. “I was still an amateur bassist, and I didn’t do great, but I thought I did fine, you know?” Slater admits. “I listened to [the cover] once it was out on SoundCloud, and [Wilder’s] dad had replaced it with his own bass playing. So I was like, ‘This band sucks, I’m gonna start writing my own stuff.’” That’s when the weird shit came.

Busking around Hyde Park in Chicago with his friend Frances Brazas, Slater yawped through folk songs about whales and teapots like he was the long lost child of an Elephant 6 member. Then he took a stint in a local deathcore band called Zombie Ritual. But honestly, he’s probably been in a half-dozen bands by now—most of them beginning with the lifespan of a mayfly. He’s a fixture at Hyde Park Records, and a place like The Orphanage on West 21st Street has affected every facet of his identity, whether it’s from catching a punk band’s set, hearing Ralph Rivera recite anarchist poetry, attending immigrant dinners, or hosting food drives for families and book drives for prisoners. “The best thing I feel like I can do is play music and do stuff like that,” Slater beams. “They go hand in hand. They’re both about the community, and that’s the biggest part of it—performing music and doing your part.”

Slater plays guitar in Lifeguard, a Best of What’s Next selection this summer, with Asher Case and Isaac Lowenstein, but his main piece is Sharp Pins—a one-man pop-rock vessel that, after the addition of bassist Joe Glass and drummer Peter Cimbalo, carries on as a trio for tours. Under the Sharp Pins banner, Slater produced the best rock album of 2024: Radio DDR. And hey, don’t let Pitchfork bait you into thinking Radio DDR is a 2025 release. We showed up to the party on time. So did Stereogum. They can’t put the squeeze on us like this! The album caught more critical attention six months ago when Slater, needing to cut a vinyl, added three more songs to the tracklist to pad the runtime: “I Can’t Stop,” “Storma Lee,” and “With A Girl Like Mine,” the latter a resplendent, plucky wad of McCartney-recalling sugar and brevity.

Sharp Pins’ debut, 2023’s Turtle Rock, utilized more of Lifeguard’s clattering, jagged noise-rock impulses, administering them in doses of subterranean jangle-pop, but Radio DDR is where Slater went full Chilton, pre-occupying his cosmos with a history of Cleaners From Venus, Teenage Fanclub, the dBs, and Guided by Voices. Slater never thinks about whether or not the shit he’s doing is the shit everyone else has already done. He’s a student of pop music and love songs, which he always writes with his partner Grace Bader Conrad in mind, as well as absurdity, surreality, bombasticness, psychedelicness, and rock music. That’s what he connects with, and he does it sincerely. Songs like “You Don’t Live Here Anymore,” “Sycophant,” “You Have a Way,” “Every Time I Hear,” and “If I Ever Was Lonely” all cram themselves into the seams of Merseybeat, Big Star ur-text, Milk ‘N’ Cookies no-fi fantasia, and Beatlemania, where la-dee-dee-das squirm under 50 pounds of tape hiss.

Sharp Pins is music that sounds like the bubblegum stuck to the back of a Topps card, performed by an antsy, zooming ingénue infatuated with Zappa and Television Personalities. This isn’t revivalism or hero worship but evangelism—a mod-styled, mop-topped boy-wonder feeding his passé creations into a 4-track and mangling the shit out of them. “When You Know” speaks the language of Radio City, “music so loud, you can’t tell a thing” discombobulation—holy tantalization garnished with bouncing distortion. Radio DDR is the hook and I am the fish’s mouth agape. All of it comes from a deep sense of youthful imagination, where people live in clouds and talk to walruses.

“I’m always trying to tap into my sense of that, which is a space that I think everyone at any age should be able to tap into,” Slater says, “because it’s a really cathartic way to let go of everything else going on in your life and tap into, ‘Oh, I’m picturing a man with a teapot for a head,’ which is something you could think of at any age. It’s just a question of how you convert it into what you do as an adult.” With handmade, magazine-collaged visuals draped all around, Slater’s sentimentality washes over you. The best way to enjoy a Sharp Pins song is to simply melt into it.

SLATER WROTE HIS NEW album, the 21-song Balloon Balloon Balloon, during weeklong increments between Lifeguard tours in 2024. “Getting back from a tour, if you don’t keep yourself working, you can get into a pretty deep depression. From being on the road and having that movement, if you go to a standstill you lose motivation,” he says. “That’s when I get the most writer’s block. So I started this album to keep it moving after a tour.” He averaged two songs per day, some written and recorded in 20 minutes and others, like the densely-arranged, harmony-filled “Popafangout,” taking an entire day to complete. At the end of “I Could Find Out,” there’s a snippet of another song that Slater wrote as he was walking out the door to run an errand.

During the pandemic, Slater got really into his TASCAM Porta One and began tracking songs on Maxell C-90s. Five years later, it’s still his method of choice. “Working on a cassette tape, you can see how much progress you’ve done,” he explains. “It’s a physical hourglass of tape that you’re looking at the whole time. It inspires me to keep on making music and complete the tape.” On his 16th birthday, he started uploading his tapes to YouTube—songs that were thought-out ahead of time, and songs that were built around “a cool chord progression.” A local band called Answering Machines enabled Slater’s obsession with cassette recordings, showing him their 4-track, which was an “‘80s-style boombox with built-in effects and monitors.” It blew Slater’s mind. “They make much more straight-up, fuzzed-out punk rock, but I knew that I could do a cool, more psychedelic pop thing using the shitty, built-in effects,” he elaborates. “It was a big source of textural and experimental inspiration for [Balloon Balloon Balloon].”

Most of Balloon Balloon Balloon was recorded alone, but three full-band songs done in Hayes Waring’s period-accurate, ‘70s basement studio in Olympia are sprinkled into the tracklist. You can tell which ones those are, because drummer Pete Cimbalo man’s the kit in ways that Slater can’t, like the ridiculous fill that kicks off “Takes So Long.” “People talk about drummers that are in the pocket, but I always say that [Cimbalo’s] pocket is falling down the stairs,” Slater laughs. “It’s like throwing a pair of pants down the stairs.” The album disintegrates in your ears: the flecking, dopey harmonies on “Gonna Learn to Crawl” dole out contact highs; the head-bobbing pop of “Queen of Globes and Mirrors” sustains as a lucid, psych-folk nebula; “Ex-Priest / In a Hole of a Home” goes full atomic with crusty bursts of indelible hooks; “Popafangout” spits out a 12-string tremolo written in cursive; Slater’s falsetto on “Maria Don’t” is so gentle it might break if you hold it too long; the riff-driven mutedness of “All the Prefabs” is squarely the whole, swaggering, glammy point. Remember: this record is a cherry-dipped fuzzscape 21 stories tall. Slater covers a lot of ground, and he covers it quickly.

He tells me that the first idea is usually his best one. Most of Balloon Balloon Balloon is a first take, and he rarely has any kind of relationship to editing. “But there is something to be said about, if you’re going for a certain type of thing, sitting on a song,” Slater clarifies. “I have songs where I will start writing it and then sit on it for a few days or a week, and then find inspiration in the natural world. But, for the most part, it’s very much the first thing that comes in my head is the best one.” And lyrically, Slater reckons, the initial concept is often the one most true to himself.

Slater affectionately embraces the cheapness of his own rig, calling his guitars a “fake Vox Phantom and a fake Rickenbacker.” He has no horse in the “quality of a guitar matters” debate that consumes social media and subreddit threads. “It’s more in the way that you play it, and the pickups and the amp, or the 4-track,” he insists. “A good song will shine through whatever. No one—I mean, I shouldn’t say no one, because there’s a lot of dorks out there, but I certainly don’t care what pickup was used on most records I listen to. It’s more like, ‘Oh, that chord turnaround is so interesting. That lyric is so good.’ I’m not a guitar snob, as you can definitely tell.” Technical limitations can be a superpower once you flip on the switch. Slater is pro-embracing your inner-rock god, or chasing the feeling of being the coolest person in the room when the axe is wailing. When I ask him if he feels like a rock god playing these tracks, he rejects the sentiment before reconsidering: “I feel like a bedroom rock god.”

Balloon Balloon Balloon’s greatest reference point is Revolver, because “it’s the coolest thing ever to go from ‘Taxman’ to ‘Eleanor Rigby,’” Slater says. “It’s a great example of you can try anything and it will all sound like you if you’re being honest.” You can go for anything and, if it’s still you, it’s going to work—that’s what a Sharp Pins record conveys. Slater thinks that a vocal melody is a window into his soul. On the contrary, the guitar is, in a Freudian sense, his “libidinal expression”—a tactile way to express excitement and energy. The sensation of using your hands to make a brand new voice is cathartic, but “playing the guitar is sort of a battle,” he reveals. “You’re fighting it a little bit.” My favorite sound in the world is Roger McGuinn’s bright, 12-string phrasing. Slater argues that McGuinn’s tone is “teeting on the edge of exploding.” It’s no wonder you can hear the Byrds’ style of lead lines all over Balloon Balloon Balloon, in songs ready to go kablooey from even the slightest amp rub, “I Feel Fine”-style. Upon seeing the album’s artwork, I thought of Donovan’s It Is, Was, and Evermore Shall Be. Now I’m left wondering if that’s Slater winking at Wilder’s dad.

Sharp Pins records are not overtly political, except for the anti-ICE, Bandcamp-only single “I Wonder Where You Hide All Your Love,” but Slater’s background is significantly leftist—and that runs deep into his family history, too: He grew up in a neighborhood with one of the country’s larger Black Panther Party chapters; his dad is a political science teacher; and his grandpa was a Marxist hippie. Lessons about democratization and revolutions happened early and often, and the writings of Angela Davis were paramount. Now at 21 years old, Slater puts that communalism back into his art, whether it’s by making the NEU!-inspired Hallogallo zine, playing shows that are DM-for-address only, or donating streaming revenue to Palestinian relief and the Immigrant Defense Project. “It’s connected to that thing of just doing it or being true to yourself and putting out music,” he gestures. “Actions speak louder than words with music. I’d much rather be doing what I’m doing than write one incredibly politically poignant song.” Nobody’s going to write another “The Times They Are A-Changin’; making the music yourself instead of signing to a major, and being stubborn about it, is a political action. DIY is resistance.

“Do you find restlessness to be a revolutionary act?” I ask Slater.

“Totally,” he says. “Even when I wasn’t financially able to support myself for my music, I’ve always treated it as my job. I’ve always been averse to the clerk, banker job. I’ve always known this is what I’m supposed to do. Obviously I come from a place of privilege that I can even attempt to do that, but I think I’m doing what I can to really treat what I do as something that’s deeply impactful to myself and maybe the world, hopefully. I don’t want to treat music as a hobby. It’s my purpose.”

Deleuze’s theory of deterritorialization—the act of separating yourself from conservative values and allowing yourself to tap into the primitive form by letting go of your body—populates Slater’s understanding of rock and roll’s lifelong connection to dance and movement. “That immediate rush you get when you listen to it—that’s at the core of everything I do,” he says. “It’s why the songs are shorter. It’s why they’re blown-out. It’s all tapping into hearing the Beatles or Motown for the first time, or some obscure noise-rock record—it all has this continued line of cathartic energy.” But all of those songs Slater writes need a place to go, because people need a space where they can have their bodily hegemony, have fun, and let loose. Under the boot of capitalism, stepping inside the radio is more vital than ever. “Who knows how much longer we’re going to be able to do the things we’re doing and have the people that we live with in our neighborhoods be free of incarceration and racism and the state?” Slater wonders. “[Rock and roll] is one of the first steps to the society we want. It would always exist in the society I want.”

Balloon Balloon Balloon is out now via K/Perennial Records.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

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