When I talk to non-Ohioans, they often struggle to wrap their heads around why someone from Cleveland could possibly hate Cincinnati. Perhaps it’s the veneer of niceness that oozes from the Midwest, but I imagine my feelings about the Queen City are the same as an Angeleno ragging on Sacramento, or a Yinzer rejecting brotherly love. But my beef with Cincinnati is a petty one—I have Celiac disease, so Skyline Chili is a no-go; my nemesis in grade school was a Bengals fan; my mom loved Ken Griffey Jr. in a Mariners uniform but I loathed him in Reds colors. But to hate a part of where you’re from, you have to love that part first. There’s pride in talking shit, and those just passing through can’t quite buy into the stock like us locals. I jest in earnest and gesture with a full, clean heart. It’s not Cleveland, but Cincinnati, for all its pseudo-Kentucky antics, has given me and the rest of this country so much: Doris Day, co-ops, Steven Spielberg, fully paid fire departments, and, of course, the Ophelias.
A year ago, the Ophelias opened for IAN SWEET at Natalie’s, a sometimes divey, sometimes swanky bar in Columbus’ northwest corridor. Monday nights in the Arch City are no good for a rock show. Maybe 10 people came to Natalie’s, two of them parking close to the stage while everyone else lingered near their high-top tables. The band played songs from an EP they’d dropped the previous Friday, including “Soft and Tame,” a heartbroken homecoming. “Giving up love in the South of Ohio, I hate it here, in the in-between,” Spencer Peppet sang out. “I wanna feel safe, I wanna feel seen. The curve of the hills when the sun is gone, a knot in my throat, another fucking song.” A violin ripped through the noise with a wincing delicacy. To hear someone sing about how uncomfortable and merciless it can be to live in this forsaken state, I felt noticed in an empty room; to hear those words suspended in the air above a chunky, synth-y, full-band explosion of noise, as Peppet vocalized through chaos in the eye of a storm, a new language fell into me and them. We’d all earned our stripes to say the quiet part out loud.
Vocalist/guitarist Spencer Peppet, drummer Mic Adams, and violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes came up together in the same Cincinnati scene. Adams and Gutmann Fuentes had a history playing together pre-Ophelias, and her joining the band came via a cold-call from Peppet when they were teenagers. Adams’ drumming talent landed him in more than a few bands across the city, including Peppet’s before they graduated high school. “I’m very grateful he said yes to that,” she says. “I didn’t realize we were friends for that long before the band started,” Adams adds. “The Ophelias kind of… made us friends,” Peppet replies, to which Adams calls it a classic “I know all of the people I know through music” situation.
“What was it about Spencer’s band that made it the one to stick with?” I ask Adams. “I don’t know that I was really in a position where I was picking and choosing,” he replies, laughing. “I was excited about the band because it was an all-girl band, and I was tired of being told what to do by high school boys a year older than me. The first time I ever actually heard Spencer do music was our first rehearsal. It was one of the first band experiences that I had where nobody was telling me what to play. There wasn’t some guy being like, ‘I thought of this beat, I’m gonna play it for you. Now you do it.’ It felt vulnerable to play a part and see if [Spencer] liked it.” The Ophelias wrote their entire first album, Creature Native, at their very first band practice.
As the Ophelias were beginning, they entered into a lexicon put into place by bands like Hop Along and Rilo Kiley, employing a girl-led sound in an era of indie music ferociously populated by men. Peppet was even keen on intentionally inviting only women to join the band, wanting to be done playing what boys her age were telling her to play. But the quartet wasn’t all that tapped into the runoff from the Blog Era. It was the effort of creating that sent them buzzing. “I remember it being like, ‘Well, we’re four girls, so here we are,” Peppet says. “It was less about marketing ourselves in that way and more like, ‘Oh, it’s actually really nice to get to make music in a space that is not male-dominated. Obviously, that changed.” That idea got pushed hard with Almost, the band’s second album, in 2018. A year later, Adams came out as a trans man. “When I was transitioning, I was like, ‘Oh, damn, but I’m in a girl band,’” he notes. “But I quickly was reassured that there were other things going on for us than the girl thing. It was actually refreshing, because I think we were all a little tired of being like, ‘This is the all-girl band!’”
“You were like, ‘I gotta do something!’” Peppet chimes in.
“I’ll change my mind, surely,” Adams laughs. “I don’t think I even realized what was going on for me before I started playing with you guys—because I was just like, ‘This feels… weird. I don’t really know if I like being in a band.’ And then I did this and I was like, ‘Oh, this is different.’ And then, realizing what was different about it, I was like, ‘Okay, so I’m more comfortable around women.’”
Peppet continues, “It allows us a lot of space and nuance to talk about stuff like womanhood. It feels like we have a very interesting and different experience, from member to member, with gender and how that has played into our experience as public-facing musicians.”
Bassist Jo Shaffer met Peppet when they were both students at NYU and was a fan of the Ophelias prior to joining. After directing the music videos for the Almost singles, she replaced the band’s first bassist, Grace Weir, a year later, right before their album Crocus was recorded. As the Crocus sessions loomed, Shaffer had to write 14 bass parts, and it was her extensive history with filmmaking (she made the feature film Hell is Empty) that allowed her to get comfortable in Peppet, Adams, and Gutmann-Fuentes’ shared world. “Editing, to me, is already such a rhythmic thing,” Shaffer says. “And then, when you’re doing it to music, you really intimately get to know the music and the tendencies. It felt relatively easy to enter the extended universe.”
Not only is Shaffer engaged to Peppet, but the bassist and Adams are “soulmates, somehow,” according to Peppet. “It made touring smoother,” Adams mentions, “having that built-in emotional support. We already understood each other.” He admits, however, that there were some nerves leading up to Crocus, because he wondered how Shaffer’s writing would change the sound of the band. “Grace’s parts were a specific sound,” he elaborates. “The way she played was a little unconventional. I think we were anticipating, ‘Is this gonna be a noticeable change? Is it going to be difficult to maneuver?’” But Shaffer understood Weir’s role in the band without sacrificing the originality of her own ideas. “I remember very consciously trying to think, like, ‘Okay, how would Grace write this? But it can’t be exactly how Grace would write it.’ It was an interesting experiment, trying to inhabit somebody else’s style.” Crocus quickly became the album that turned me—and many others—on to the Ophelias, thanks to songs like “Neil Young on High” and “Spitting Image” being absolute rippers. “Becoming a Nun” is still one of the band’s very best efforts, its crescendo doted on by four people perfectly in-sync with each other.
Just a handful of years into their career, the Ophelias’ history became one centered around queerness and transness, as Adams and Shaffer have both transitioned since Crocus. The band is still inserting themselves into a scene where the vast majority of artists aren’t like them too, as Peppet and Shaffer currently reside in Brooklyn, where some of the buzziest up-and-coming acts are centered around cis white men. Obviously, there’s a didacticism of not wanting your civil rights taken away that motivates the Ophelias as people, but the art-making of it all can often land, in Shaffer’s eyes, on the ephemeral side of identity. “I feel like I have these very specific rules in my head related to it that are totally not universal and not something that even I should abide by,” she says. “Like, ‘We’re not a band full of straight guys, so let’s not play blue scales.’ I’m always startled by how much the subconscious plays a role in writing music and how much feeling uncomfortable can mess with what’s going on in ways that are really hard to articulate and even pin down in the moment.”
For Adams, the confidence and experience he’s gained while playing in the Ophelias has paralleled his own personal and interpersonal growth. “They hand-in-hand went along with each other throughout my high school and college life, trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to surround myself with,” he says. “Being in a band makes you feel like you’re on a team and you’re not just representing yourself. I’m not the most outspoken person all the time about being trans. I don’t know if I would have been if I weren’t in a band, because I feel like this community of people made me feel comfortable. I wasn’t alone in announcing this. It gave me a platform to feel more comfortable. And that platform wasn’t just my Instagram. Becoming more confident in myself and my abilities has made it easier to collaborate musically and express ideas.”
But, as bigger music publications continue building out their coverage of LGBTQIA+ artists, bands like the Ophelias are hopeful that they won’t always be pigeonholed into the labels being affixed to them right now. They’re at the forefront but yearn for a spot in the backdrop. “You want your music to exist regardless of your identity, right?” Peppet wonders. “We’re not a band that makes music only for queer and trans people but, especially now, when there’s a lot of violence happening specifically directed at queer and trans people, I would love for our shows to be a space where people feel comfortable and safe.” Representation is as much a crux in the Ophelias’ vernacular as balance. “It’s deeply important to have people who are queer and trans making music, because otherwise it is just cis straight men who end up controlling the conversation,” Peppet adds. And yet, the way the Ophelias reckon with identity and liberty now gets entangled with the oppressions being faced outside of their circles. In the wake of that hurt, their voices just grow louder.
On Friday, March 14th, Peppet spent her morning in Austin, Texas organizing and doing mutual aid work around the city. A few hours later, she was at High Noon performing a solo set at the end of the Paste Party. The Ophelias have been active in speaking out for musicians’ rights, aligning themselves closely with United Musicians and Allied Workers, and they even boosted the Ohio District Court of Appeals’ recent blocking of a ban on gender-affirming care for minors while concurrently promoting their new album, Spring Grove, online. Peppet has been especially taking cues from Artists Against Apartheid. “If you have the ability to talk about the genocide in Gaza and in Palestine and the atrocities that the Palestinian people are facing, you take it,” she says. “Eliza McLamb puts a keffiyeh on her synth stand. That’s a visual representation. She doesn’t make a big speech, but it’s present. Unfortunately, that is still something that is getting demonized by people who don’t agree. The number one thing that you can do is be present and be vocal, because then, if everyone is present and vocal, it’s way harder to stop a movement.”
When they’re not touring or recording, the Ophelias are spread out across the East Coast and Midwest. Peppet and Shaffer are in New York, while Adams is stationed in Chicago and Gutmann Fuentes is enrolled in grad school in Washington, D.C. Getting together is, in Peppet’s words, “going from 0 to 100” and spending every day in a car with her bandmates after not seeing them for months. But Adams enjoys the ebbs and flows of the band’s separation, because writing and playing shows has helped make the project a constant in his life for nearly 10 years. “It fits into my life really well—the pieces of my life that would otherwise be empty,” he says. “I can’t really imagine a world where I wouldn’t be excited about it, but I could see if it were very regular it would get maybe a little old or tiring. No matter how much you love something, if you’re doing it every day, you don’t want to be doing the same thing every day. I appreciate the flexibility that being apart gives us.” His parents warned him that, if he went to school for music, he’d start to hate it. Now, doing music on his own terms reinvigorates the entire unit when they’re together. “We know that it’s a resource that isn’t infinite,” he continues. “It gives me an appreciation for being together and being in a band. It feels like a very special, separate part of my life that’s always there. But, when we get to focus on it directly, it’s a big treat.”
The Ophelias’ writing process is like a medley. The foursome sends ideas to each other through audio files and then write their own parts, walking a “fine line between keeping it interesting and not playing the obvious choice but not playing over the song.” Peppet will establish each track’s fleshed-out foundations, Adams’ drum part will work off her lead, and then Gutmann Fuentes shapes her violin piece to fit into his rhythms while Shaffer sews it all together. There’s a freedom and unpredictability woven into the Ophelias’ curious, beckoning tapestry. Just listen to “Cumulonimbus” and you’ll be met with a punishing tetraptych of indie rock overcast. “There’s surprise built into the process,” Shaffer says. “My temptation is always to try to overcomplicate things, because it’s so easy to write a boring bass part. I think a tension that I enjoy is me overcomplicating things and then Spencer saying, ‘No, strip that out.’ It’s a healthy contradiction to be resolving, and it leads to interesting things on a practical level. I’m always trying to not play where Mic plays, at least on Spring Grove. That was a heuristic that I would use, like, ‘All right, the kick drum is there, so let me try putting this not right after the kick drum.’” Up until he played with a shoegaze band a few years back, Adams never thought of bass and drums as a solidified unit, because, as intertwined as the Ophelias are, they fill in the pieces in a perfect way without marching along as a united front. “What I like about our songs is that each part is its own little song. If you separate them, they have their own melodic quality. It feels like a collage to me,” he says.
The era of Spring Grove can be traced back to this time last year, when the Ophelias self-released the Ribbon EP. It was a batch of five songs written across the band’s career; Peppet wrote “Upper Hand” at NYU and “Soft and Tame” right after Spring Grove was finished. They were a bunch of “in-betweener” tunes that never made it onto any records. “It felt like getting to go through a scrapbook and be like, ‘Oh, I forgot about that one’ and pick it out,” Peppet says. “And then, because it had been enough time, something like ‘Upper Hand’ or ‘Dust’ or ‘Rind,’ we have all changed as musicians since those songs were written. They got to take on this new life and new confidence. We’ve settled into ourselves as people, and I think you can hear that in those recordings.”
The Ophelias choosing to put out Ribbon independently also marked their departure from Joyful Noise, the label they’d been on since they were teenagers, after Why?’s Yoni Wolf took a shine to them in the mid-2010s. It was an amicable split, and the idea of putting the EP out on their own became the most sensible option. The band got a new PR team and did rebuilt everything from scratch, filming the “Black Ribbon” music video in a Midwest field in January—a nod to Peppet’s dad saying that “it’s not an Ophelias video unless it’s freezing outside”—making the artwork by hand, and building dioramas on dining room tables. “It felt like going back to the beginning of the band,” Peppet affirms. All the while, Spring Grove was written, recorded, and sitting on the shelf. Grammy winner Julien Baker—one of the most beloved names in indie rock, produced it—but the Ophelias couldn’t find a home for the music.
“Is it difficult, having to keep selling yourself about the best songs you’ve ever made?” I ask the band. “Totally. It’s one of the least fun parts of the process,” Peppet responds. “I would say touring: super fun. Recording: super fun. Even making videos, I find that really fun. I don’t mind doing a spreadsheet, I’m down to do the business stuff. But, when it comes to being like, ‘Okay, here’s me as a product,’ and then doing that a bunch of times, it definitely gets a little demoralizing. I’m very grateful that it didn’t take too too long. We ended up in a good spot.” That spot was Get Better Records, the label home to great artists like Empty Country, Pictoria Vark, and ZORA.
The Ophelias met Baker in 2019 while they were on tour with Finom (previously known as OHMME) and playing songs from Almost. At a gig at Drkmttr in Nashville, one of Baker’s friends was working the door and urged her to stop by and check the Ohioans out. “She came to the show and knew the words,” Peppet remembers. “And Mic, ever the charmer, started chatting with her at the merch table and we got along really well immediately. We exchanged information and kept in touch over the next couple years.” In late 2020, while the band was working on “Neil Young on High,” Peppet messaged Baker and asked her to sing on the track. Baker said yes and recorded her parts remotely. A week later, her manager contacted Peppet. “She said, “Hey, Julien wants to produce your next record.’ I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom at my parents’ house. I was like, ‘Oh my God, obviously.’”
Though her first official producer credit on another artist’s album is jasmine.4.t’s You Are the Morning, Baker’s first time producing a record at all came while working on Spring Grove with the Ophelias in 2021. And her touch was immediately impactful. “It was surprising to me that it was not something that she had done before,” Peppet admits. “She’s very good at it and she’s incredibly thoughtful, being able to look at things on a big, overarching level and then also at the really tiny details. She’s very holistic.” Baker is a referential producer, someone whose spark for collaboration involves citing lines from books or creating a long, educational playlist through off-the-cuff mentions in the studio, a rented house in Memphis. Peppet recalls Baker’s tendencies to be hands-on during those 10 days, reminiscing with Shaffer and Adams about the boygenius member’s penchant for “dialing the guitar tone herself” and bringing two suitcases full of pedals to every session. “She’s got ‘HARD WORK’ across her knuckles. It tracks,” Peppet says.
“When everything really gels, you stop analyzing things,” Shaffer says. “In some ways, we went in and blacked out and then came out with a record. I tried to emulate the way that [Baker] would lock in on everything—not just, ‘What tone do we want?,’ but listening so intently to every vocal take.” Adams agrees, remembering how Baker was “there at every moment and was the center of every conversation.” “There wasn’t this sense of urgency that I’ve felt in studios before,” he adds. “She allowed things to take as long as they needed to take. We were doing the music and we all felt supported by her while she was steering the ship. She wasn’t telling us what to do, but we were following her impulses.” Each time the Ophelias arrived at a new focus, Baker gave them time to figure out what it meant. Together, they all bonded over a common language: visceral music discovery. Adams even made a mix of every song Baker mentioned while she and the Ophelias worked on Spring Grove.
Spring Grove is filled-out and filled-up, as Adams and Shaffer anchor every track and Gutmann Fuentes’ violin colors the drama with a dialect of its own. But it’s Peppet’s lyricism that makes the music a one-of-a-kind, streamlined triumph. Spring Grove is a heartbroken album without any conventional breakup songs (it helps that Peppet and Shaffer have been together for almost a decade now). Peppet instead drinks from a wellspring of hurt by focusing on connection—be it rekindling conversations with people from her past, losing touch with friends new and old, or welcoming strangers into her life. On “Open Sky,” she sings to an estranged friend who’s in the comedown of a relationship: “I don’t see you anymore. It’s been three years, I’m better off, but I had heard what’s going on. And I have a single thought: Good for you, I’m really happy for you.” The album is epistolary like that, candid but earnestly poetic. On “Salome,” the Biblical imagery of King Herrod and John the Baptist becomes a vehicle for unpacking misogyny; after singing “We would both be better if we could go silent” during the title track, Adams’ ferocious percussion on the outro moved Peppet to tears; in the vibrations of “Cicada,” a swarm of memories descends onto Cincinnati; like the haunt of synth unfurling behind Peppet’s acoustic, elegiac thrums on “Vulture Tree,” “Cumulonimbus” is plagued with spectral regret and soundtracked like one of Shaffer’s horror movie scores.
“I think a lot of [Spring Grove] is, somehow, more personal than anything else we’ve ever put out, even though a lot of our stuff is very deeply personal,” she says. “It has some topics that I have not written about previously, maybe at least in this obvious or blatant way, and I think that is a little bit nerve-wracking.” And a lot of that is thanks to Baker creating an environment where Peppet could “comfortably ask her questions and she was comfortable answering them.” Baker’s earliest work, especially Sprained Ankle, is plain devastating. I remember watching her play alone and sing “the pavement won’t answer me” to a hushed room. You could feel the brutality in the walls, an energy that lingers when the Ophelias perform, too. “When you see an experience reflected that you’ve had in someone you respect a lot, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re playing on the same team,’” Peppet says. “I trusted her opinion about ‘Can I say this?’ or ‘Is this too much? or ‘Am I putting too much of myself into this? Am I going to regret being this vulnerable?’ I’m not even really concerned with being appropriate in my songs, but I knew [Baker] had an expertise with stuff like that.”
Baker has been vocal in the past about needing a band, because performing by herself every night became far too difficult to sustain. “Is this going to be something where, if I play this song live and sing these words every night on a five-week tour, am I going to combust?” Peppet asked her. Songwriting can be as cruel to the writer as it is to whomever the music is being written about. Spring Grove is a measure of Peppet and the Ophelias having the guts to be honest and lean on each other musically and emotionally. Discomfort is a superpower on these songs; the sirens flourish in granulated details and awaken genreless, fading out of the band’s previous folk-hued inclinations and into ghostly tensions set ablaze by big-time hooks. This is what a document of four people needing each other sounds like.
I think about that Natalie’s show a lot, and I think about those two fans whose bodies moved in unison with Peppet’s flowing dress mere feet from the stage. They filmed so much of that set on their phones, gushing over every track without once watching the performances through a camera lens. I was filled with awe at that moment, seeing kids capture the music while also wanting to draw every note from memory. At the merch table afterwards, they confessed to Peppet how important her songs are to them. They must have felt noticed during “Soft and Tame” too, a song so overwhelmingly about the act of leaving yet so impossibly worth sticking around to hear. Now, songs like “Salome,” “Cicada,” and “Vulture Tree” find Peppet and her band putting a stop to what fleeting togetherness washes over us by turning every stone. This music asks: “But what if we stayed?” It makes for an eye-opening record, if only because it’s so potently human. The Ophelias are calling things like they are on Spring Grove. And, in a world full of pivots, deflections, cruelty, and avoidance, I can’t emphasize how beautiful a thing like that really is.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
