It’s been just a few years, but Poster have grown up a lot since they released their debut, Cassette, in 2013 and the Brandt LP less than a year later. Today the quintet, who split time between Tampa and Lakeland, dropped a brand new album, Elias Is A Nice Guy. The eight-track effort is 23 minutes of nearly-perfect laid-back, harmony-driven stoner-pop. The band took six months to track the album themselves in a few different bedrooms and living rooms before Jackson Scott (Fat Possum, Bloodmoss) mixed and mastered it.
“Honestly a dream come true, we've been really big fans of his since ‘That Awful Sound’ came out,” Poster's Stratton Roberts wrote in a message to CL. Poster played with the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter when he was on a Florida tour, and Roberts mentioned not trusting many people to mix his own band’s music, so Scott said he’d do it. “We kept in contact and sent him the songs after we finished tracking,” Roberts, 21, wrote. “The album is 1,000 times better because of Jackson, and we really didn't have to tell him much of anything — he just kinda knew what to do.” The album title has nothing to do with the content of the songs, but using band member Elias Beritner’s name wasn’t totally coincidental.
“I guess it could be symbolic of the shift to a full band, since Poster's first two albums were recorded entirely by Connor [Kirby, guitarist] and I, but it was mostly just a joke that sounded cool as an album cover,” Roberts said. What’s not an accident is how quickly the band is writing music — they already have a follow up to Elias in the works.
“Playing Brandt and Cassette around town made us wanna work on the new stuff twice as much,” Roberts said, adding that the band has adapted to a far more democratic writing process since adding new members. He admits that the speed has led to about three albums of material that won’t see the light of day.
“We just don't feel connected to [it] anymore, so the writing of the next album felt really necessary,” Roberts said. “The next album is gonna be a pretty big shift in sound. We also took way too long to put out something after Brandt and we don't wanna wait that long again.”
The album is available for download on a name-your-price basis, but Tallahassee’s Viridian Sounds is releasing a limited amount of cassettes and CDs. Poster leaves on a 10-day tour next month and will hit Georgia, Pennsylvania, New York and South Carolina. They kick off the tour on December 9 when they open Sleeping Pills' CD release show at The Bends in St. Petersburg. Details on the show are available via local.cltampa.com, and a stream of the new LP is below.
