Celebrating Valley’s “Last Birthday”
Cover of Valley’s “Last Birthday” EP
“Somebody tweeted, “I'm scared for the next Valley release because I don't know if it's gonna make me want to dance with my friends or if I'm gonna need to see a therapist,” Valley drummer Karah James recalls.
Valley, consisting of James, lead vocalist Rob Laska, guitarist Mickey Brandolino and bassist Alex Dimauro, formed in 2014 after the members were accidentally double-booked at a local recording studio as high school students. Brandolino admits he was considering chiropractic or architecture had he not met the other members of Valley. “I would have been a dog walker,” James declares.
Since releasing their debut EP Car Test, in 2015, Valley released several other albums and EPs, including Last Birthday, on October 1 this year.
Last Birthday contains a variety of songs, including “SOCIETY,” “Tempo,” “Oh shit…are we in love?,” and “Like 1999,” which were all released earlier this year.
Although “ain't my girl” came out in this past September, it is actually seven and a half years old, a hidden gem in Valley’s Dropbox archives only rediscovered in a trip to a cabin while on weed gummies. “We had the most existential moment and we're like this has to be on the EP, so we recorded it the next day and finished it,” Laska explains.
Not all of Valley’s recording experiences are so straightforward. “Usually when we write, we have to travel to collaborate with people,” Brandolino said. “For example, when we wrote ‘sucks to see you doing better,’ we went to LA and got a place there for a month and had people come in and out.
“But this time we did a lot of it over Zoom so we were able to write with all these people that were all over the US and the world,” he continues. “Our palette was a little wider this time, getting other people's influences from all over the place, which was kind of a silver lining of the pandemic.”
Although each band member has a specific skillset, they don’t confine themselves to a role. “We just have never operated that way. Kara will write a full song or Mickey will bring in a drum groove and then Carol will read a verse and I'll come in on the course and Alex will write the bridge,” Laska said. “There's no rulebook at all for the way we operate and write music.”
This flexibility has allowed inspiration to come from anywhere. “We're watching the Truman show several months ago and we're like it’d be cool to write a song about this and then everything kind of snowballs off of that,” James said, of their song “Can We Make It? (Jim Carrey), on Last Birthday.
Despite the EP name, Last Birthday does not have a titular song, though that is not to say it doesn’t exist.
“There's a song called ‘Last Birthday,’ that is really one of our greats,” Laska said. “It's not trying to be anything. It's not trendy. It's not cool. If we were to die tomorrow, “Last Birthday” is the song we want people to hear.”
Stay tuned for “Last Birthday”’s release by listening to the new EP on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube or following Valley on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.