Earlier this week, the Brooklyn-based trio, Sister., released a new single, “Colorado” off of Mtn. Laurel Recording Co. If you live in New York and have seen the band perform in the past few months, whether that be stripped back for a house show or a full band endeavor, you most likely have heard a variation of this song. Regardless of which version, “Colorado” finds Sister. exuding a level of patient handling; a relic that romanticizes the enduring process of their collaboration, all while further defining their style and sound at their own pace. 

This interview was conducted in January of this year. The band took the time to call me as they sat between projects and recording sessions of “Colorado”. We decided to hold off on publishing this piece until the song was released, and in the sense of music PR, that was the move – and for the sake of the piece, it allowed me to watch the contents of our past conversation live its life in real time.

Sister. is composed of songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Hannah Pruzinsky, Ceci Sturman and James Chrisman. Last October, the band released their debut full-length album, Abundance, which found the band in a comfortable spot. Pruzinsky and Sturman started the project as a duo when they met in college, and since then, their songwriting found a similar path of sincerity and inventiveness in Chrisman’s warm and unique production and textured instrumentation.

At its core, Abundance is a bedroom record, hopping between locations in the process of writing and recording. Most of the album was tracked in a small cabin in Woodstock, NY –  a little run down unit making a comfortable home for the trio to set up shop and flesh out the new songs. Unlike recording in a professional studio, the band was able to take their time, as Pruzinsky shares, “I think it was fun to be able to stretch it out so long. Even more so than recording in the cabin, I feel like I always think of us recording all the overdubs in my room with James at the computer and Ceci laying on my bed re-listening to the songs a million times.”

Whether at the cabin or in Pruzinsky’s bedroom in Brooklyn, the band recognized the outside elements that allowed the recordings to breathe; a symbiotic relationship between the noises captured and the environment in which the band occupied – “when we had the mics gained up you could hear the creek that was under the cabin,” Chrisman recalls, sharing an example form their time in the woods. These moments throughout Abundance latch on to our senses; a blend of birds in conversation, the clicks of guitar pedals and keyboards, pouring rain and the creaking of old wooden floors all stand out in their own way, yet add a collective beauty to the overall experience of the record. “That’s actually a personal preference of ours,” Sturman says, “using whatever happens to be captured, instead of going back and trying for a better sound or recording.” Something she further explains, “I think we’re just really good at embracing that sort of thing – this is what we did, we’re gonna honor it and that’s gonna become the song.” 

There is no more striking example than the album’s opener “Ghost” – a song attributed to Sturman’s time learning the piano and recorded on a trip with her mom to a ranch in New Mexico. The final version grows from that original voice memo, capturing a performance of Sturman playing the song for her mother. “Ghost’ was really uncomfortable for me to accept,” Sturman shares as the others recall having to convince her to use it on the album. This song was my introduction to Sister., first listening to Abundance on the train when it was released. Its spacing felt like a familiar form of tenderness, one that knows that healing is an option, as Sturman sounded so distant in her presence, but so vulnerable and compelling in her performance.

The choice to place it as the opener wasn’t much of a topic of discussion for the band; “we started sending the album around a lot, and people said “Abundance” has to go first – you need a big entrance, and we all were like, no,” Pruzinsky laughs. It was a gut feeling, trusting their creative intuitions that kept it in its tracking spot. “I think there were definitely nerves about it, but it does welcome you into the expansiveness of the album,” Pruzinsky continues, with Sturman adding, “well, it felt like a risky move for me because it feels vulnerable, but I think it’s cool. We have to put trust in the listener that they will keep listening, and then they can understand why that might have been the first song.”

And to the band’s credit, having “Ghost” open the album perfectly sets the tone for a project that doesn’t stay in one lane for long, but rather focuses on their craft as a culmination of moments. “It’s like a record of so many things,” Chrisman says about the song. “It’s a record of Ceci and her mom and one particular performance, but it’s also because Ceci is learning the piano, it’s a document of a moment in her relationship to piano, too.”  And once again, inviting in their settings, “even a document of that acoustic space with a weird bird in the background,” he laughs. 

As a project, Abundance savors maximalism at no expense to intimacy, and originality through vision and feel of its players. Songs like “Notes App Apology” and “Guts” flow with melodic folk voicings through a classic and tempered alt-rock drive. “Gorilla vs. Cold Water” is a patient build, standing strong through synth drones and heavy guitar strums. The drum machine track plays second hand antagonist in the dark turns of “Classon”, and “Kinder” reaches similar emotional heights until decomposing into dust as the instrumentation burns from the inside out. “There are so many different narratives that take place on this album,” Pruzinsky shares, “I think what came through were these momentary glances in time.”

Abundance became a document of the trio’s growth, experimentation and ultimately, their form, but it is also helped capture the way that they learned to communicate creatively with such intention and ease. “It was more like a phase or a chapter for us, as songwriters and collaborators,” Sturman begins. “I think we have just been growing a lot as people and as musicians, so we got to just use this as an opportunity to co-write and just really try to see how we could make a bunch of different songs really work together and have cohesion.”

That cohesion comes through in the varied feels of comfort that arise from the individual songs, regardless of their build, emotional pull or stylistic choices. “For so long, Ceci and I had no idea how to articulate our ideas to each other and how to find someone that also just knew what we wanted,” Pruzinsky shares. “When we were able to finally get there, it was like, ‘okay, now we can do everything we want!’ It’s like we can be doing the most minimal thing, which is just the three of us playing acoustic instruments in a room, and it feels so good and so comfortable.”

“We wrote Colorado together,” says the band in their press release. “Hannah started with the chords and the line ‘You drive to Colorado and I get emotional,’ and we built it all from there.” The song builds off of those same elements of loose textures, shared ideas and honored performances that live within the heightened emotional release of the song. Within their composure, the band thrives in pushing the vast soundscape further, but in no way at the expense of losing that intimacy that makes their performances so full and memorable.

While recording “Colorado”, Sturman recalls a time when their friend and label manager, Elijah Wolf, said, “this is such a classic Sister. sound,” in the middle of their session. “That’s so cool that we might have something like that,” she says. And as “Colorado” now sees the daylight, and it was time to resurface this old conversation, I was instantly enveloped in that first experience I had with the Sister. sound, a moment of true Proust Effect on public transportation; my own momentary glance in time that felt so present. And to its effects, that classic sound doesn’t feel to necessarily label their form, but rather a chance for the band to define themselves with where they are now in the moment, knowing they have so much more to show us.

“Colorado” is accompanied by a music video made by V. Haddad with the help from Nara Avakian. You can stream “Colorado” on all platforms now. Pruzinsky and Sturman also run New York-based show zine, GUNK, which is shared at the beginning of every month.