Felt Out Follows Their Shape-Shifting Pop Intuition
A rename and shared chemistry propel the Austin duo's new album
By Genevieve Wood, Fri., April 28, 2023
For Walter Nichols and Sowmya Somanath, the brains behind acoustic-twinged electro-pop project Felt Out, surfing is the best metaphor for their intuitive approach to music. Never mind their lack of experience catching waves.
"I don't surf, but I relate to it for some reason," says Nichols, an Austin native. "You're taking on the world as it is, and literally riding life as best as you can rather than trying to twist reality into what you want it to be."
2019's Superfluid, released under former name Emme, introduced listeners to the pair's equally ambient and danceable take on synth-pop. Their second album, Until I'm Light, arrived April 14 as the pair's first full-length since rebranding to Felt Out. The story of their title change dates back to April 2020, when the pandemic forced Nichols and Somanath to cancel their first tour.
"At first, we kept pushing the tour back further into the summer because no one had any idea what was going on," explains Nichols. "There was this slow dissolution rather than just a cancellation, and we felt so worn out from the momentum loss.
"It gave us a chance to take stock of us and where we were."
From the trenches of anti-climax, Felt Out was born. Somanath, who also heads synth-acoustic solo project Plume Girl, offers: "As we continued writing, we kept landing on this idea of prioritizing intuition. You can't force or control life – things have to just kind of naturally flow into being.
"That translates into every facet of music-making for us, whether it's performing or writing or whatever. If we're playing at a super DIY event, we don't try to bend backward to fit our songs into the space. We'll say, 'Let's do an experimental set instead!' and just ... well, feel it out!'"
As COVID shifted reality, a second unexpected life change quickly crept up on the longtime friends, who grew close in 2011 as members of UT-Austin's Ransom Notes a cappella club and solidified their musical partnership in 2015. With dreams of tour deferred in 2020, the duo and their band road-tripped to the lush Santa Fe National Forest. There, Somanath and Nichols became increasingly unable to deny their shared chemistry.
"That's when we realized how great it would be to be together," says Somanath with a smile. "We were together constantly and it was the best thing ever. The 12-hour drive felt like two hours."
A tumultuous period of emotional reckoning and tectonically shifting dynamics ensued as the duo teetered uncertainly between bestie-hood and partnership. "Road Trip," the final single released in anticipation of Until I'm Light, offers listeners a passenger-seat view of the relationship-defining adventure. Over a sonic tapestry that blends A.G. Cook's outsider pop with Alex G's guitar-driven indie rock, Somanath's voice rises to meet challenges with a calm strength: "I won't let myself go home/ It's a fear I want to know."
From fear, they emerged stronger and more flexible in their songwriting process than before.
"Early on, our roles were very crystallized," explains Nichols. "Sowmya did all the vocals and lyrics, and I made all of the background music. There are no barriers in terms of how we make music now."
Until I'm Light unlocks new levels of lush, cross-genre play for Felt Out, as the self-described "melody-heads" stack ear-catching, Auto-Tuned hooks atop acoustic chords. A collage of cherished samples add texture to the album: As Somanath teaches music and dance part time, three of her students contribute angelic harmonies to "Room," while pitch-shifted audio from the couple's shared Handycam splashes color across multiple tracks.
Both bring decades of formal music training to the project – Somanath has practiced Hindustani classical music since childhood, while Nichols received a Music Theory and Composition degree from UT-Austin. The duo cites both Western (Bach, Stravinsky) and Indian (Kishori Amonkar, Rashid Khan) masters of composition as major influences, as well as modern-day pop pioneers like Charli XCX and the PC Music collective. To promote a performance at KUTX's LookOUT Fest last fall, with leading experimental electronicists Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Julianna Barwick, Felt Out curated a mixtape that seamlessly meshed Chopin's tranquil "Mazurka in A Minor" with XCX's exuberant hyperpop anthem "c.20."
Arguing the compatibility of Charli and Chopin in the playlist's accompanying blurb, they wrote: "The things we love about the Mazurka – its inventiveness, its design, its beauty – are the exact same things we love about c2.0 ... Two perfect little pieces of music separated by 200 years, adhering to completely different aesthetic conventions, but making us feel exactly the same way is pretty cool."
Felt Out's embrace of contradiction becomes second nature on Until I'm Light. Lead single "Closer" expresses an intense desire for intimacy ("I think about you when I wake up/ Do you see me when you stay up?"), while "Room" serves as an ode to the religious experience of solitude ("All I want to be/ Is with me"). Somanath speaks to juggling both of these moods.
"Balance, whether texturally, conceptually, or lyrically, is something we're always thinking about and crave, because the music we like is able to balance the very sweet with the very dark," she says.
Felt Out records, mixes, and masters everything at home, which Nichols says allows the music to be "just a straight extension of us." When not fixating on new sounds, he runs sourdough startup Hello Bread out of the pair's shared North Loop abode. Is it possible, one might wonder, to draw comparisons between the bread and music-making processes?
"Are you kidding me?" laughs Nichols, as Somanath nods in assent. "Going back to the surfing metaphor, breadmaking is all about creating an environment that you kind of manage, but can't really control.
"I try to think of music in that way, too. You set the conditions and try to set yourself up for success, and then you just kind of let it go."
Felt Out have finally embarked on their first tour – a 16-stop sweep of the Midwest and Northeast – following a sold-out album release show for Until I’m Light earlier this month at Mohawk indoor with Font and Loveme.
