BmoreArt

The South Hill Experiment (S.H.E.) consists of brothers Baird and Gabe Acheson, who dropped their third album, EARTHBREAKS, on March 21st. The Achesons will celebrate the record’s release with a mini-tour, including a homecoming stop in Baltimore on April 3rd at Metro Gallery. I got on the phone with Baird and Gabe to discuss the S.H.E.’s origins, evolution, and the making of their third studio album. 

“We were able to find a space, and the space made the band… It’s like the band was already there,” Gabe Acheson tells me. “It’s like there’s a ghost of a band in that room, and we’re playing covers [of their songs],” Baird adds, only half joking. The Acheson brothers are describing the warehouse room on LA’s South Hill Street they’ve been renting and making music in for the past few years.

When Baird moved to L.A.—where Gabe had already been living—in 2020, they realized they could just about afford a shared creative space. The South Hill warehouse gave them a chance to restructure their methods as composers, producers, songwriters, and multi-instrumentalists. “The music was always going to be mediated by a computer, but we decided to take the composition out of the computer’s reach,” Gabe says. The brothers’ process is expressed by a fervor for performance and by an unwavering pursuit to capture the unvarnished soul of performance. Baird explains it as an act of “channeling instead of constructing.”

I wonder how performance—as an idea, as an experience—feels for the brothers as a device for expression. Seeing where I’m headed, Gabe jumps in… “It’s exciting to figure out how to achieve performances that feel overwhelming or overwhelmed.” EARTHBREAKS is awash with this reciprocal notion of overwhelmedness. Don’t get me wrong. This feeling is far from unpleasant. The record is marked by earthly swells of tension where the ebbs are as entrancing as the flows.

Speaking to their collaborative spirit, Baird and Gabe say an explicit goal of the band is to give up control of the direction of a musical idea until as late in the process as possible. As esteemed producers who have worked on various hip-hop, pop, and indie projects (Arlo Parks, Berhana, Brockhampton, Kevin Abstract, to name a few), their approach to keeping control at a distance intrigues me. But then again, the S.H.E. has always been about reinvention for the Achesons—about generating atmospheres where musical essences emerge organically.

“The S.H.E. is not precious,” they write in their manifesto. “It’s a place for the music we wanted to make as kids in a Baltimore basement.” The city remains important to their shared creative project, as one’s hometown often does. I ask how Baltimore continues to shape their collaboration after several years of calling LA home. “I feel like being from Baltimore shows you that you can be someone who makes things in an unconventional way, whether for a living or not… you can do it passionately,” Baird says.

Gabe nods vehemently. “Yeah, Baltimore nourishes this idea of… can you do something distinct? Can you make something interesting? That ethic was valued at a community level growing up and I don’t think most people in the world get that experience.” This Baltimore distinctness is reflected in the opening acts—Eyas and Josh Stokes—who will share the stage with the S.H.E. on April 3rd at Metro Gallery.

Eyas is a singer/songwriter and producer who blends indie pop, jazz, and folk, whereas Josh Stokes is a singer/songwriter, producer, and drummer who combines new age soul, R&B, funk, and psychedelic punk. In another city, this combination of sounds in one lineup might be outside of the norm, but in Baltimore mixed bills are familiar and frequent.

Like Eyas and Josh Stokes, the S.H.E. is also a genre blending act, one that eludes categorization. What I know for certain is that EARTHBREAKS marks a new chapter in the Acheson brother saga. “We use a lot of feedback and resonance on this record, which we do on all the South Hill records, but I think we really leaned in on that this time,” Gabe says. “We used physical spaces like a giant stairwell to color the album. The echoes and reverbs there are pretty chaotic and long and give a real sense of depth.”

Varied depth is representative of the entirety of EARTHBREAKS. There are songs on this album that give the impression of having been recorded and left almost as is, tinkered with to a minimum. “Passion Fades,” for instance, is graceful in its lightness of touch and self-evident in its continuous build. But there are also tracks like “The Drain” that are robustly processed, rife with snappy drums and breathy, honeyed compression.

I ask whether the album’s lyrics search for hope amid the world’s dire political and ecological trajectory. Baird nods. “We’re trying to be against despair and cynicism,” he says. “Most things are going wrong, but we can still do something about it. We can still sing.” The project is also about the death of the studio album, he tells me. “In a blip of human existence which is a blip on the planet, there’s this art form that the three of us on this call right now and many others care deeply about.”

Expanding on how EARTHBREAKS departs from MOONSHOTS and SUNSTRIKES, Gabe says, “we want the voice on this record to be a little bit more anonymous, a little bit less personal. It’s not supposed to be confessional. I love confessional music, but that’s not really what South Hill is about.” He takes a breath before zeroing in on his point. “We’re aiming for universality on this record, the kind in which you can say the same lyric twenty times in a row and still feel it.”

Though the band has always been a conduit for performing and improvising, Baird and Gabe didn’t actually perform in front of onlookers as a band until the first two records were mixed. The underlying universalism of EARTHBREAKS is a testament to knowing who they want to be on stage and what effect they want to have.

This clarity in their stage identity mirrors their approach to creation itself. The S.H.E. isn’t about formulaic construction but about channeling something beyond, like that ghost in the room. It’s about “staying open to possibility and letting the production find itself through experimentation rather than going in with a concrete plan,” as Baird puts it. A similar kind of openness shaped my own experience of the record upon first listen. 

I was on a train in the evening and I could barely make out the landscape outside, but I felt the light rumble of being in motion. In transit, I was in somatic tune with the swells of tension in EARTHBREAKS, which reminded me of the routine movements of the tide. I knew the big moments when they arrived just as I recognized and cherished the tender, restrained bits. I was buoyed by expectation but nonetheless thrilled by the demure expansiveness of the album. Seeing the S.H.E., Eyas, and Josh Stokes live is not an occasion you’ll want to miss out on.

The South Hill Experiment will be playing Metro Gallery with openers Eyas and Josh Stokes on 4/3. You can purchase tickets at this link and learn more about the S.H.E. on their website.