Atta Boy Unearth New Depths on 'Silt'
- Josh Kitchen
- 1 minute ago
- 11 min read
By : Josh Kitchen / June 26, 2026
Atta Boy have been at this a while. The Los Angeles-based quintet consisting of Eden Brolin (guitar/vocals), Dashel Thompson (keyboards), Freddy Reish (guitar/bass), and Lewis Pullman (drums) met in middle school, bonding over the albums they were obsessed with before discovering they had something special when they started jamming together. On their fourth album, Silt, Atta Boy dig through a lifetime of shared history and relationships that only deepen with time. As Brolin tells me, "We become ourselves the longer we know each other."
It's an album that yields new treasures the more you peel back its layers, basking in the glow of a band that has realized the best music is made when musicians know one another as well as they know themselves. Opening with the murky, slow-building stunner "Scratch," you hear a band so completely in tune with one another, even though much of the record was written while they were scattered across different places, relying on the creative shorthand built through years of friendship. "Oh, mama, you're an oak tree / in the summer you are shady," Brolin sings on the album highlight "Oh, Mama," mournful horns drifting alongside Pullman's jazzy drumming as Reish and Thompson weave around her performance like a conversation that no longer needs words.
The takeaway from Silt is that Atta Boy have reached the point every great band hopes to reach, where years of shared experience become another instrument in the room.
Something I find really interesting, especially for people who've followed you since the beginning, is that when I listen to that first record, I hear a great debut from a band still finding its footing. It feels more lo-fi, like you're discovering your voice. Then you move into the big-hearted alt-country vibes of the next records, and now Silt feels like a band that truly knows who they are. The production is so crisp and full.
Talk to me about Silt versus where you started and what that journey has felt like.
Freddy:
I think we're all in different places now, and that's tied to who we are as people. We've grown into ourselves and have a much better sense of who we want to be than we did at 19. This is also the first album where we really gave ourselves the time to let that happen. If something wasn't right, we didn't settle—we kept chipping away until it matched what we heard in our heads. That's made us more confident and intentional with every part of the music. We spent two years writing this album. Before, we'd get into the studio, learn the songs, record them, and it sounded like we were playing songs we'd just learned. This was an entirely different process.
Eden:
I'll add that there was something really valuable about that old process, and I think it always will be. It was like a pressure cooker. Jason Hiller, who co-produced our first three records, recorded them, and plays bass with us, helped us develop that organic live sound. He taught us to trust our instincts. This record feels like the culmination of that process, just stretched out dramatically. Instead of one two-week session, we had five. We could throw things at the wall and see what stuck. That was really fun, and a lot of it happened remotely, so it was a very different process.
I love that. What I love about Silt is that it sounds like a record Attaboy could only make now. You all met so young. The first record came out in 2012, and even before that you were different people. So much life has happened to each of you and to the world, and now you come back as adults with all of those experiences finding their way into these songs.
Dashell:
I think that's completely true. We've grown up. Our frontal lobes are developed now. Like Freddy said, we're comfortable in our own skin in a way we weren't before. Another huge part is that we're finally playing shows. During the first three records we weren't really touring, and doing that has changed both our playing and our musicality together. It's ironic because a lot of this album was recorded remotely, while the first three were recorded live together. But spending so much time in a van and playing shows really changed these songs.
Eden:
Yeah, absolutely.
I was listening to "Oh Mama,"—the oak tree lyrics really struck me. Then there's "Pale Blue Sky." I'm impressed by how you've written a song that feels timeless. It doesn't sound old or new—it just sounds like it's always existed. It's the kind of song you hear and wonder if you've known your whole life. Then to follow it with "Full Cloud" is such a cool sequencing choice.
Lewis:
"Pale Blue Sky" definitely has that timeless feeling. It could be an old classic, a '90s song, a Cranberries-type banger, or belong to another era entirely. It's got a lot of different personas.
Eden:
I did a workshop through School of Song. It was a Christmas gift from my husband, and the instructor was Adrianne Lenker, which was so fucking cool. One of the first assignments was to look around the room and name five things you could see. Everyone put their words into the chat, and we started pairing them together into little clusters. That's where the first stanza came from, and eventually the music followed. It's funny because there are probably thousands of songs built from variations of those same kinds of words. To me, it's a really surreal song. It feels like when you fall asleep in the afternoon and wake up and suddenly it's nighttime. That's always been the feeling of it.
Freddy:
It took a long time to figure out the rhythm guitars and make the song feel encapsulating, swirling, and flowing while still having dynamic changes. What really took it over the top was Eden's friend Keenan O'Meara, who recorded all of Eden's vocals except on "Oh, Haven't Yet." From the demo, Eden kept saying, "Lap steel would be really cool on this song," and I kept adding everything except lap steel. Eventually Keenan came in and absolutely nailed it. He played these amazing parts in the final chorus.
Eden:
He called them something like the ping-pongs.
Freddy:
They're these pitched little lap steel plucks that pan left to right and make you feel like you're inside this dream. Going back to the timeless thing, Lewis wanted a Cranberries-style drum part, then I started thinking George Harrison in the second verse. We borrowed from different eras of music that influenced us and built this textural dream around Eden's vocals. It's just really fun to sing along to.
Another thing I love about this record is that you have a song like "Pale Blue Sky," which is so dreamy, alongside these really heavy rock songs. That makes me think about the title, Silt. I think of something gritty and earthy—layers settling over time, new things being revealed underneath. Can you talk about that idea?
Dashell:
Like Freddy said, we had a lot of time to make this record. There was something sedimentary about how things got built on top of one another. We'd written these songs almost two and a half years before ending up back in the studio, so things really layered over time. It gave us space to try ideas, sit with them, and synthesize them. That process became elemental to what the record became. It gave us time to discover the sound. One thing I've always been proud of is that Attaboy has always had a sound, even as we try new things. We might experiment with weird synths or crazy guitar parts, but at the core there's still something unmistakably Attaboy. I've never been able to explain exactly how it happens, but something about the four of us in a room together makes something really nice happen.
It's only the four of you who can make Atta Boy sound like Atta Boy. No matter how much the music evolves, it still sounds like you. It's like those great guitar players where you always know who's playing, even if the song is completely different.
Eden:
There was also a nice challenge in having the confidence to make mistakes and experiment while not alienating the people who've been coming to our shows and still love those first records. It was fun trying to maintain whatever that thing is we have together while thinking outside the box a little.
Lewis, you also created the album cover. When I look at it, then listen to the record, they make perfect sense together. I love digging through records at Amoeba and buying something just because the artwork catches my eye. This feels like one of those albums that would make me stop and pick it up.
Lewis:
Thank you. We went through a lot of different iterations. I kind of did an Adrianne Lenker-style poll where everyone wrote down the words that stood out while listening to the record, along with the mood they remembered from making it and what they felt the overall message was. Eden also sent me this amazing Pinterest folder of visual references she'd been collecting. I'd already made a bunch of mockups just from listening to the record over and over and sketching whatever came to mind.
For some reason I became obsessed with telephone poles. I loved the contrast of light and dark. I wanted the cover to be mostly black with just this little pinhole of light shining onto something. We tried a bunch of versions, but this one ended up being the simplest. Your brain kind of fills in the mountain that's hidden there. It also reflected how we made the record. We recorded some of it together, but afterward we were all living in different states, constantly on the phone, connected by these thin little wires. That became the whole idea.
I love hearing you connect the telephone lines to the fact that you were all separated while making the record. It's literally an image of connection. That also makes me think about influence. I'm much more interested in asking what influenced you outside of music. What did you see on a hike today? Did you talk to your grandma on the phone? Did you smell something beautiful? We're all shaped by the world around us. When you understand who someone is beyond the music, it makes the music itself richer.
Lewis:
Totally.
Eden:
I love that. It's true. I think that's part of what's made the evolution of Attaboy so nice, because we become more ourselves the longer we know each other. We've known each other for such a long time, and the more inspired by each other we become—and the more trust there is between us—the more room there is to try things we would've been scared to five, seven, or ten years ago. And to your point, I think there's something really beautiful about asking what, in the physical world, affects us... what we experience sensorially. In this super technological world we're living in, it's such a beautiful thing to share that kind of physical experience with other people. I know that's kind of stating the obvious, but it's such a cool fucking thing to get to do.
you guys are finally going to be playing these songs live soon. You've got the Troubadour coming up on July 10. Talk to me about these shows.
Freddy:
I'm so excited and nervous. Taking a swing on a recorded album is one thing—you have all the time in the world to perfect it. Then suddenly you're like, "Whoa... now we have to do this live."
This is the room we recorded in. It's in the back of my parents' house, and we've been playing here for fifteen years. It's easy to take chances somewhere so familiar. Then suddenly you're playing bigger venues you've never played before—venues you've gone to as a fan to watch bands you admire. That's a crazy pill to swallow. It heals whatever weird thing is going on inside me, but it's still hard. At the same time, it's a huge honor. The fact that people believe we can do this and fill those rooms is really amazing. So thank you to everyone buying tickets, and thank you to everyone who sold out the D.C. show. We really appreciate it. I'm super excited, super nervous, and I can't wait.
Have you thought about how these songs might evolve once you start playing them?
Eden:
I remember there being a point where I kept saying, "Add another guitar. Add another guitar." Freddy kept saying, "How are we going to play this live?" and I just kept saying, "It's going to be okay. Trust me." Now I'm the one asking, "How are we going to play these?"
But it's great, right? You go see your favorite artists, and they're not always recreating the record exactly—they're playing a version of the song. Ideally, if the recorded version is really big and beefy, you do your best to make it feel that way live, but there's something really fun about figuring out how to stay true to the song without recreating every production element. It's a fun puzzle. Can we move this part over here? Shift that part over there?
We've done that before with older songs that sound very different live than they do on the records. Usually those were deeper cuts, but it ended up being good practice. How do we keep the spirit of the song alive while shifting it into a live setting? It's a little weird, but I think we'll be okay. I still trust the process.
Originally, the horns on "Oh Mama" were actually a guitar melody Freddy played, and another part was a synth line Dash wrote. So if we can't program horns, we can always go back to that version. I think it'll be fun. It'll probably be a disaster at first... but it'll turn out alright.
Lewis:
I just fucked myself on this record. I doubled most of my drum parts. It was always this fantasy I had, and Freddy let me go for it. It sounds really cool... and it's impossible to fucking do live, unless you're the Allman Brothers and want to hire another drummer.
I have faith. I have faith you'll figure it out.
Freddy:
What gave me a lot of comfort was opening for Shakey Graves. Those guys were incredible. They played amazing sets every night, but every show was different. I remember walking into soundcheck in Spokane and hearing them absolutely nail "Don't Let Me Down" by The Beatles, and then they never played it again. I remember thinking, "You guys can just do that? You can just sound like this and have fun?" It made me realize every show can be its own separate experience. That's just so cool.
What's the last record each of you bought on any format? LP, CD, cassette—anything.
Freddy:
I wish I was with my record collection.
Eden:
I remember mine. I saw the cover and thought, "I have to know what this sounds like." It was a five-dollar record. I didn't even realize at first that it was Wendy Carlos—
Dashell:
...basically one of the pioneers of analog synthesizer music. She did the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack, and I think the original Tron soundtrack too. She's an absolute legend. Switched-On Bach is kind of awesome.
Eden:
It's so sick. I'm so happy I bought it. I had no idea what it would sound like. I didn't even look at the credits before I bought it, so when I got home and realized it was Wendy Carlos, it made it even more fun. I remember listening and thinking, "This kind of sounds like the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack." It's a great record, especially if you're trying to get work done.
Freddy:
The last one I definitely remember buying was from one of the openers we toured with, The Wonderfool's Shiner. That record is awesome. I know what the next record I want to buy is, though—Breakfast in America by Supertramp.
Dashell:
The last record I bought was Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay when they came through Cleveland. One of the wildest shows I've ever seen. It's almost more of a stage performance than a concert.
Lewis:
A friend introduced me to "Junior Dad," from Lulu, the Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration.
Dashell:
That's a wild record.
Lewis:
It is. I can't believe I'd never heard it before. It must've been toward the end for Lou. His voice has this really raspy, late-era Iggy Pop quality. "Junior Dad" fucking rocks, but it also makes me cry. The whole record is filled with these little gifts. It's such a bizarre collaboration.
Listen to Silt below and catch Atta Boy on tour at the dates underneath!
