As bandleader Johnathon Mayer tells it, Surgeons in Heat recorded their new album, Bored Immortals, almost in reverse. The band began tracking the record with producer Josh Evert at Silver City Studios before the studio was situated in its current Washington Heights location, and because of permitting issues, they had to keep the noise to a bare minimum. “So, we tracked the whole record live without drums and without our guitar amps, then we did the bass, guitar and keyboards together and just started overdubbing,” Mayer says. “We just kind of did it all backward. Usually bands record the drums first and tracks everything else live together.”
Though he admits those first few weeks of recording were strange—“We’re a rock band so it’s a little weird to be like, ‘OK, everybody put on your headphones,’” he says—Mayer was less flummoxed by the situation than most musicians might be. Since he began Surgeons in Heat nearly a decade ago, he’s been making the most of whatever the world has thrown at the band, be it unorthodox studio arrangements or a revolving door lineup. He’s the lone constant member in the group, which is currently rounded out by bassist Ryan Reeve, keyboardist Bradley Kruse and their new drummer, Sam Reitman—the latter also of Midnight Reruns.
The band has gone through so many drummers over the years that Mayer can’t even count them off the top of his head. All of that suggests drama, but Mayer says that isn’t the case. Band members simply move on with their lives. “Usually, they just leave because they can’t make it work with their other commitments or aren’t able to tour,” Mayer says. “It’s OK. There’s no reason to get upset about someone not wanting to play in your band. Nobody’s ever going to be as passionate about your songs as you are.”
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And so, partly out of necessity, Surgeons in Heat has gradually become a much weirder, more studio-minded project than the garagy power-pop group they originally introduced themselves as. More so than its predecessors, Bored Immortals takes advantage of guest musicians. In addition to producing, Evert lent some drums, vocals and keyboards. Vincent Kircher of Jaill, whose currently lineup also includes Evert and Mayer, contributed some glockenspiel. Sean Hirthe of Paper Holland and Soul Low played saxophone.
The result is a heavily tinkered, endearingly odd, pop-rock record, filled with nods to jazz, R&B, prog and yacht rock. One beat-heavy standout, “In My Sight,” plays like a remix of a water-warped Hall & Oates 45. Even though the audio fidelity can vary wildly from song to song, somehow it all hangs together.
Mayer says there was a part of him that was worried whether the band’s drumless early sessions for the record would even be usable. “In the back of my mind it was like, ‘Are we going to have to re-track this or start over?” he says. “But it ended up working great. Trying out that process led me to try new ideas. I even started taking some of the demos that I had and would incorporated into what we were recording. It seemed like it would be a limitation at first, but eventually it was like, ‘I can bring anything of any audio fidelity into this studio.’ If I didn’t like something we’d been working on at home, I could bring it in and reconstruct it. There was just this total freedom to explore all these different sounds.”
Bored Immortals is out Friday, June 22, via Chicago’s Maximum Pelt Records. Surgeons in Heat play an LP release show with Jaill, Cafe Racer and Ravi/Lola on Friday, June 29, at 9 p.m. at Cactus Club.
