SyncVib

The members of Slow Pulp, a Chicago-based but Wisconsin-rooted alt-rock quartet, were halfway through making their debut album, “Moveys,” when the pandemic hit. They ended up working remotely, and singer-guitarist Emily Massey recorded her vocals at her father’s home studio in Madison.

That might seem like a major inconvenience, but when Massey, guitarist Henry Stoehr, bassist Alex Leeds and drummer Teddy Mathews started working on their new album, “Yard,” they returned to the way they made its predecessor. The result is an album whose mood is intimate but musically encompasses both gentle ballads and noisy rockers.

“When we made our first record — well, first of all, we just didn’t know what we were doing because it was the first record. But it was under really strange circumstances,” says Massey by phone from the band’s practice space.

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“Because I had been exposed, and I didn’t want to get anyone sick,” Massey went to a remote cottage in northern Wisconsin to write songs. And then to her parents’ home to record vocals.

“I had never been that alone before,” Massey says of her time at the cottage. “And I found it to be really cathartic. It allowed me to open up with myself in ways that I didn’t expect. It made songwriting a bit easier for me.”

“Because that felt so good, I made that part of the process for this record.”

As for recording in her father’s studio, “It ended up going, kind of to our surprise, really well,” she says. “My dad was able to get me into this very visceral, emotional state to be able to record the songs.”

“If I’m able, I’ll probably keep recording with him as long as I can,” she adds.

For Massey, returning to the cottage to write songs for “Yard” was a logical choice. “It’s easier for me to be incredibly emotive, or vulnerable, when I am alone. It’s harder for me to do that in front of people.”

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“I feel really privileged to have a space like that. The first day I get up there, I just, like, cry,” she says, laughing. “Letting myself catch up with myself and maybe some things that have been hard in life, doing some processing. I really leave feeling so much better than when I went in.”

Massey writes nearly all the lyrics, but all four band members are involved in the songwriting. One of the new album’s tunes, “Worm,” is sung by Massey but was written by Leeds.

After the musicians record their parts, the songs are completed by Stoehr, who’s the band’s producer, engineer and mixer as well as lead guitarist. Massey credits him with adding “all the magic bits to it to become the song that you end up hearing.”

One more transition awaits: turning the studio-crafted songs into ones that can be played onstage. “The live iterations of the songs end up being definitely different from the recordings,” Massey acknowledges. “The past few weeks, we’ve really been preparing for this tour. We had to rearrange some of the songs to figure out how to play them.”

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“Even on tour, things might change. We like keeping them loose and open in that way. It keeps things new and exciting, even though they’re songs that we’ve heard a million times by now,” she says with a laugh.

Performing the songs live will also require Massey to publicly air feelings she first summoned in isolation. “There definitely are a few songs, I think, that will be a little difficult to get through. Even playing them in practice, I feel myself being pretty emotional. I think my relationship to them will change the more we play them.”

She singles out the album’s piano-based title song, “which is about my relationship to my family, and to my sisters,” as “particularly raw.”

“When I first played that song for my family after we had finished it, we had a very emotional moment where we were tearing up. I hope when I play that song and they’re in the audience, I’m able to hold it together.”

Oct. 30 at 8 p.m. at Union Stage, 740 Water St. SW. unionstage.com. Sold out.

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