After 12 years in the Brooklyn indie band Chairlift – and a magic mushroom epiphany – Polachek has produced one of the year’s finest experimental pop albums
Caroline Polachek was writing about the danger of trying to change for somebody from her first hit with indie-pop group Chairlift. “I tried to do handstands for you,” she sang on 2008’s twee yet melancholy Bruises, which made the Boulder-to-Brooklyn transplants ubiquitous after it was used in an iPod advert. The charming track caught the trio in a similar bind with their audience. “Even when we released our second album, which was much grittier than the first, people pushed back and said: ‘We want more Bruises,’” Polachek recalls.
To their credit, Chairlift never caved in. Over three albums, the trio-turned-duo easily outstripped the fast-diminishing Brooklyn indie scene of the early 2010s. She and Patrick Wimberley were as fluent in 80s Japanese pop, esoteric English songwriter
Virginia Astley and opera as they were contemporary R&B;
Beyoncé ended up recording a Chairlift castoff, No Angel, on her self-titled fifth album. They split, amicably, in 2017, proud of their distinctive sound, says Polachek, if disheartened by the limited perceptions of what an indie band could become.