The Technicolors moved in silence, creating their 2025 album, Heavy Pulp, behind closed doors while fans were begging for new music in the comments of their old Instagram posts. Little did listeners know that if they were patient enough, a fresh new album would be in their hands Aug. 29 and their dream of a Technicolors comeback would come true.
Reemerging into the music scene in April of this year by posting a chaotic short montage clip to Instagram inciting people to “spice up their life” by dialing 555-PULP, The Technicolors made a surprise splash, pulp and all. The four-year period following the release of their 2021 album, Cinema Sublimina, has given the band enough pulp to make the perfect juice recipe, one that satisfies the consumer who prefers unfiltered magic.
The Technicolors, composed of Brennan Smiley (lead vocals, guitar), Sean Silverman (guitar, backing vocals), Nico Nicolette (bass guitar), and Kim Vi (keys), are no stranger to transformation and evolution, and their vast discography, spanning from 2012 to now, shows it. The band’s diverse hits, “Tonight You Are Mine,” “Neon Roses,” “Space Cadet,” and “Dress Up For You,” prove their stylistic choice to create outside of the box has worked in their favor time and time again, keeping audiences wondering what sound they’ll bring to the table next.
Fast forward to 2025 and The Technicolors began a new era with their single “Posh Spice,” in which they exploded with confidence and edge, greeting their signature experimental energy like an old friend. Before the single was released, The Technicolors teased this new era with clips from the “Posh Spice” music video directed by Jarod Evans, giving listeners just a peek into the inner world of their creative vision.
Frontman Brennan Smiley said the music video follows a theme presented Heavy Pulp of the prominence of scam culture in society and how it thrives on creating blurriness between what the goods actually are and what people think they are.
“There’s a lot coming at you at all times and there can just be a lot to deal with,” Smiley said, “and what felt like the most fun, immediate way to represent that was to do a video that was about some kind of like grifter salesman person trying to sell some new magic, potion, or magic, spice, whatever the thing.”
The Technicolors released singles “Softcore” and “Gold Fang” following their comeback single “Posh Spice.” While “Softcore” embodies a hazy, dream-like state of “faking it till the love is gone” by replaying their love interest’s records over and over and drowning in their “lipstick letters,” “Gold Fang” fires up the jets and clarifies that their want for this person is strictly a need.
With its bold demeanor, “Gold Fang” earned its spot as the lead track on Heavy Pulp, giving listeners an entranced experience from the get-go. However, the vibe suddenly shifts with the second track, “Softcore,” where the jets ease off, trusting the wings to carry the momentum. “I think we liked starting from a point of similar chaos, a lot coming at you,” Smiley said, “and then it kind of felt nice to hit you quick and hit you fast, and then pull it back and slow things down.”
At the same time, Smiley said that the placement of these two tracks had to do a lot with when they were written. “Oftentimes the first song of an album is the one song that sparks the excitement and inspiration for the continuation of writing the album,” Smiley said, “and those songs were definitely there from the very early days, like a couple years ago. I think it just felt natural that those should be towards the beginning of the album, whether or not they were the first two songs. I don’t think we thought that far ahead, but that’s where they ended up because I think it struck a chord with how we liked the album flow, but also it felt like it represented how we made the album.”
The band started working on “Gold Fang” and “Softcore” three years ago, during what seemed to be their four-year-long “break.” “We’ve always fantasized about taking a real break but we’ve never had because we always were working on stuff during those times and were just going really slow,” Smiley said.
With four years to write and record tracks that would eventually come together on Heavy Pulp, Smiley said that slowing down and taking the time to create impacted the dynamic of the album. When the band was writing and recording Heavy Pulp’s earlier songs, they weren’t specifically thinking that they would be part of an album. “We didn’t have any vision for an album at that point,” Smiley said. “We were just kind of writing to see what we get.”
This process of doing everything in bits and pieces gave The Technicolors the patience to wait for “the clouds and stars to align” and the right moment and people to fall into place, Smiley said.
“I think in the past, we’ve never given ourselves that amount of time to sort of see what we’ve been working on, really let that soak in and then really prepare to do something to capture a moment,” Smiley said. “And I would say that’s the big difference, of the timing of this one, is we just had more preparation to capture something raw and special and do it in a way that we weren’t as stressed out, maybe we could feel a little bit more free to explore.”
The Technicolors released five singles before the release of Heavy Pulp, including the vulnerable “First Class to Nowhere” and the confrontational “Alpha Alpha Alpha.”
The band didn’t plan the release order of the singles; instead, they put themselves in the shoes of their listeners and picked the next track to release based on what they thought would excite them next, Smiley said. The order kept changing, but they did have a selection of songs with accompanying videos that they knew would probably be featured. “We kind of really just listened to the moment and the feeling of like, ‘what would be fun to put out next,’ type of vibe,” Smiley said.
The Technicolors were able to visually represent all five of their singles with music videos, something that wasn’t really planned but happened because of their talented, close friends’ excitement of wanting to contribute and work with them. “Things are always just better when you can work with people that you trust in that kind of way.”
Smiley opened up about the isolation that came with the pandemic, saying how it was a time of people trying to figure out how to survive in certain ways, which ultimately pushed all of us away from each other. When making Heavy Pulp, they wanted to emphasize the importance of collaboration and friendship, a big theme presented on the album, Smiley said.
“I think the recording, the making of this album was really heavily themed by ‘let’s do as much stuff together with our friends as we can,’” Smiley said. “The recording, the video stuff afterwards, we really wanted to kind of bring it together. And it did feel like that from the recording on, it felt like everything was kind of like a homecoming of friends.”
Admitting that the band has never been good at social media, Smiley said that it is a running joke that their music didn’t really start to do well until they stopped using social media. The increase in their streaming numbers was due to playlists and the algorithmic gods helping people find their music, Smiley said.
As a member of a band who has both utilized and stepped away from social media, Smiley dived into the prevalence of these platforms and shared his views on using social media as a promotional tool in the music industry.
“I think we’ve kind of always secretly been trying to manifest a world in which we didn’t have to rely on that stuff as much and maybe our music could speak loudly enough to someone’s soul where that’s what people would seek out, versus like a fucking TikTok post or some kind of buzzy visual thing,” Smiley said. “It’s like for us, we’ve always just not been great at finding ways to translate into that world fully, until we do, and then we always have a lot of fun with it, which we’ve tried to force that stuff in the past, and it’s never really worked out.”
The Technicolors have been called mysterious for their absence on social media, but Smiley said they just were never good at doing what everybody told them to do. Smiley has had friends that were signed to labels where they were pushed to use social media in specific ways, similar to how everybody else was using it, where the content was very cookie-cutter and was used for “getting a couple of eyeballs on you for a couple seconds.”
“We’ve had a lot of friends and we’ve seen a lot of people use those things in really awesome ways,” Smiley said. “And the bummer is when aspiring or younger creative people that have raw talent or something special to say and get pushed into using those tools in the most boring, cookie-cutter ways.”
Smiley said that the band tries to stay away from social media until they find a way in which it makes sense to utilize it. For this album, the band saw the opportunity to use social media to “make a splash” by posting content to showcase their music videos, especially since they put a lot of resources into the making of them. Smiley said if anything, he wants to translate a fun, communal feeling around the band through their social media platforms because that’s what lets people in.
Heavy Pulp’s flow is very dynamic, introducing genre-bending sounds that give listeners a variety of flavorful samples of what the band can do. Entering the studio with 20 demo ideas, recording 14/15 of those and finding the final thread of tracks, Smiley said Heavy Pulp was definitely a “song-first” album where, instead of being brought to life by a narrative, the tracks came together from a space of just simply writing a pool of songs.
“We were trying to see what we could get away with, how different we could go,” Smiley said, “but for it to all still feel cohesive enough and coherent.”
Smiley opens up about his connection to Heavy Pulp, describing it as a very personal album that has certain songs that strike a deeper chord in him than others.
“I think it’s this balance of the depth of life and the hard moments mixed with the fun moments and mixed with the times that you can just let all that shit go,” Smiley said. “And maybe to an extent, we always try to do that with our albums, but this one feels the most potent in that mixture of like we really weren’t afraid to let those wild moments be as wild as possible. There’s a lot of playfulness, there’s a lot of masks that we’re trying on, just with the way the lyrics are, the vocals are treated with different effects.”
The Technicolors are set to bring Heavy Pulp to the stage in Los Angeles, their hometown of Phoenix, and New York City starting Aug. 29 following the release.
Listen to Heavy Pulp here.
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