Shell of a Shell Pushes and Pulls in New Directions on Away Team

“I’m already high-strung enough — I don’t need to hear about how somebody got disemboweled on a butcher’s rack,” Shell of a Shell bassist Noel Richards tells the Scene, describing the grisly true-crime podcasts favored by his bandmates on tour. “But I did drag them to the JFK assassination site. I’ll happily debate with strangers about government conspiracy theories. Basically, I’m the Dale Gribble of the group.”

“Wait,” singer-guitarist Chappy Hull says, turning to drummer Ian Sundstrom. “If I’m Hank, [guitarist] Dylan [Liverman] is Boomhauer — the quiet, sexy one — and Noel is Dale, does that make you Bill?”

“Man, I’m not Bill!” protests Sundstrom. “I don’t think we can boil Shell of a Shell down to King of the Hill.”

The drummer, who is neither bald nor middle-aged, has a point. But he and his cohorts do play off each other in a way that is not dissimilar to their Texan cartoon counterparts, bantering over beers and roasting one another in the way only close friends can. The local alternative rockers have met me at The Nations Bar & Grill in West Nashville to discuss their first full-length Away Team, out this week on Exploding in Sound Records — the Brooklyn label home to bands like Pile and Ovlov. They’ll celebrate with a record-release party Friday at East Side all-ages club Drkmttr. 

Shell of a Shell unites two sets of longtime pals in their mid-20s. Liverman and Hull met at Nashville School of the Arts; Sundstrom and Richards attended Hillsboro High School. All four have kicked around the local DIY scene ever since. Hull has been one-half of power-punk duo Gnarwhal since before he could drive; Sundstrom and Richards have played in numerous groups together, including the defunct avant-hardcore project Watcher and still-active thrash band Waxed.

Not only are both Gnarwhal and Shell of a Shell on a short list of Exploding in Sound artists from outside the Northeast, but Away Team also has the distinction of being the label’s 100th release. The partnership with EIS honcho Dan Goldin dates back to 2013, when Gnarwhal opened for a then-unknown Pile at Nashville’s Springwater for an audience of zero. Bowled over by the Bostonians’ set but bummed about the turnout, Hull and his bandmate, drummer Tyler Coburn, set up an on-the-spot house show later that night that 40 friends attended. EIS was impressed, and went on to release two Gnarwhal LPs. As Pile’s star rose, leader Rick Maguire eventually moved the group’s base of operations to Nashville and brought Hull into the fold full time as second guitarist. 

Between that Springwater show and joining Pile, Hull formed Shell of a Shell as a separate outlet for riffs written while Coburn was out on the road with indie rockers Bully, black-metalers Mutilation Rites and others. Hull envisioned “something more collaborative,” he explains. “Loud indie rock, but emotional and dark.” The band’s debut EP Already There, recorded at home by Liverman and issued on cassette by EIS in 2018, accomplished some of these aims — mathiness, loudness, dissonance — but felt like a work in progress.

With Away Team, Shell of a Shell has turned a corner. The 10-track album is front-loaded with short, punchy material: “My Wildfire” toys with Eastern melodies and tones, and “Find Me a Field” verges on Southern-gothic freak-folk. But putting its own spin on classic indie rock and post-hardcore remains Shell of a Shell’s favorite pastime. Cases in point: “Forgetting Symptom,” a Revolution Summer-style ripper in 7/4 time; “Fill in the Blank,” which is pensive and Slint-y; and first single “Knock,” a study in Dinosaur Jr.-esque bummer-grunge.

The group recorded with engineer Seth Engel at Pallet Sound on Chicago’s South Side, a stone’s throw from the White Sox’s home field Comiskey Park. Like a workhorse pitcher who saves his most electric stuff for the final innings, Away Team’s back half burns brightest, beginning with the emotive title track (whose name was inspired not by baseball, Hull clarifies, but rather the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in 1997). In the spirit of David Bowie’s Low, The Police’s Synchronicity or more recently Angel Olsen’s My Woman, Side A of Away Team is concise and focused, while the flipside is drawn out and experimental. 

My eureka moment with Shell of a Shell came during the East Nashville music fest Spewfest IV in 2019. The foursome stopped the hard-partying crowd in its tracks with an epic new song, a serpentine prog-punk suite that was oblique in structure yet made perfect sense as it unfolded. That tune, “Don’t Expect,” is slotted second-to-last on Away Team. It starts in medias res — recalling Explosions in the Sky’s 2001 post-rock classic “Greet Death” — ebbing, flowing, grooving, riffing and vibing its way through eight-and-a-half transporting minutes. 

“I often get lost in it,” Sundstrom says of “Don’t Expect.” “I get lost in it too, more than any other,” agrees Liverman. “It’s such a visceral song.”

Showcasing the dynamic range the band has spent the past few years honing, Engel’s recording is spacious, the performances are loose and Hull’s vocals are raw but honest. The four members agree that tracking Away Team out of town allowed for a shared-brain mindset impossible to come by at home, with all its external stressors and distractions. 

“It let us focus on what we had to get done,” says Richards. “Record the songs, keep ourselves alive — that’s it.”