The Sleeveens
“You have to include all this when you write your piece,” James Mechan tells me, gesturing at his unexpected surroundings.
On a chilly February night, the bassist for Nashville rock outfit The Sleeveens is standing next to drummer Ryan Sweeney in a rain-misted clear plastic tent where patrons of Memphis dive bar DKDC can sit outside in the winter. It’s a bubble of relative calm — “relative” doing some heavy lifting here — where we can record a short interview before the first show of the band’s tour for their self-titled album. The Sleeveens are playing the late show at DKDC, and the evening’s drag bingo night is still going on while we wait for the rest of the band. Occasionally, we can hear the bass line of a Robyn song, the screaming tires of street racers or a woman with pink hair yelling: “G-28! G — 28!” Soon guitarist Eli Steele shuffles through the tent flaps. Frontman and songwriter Stefan Murphy follows; with his stature more akin to an NFL tight end than a punk poet, he has to crouch a bit.
“One thing I realized today is that we played our last show in September,” Sweeney tells me. Murphy, who is Irish, was back in his home country during the autumn. “The photo that’s on the cover of the album was taken that night. And the first time we’re going to have it on the merch table is our first show back.”
Around The Sleeveens, things happen rapidly. Only four months before the release, Steele and Mechan were at Memphis garage-rock celebration Gonerfest to meet with Dirtnap Records founder Ken Cheppaikode. He had reached out upon hearing their first single, released in July via Sweeney’s Sweet Time Records; the band responded by sending Dirtnap a copy of the fully finished album. Said 7-inch, “Give My Regards to the Dancing Girls” backed with “Small Talk With Jonathan,” had already drawn the attention of New Orleans underground icon Quintron, who booked The Sleeveens to play his annual Mardi Gras party. Murphy, who was in Dublin at the time, had already planned on returning to the States for a tour booked around the New Orleans show, so plans fell into place for Dirtnap to release The Sleeveens by that time. One might assume a band that moves so fast was intentional from their inception.
“No, no — it was just supposed to be recording some songs that Stefan wrote,” Sweeney explains. “And that was kind of it — the two songs for the single.”
Murphy had released music under the monikers The Mighty Stef and Count Vaseline, but he hadn’t made a record since 2019. “I came to Nashville to go to Cumberland Heights to solve my problems with drug addiction,” he tells me. The Dubliner lived in Atlanta when he found his way to the venerable treatment center. Once he got out, he wanted to stick around to make new music in Nashville. He reached out to an acquaintance, James Mechan, a guitar tech for Northern Irish punk originators Stiff Little Fingers. Known as Jamie to his friends, Mechan had spent his down time building 302 Sound, his Mt. Juliet studio. “Within a few days of that,” Murphy says, “he’d recruited Sweeney and Eli to come along.”
Mechan had been the Dee Dee in Remones, a Ramones tribute band, with Steele and Sweeney playing the roles of Johnny and Tommy, respectively.
“For the single,” Steele says, “when we went in to record, we were like, ‘How are we going to treat these songs that we’re helping Stef record?’” But with hours and hours of practice together as the Remones, the group adapted easily to Murphy’s songs and had little trouble recording the pair of revved-up rockers for the 7-inch. It was clear they were onto something special.
Mechan hardly had time to get out of the producer’s chair before he was back in it for the band’s eponymous 11-track album. The Sleeveens is a truly classic-sounding record — with reverberations of the New York Dolls, Australia’s The Saints and early Stiff Records singles — that’s not just another throwback. It showcases Mechan’s knack for simple but effective sound and Murphy’s penchant for matching imaginative storytelling to superb melodies that feel like a favorite old shirt. “Metallica Font” is one standout tale of camaraderie, all the more charming because it rings true.
“I think one of the advantages that we have going for us, and why people fucking buy into it, is because the songs are decent,” says Murphy, his booming Irish accent just a bit weary from a trans-Atlantic flight and a three-hour van ride from Nashville to Memphis. March 9, they’ll be back in Nashville, celebrating on home turf while opening for Northern Irish punks Protex. With the LP freshly pressed, Murphy sounds hopeful about the band’s next steps.
“I moved back [to Dublin] — the long and the short of it — for family reasons,” Murphy says. “And I don’t think we even really had to have a discussion about whether or not we were going to keep the band going. If we want to keep it going, it’ll work out as long as we’re all into it.”
