She Sir

Austin, Texas quartet She Sir came together after vocalist/guitarist Russell Karloff and vocalist/bassist Matthew Grusha crossed paths as college students in the early 2000s. Both had studied music composition, and they channeled that formal training into the realms of dream pop and shoegaze. Enlisting an array of additional players who would later appear in groups such as Ringo Deathstarr and the Mountain Goats, the band issued the Who Can't Say Yes EP in 2006 and the Yens EP in 2010. Also in 2010, the Japanese imprint Happy Prince assembled a retrospective collection of their material titled Ev'ry Thing in Paris. Those tracks drew the attention of the venerable indie pop outfit Shelflife, which enabled the painstaking quartet to deliver its debut full-length, Go Guitars, in early 2014. Drummer David Nathan and guitarist Jeremy Cantrell completed the studio lineup for that effort. The same personnel remained intact for the follow-up album, produced by Louie Lino (Nada Surf, the New Pornographers). Shelflife put out Rival Island in July 2017, on which the group broadened its shoegaze palette through '80s saxophone solos, dream pop textures, and heightened reverb.