Colorado alt rocker bears her soul on new DIY-minded project
The four recording locations tell you almost everything you need to know. Drums at Cold Storage Art Collective — a bike repair workshop and DIY venue that also happened to be the band’s first show. Guitars at Durango Premiere Auto Care. Vocals onstage at Ska Brewing. Bass in the rehearsal garage. Producer Jeff Sontag and the band didn’t just choose not to use a traditional studio; they made the deliberate, principled decision to use the rooms where Alicia Glass actually exists as a band — the spaces where they practise, where they first played, where they live in their community — and to capture the acoustic character of those rooms rather than erase it.
“Will That Be Ok” is the first track from a two-song EP built on this principle: emotionally charged, intentionally raw, designed to sound as close to the live version of the band as recording allows. The song itself speaks of regret and submission to failure, with an undercurrent of rage running beneath — Courtney Barnett’s conversational precision, Amyl & the Sniffers’ physical energy, Lambrini Girls’ confrontational honesty..
“We wanted these recordings to feel as close as possible to what we actually sound like live, so rather than recording everything in a traditional studio, we leaned into local spaces around Southwest Colorado where we play and live,” Glass explained. “We tracked drums in a bike repair workshop where we played our first DIY show as a band, recorded vocals onstage at a local brewery, tracked guitars in an auto repair shop, and recorded bass in the garage where we practice. We captured the natural sound of each space as part of the recordings, so the ambience and reverb you hear come from the rooms themselves.”
What makes the recording approach interesting beyond the novelty of it is what it implies about authenticity as a value. In a moment when the distance between a finished record and the band that made it can feel vast — polished, corrected, processed into something that no longer resembles a group of people playing in a room — Alicia Glass has made a record that is specifically, stubbornly about that room. Go ahead and give “Will That Be Okay?” below.
