Sleigh Bells, the duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller, slashed and burned their way into the popular consciousness in the fall of 2009 with a mixture of crass, abrasive guitars and tinnitus-inducing drum programming. Steroidal tracks like “Crown on the Ground” overwhelmed competitors in the more reserved world of indie rock, but like many acts that start strident, Sleigh Bells have softened with time. “I love a lot of beautiful music, as does Derek,” Krauss tells Vogue.com. This is more apparent than ever on the group’s fourth studio album, Jessica Rabbit, due November 11. “We never really felt like we could write in that way in the past,” Krauss adds. “It was nice to be able to go there.”
In the case of Sleigh Bells, this kind of evolution is necessary for survival: Just as the duo absorbed the lessons of rock history—Miller, for example, acknowledged a debt to Def Leppard—the rest of pop has quickly learned from Sleigh Bells. M.I.A. pulled Miller in to work on her 2010 album, Maya; in 2012, the pair coproduced a track on an Iggy Azalea mixtape with Diplo. As if to prove the extent of Sleigh Bells’s incorporation into the Top 40 sphere, the band recently filed suit against Demi Lovato, alleging that the singer’s “Stars” ripped their work without credit.
That’s not all: Others who may not have directly looted Sleigh Bells’s mojo arrived at a similar endgame. Massive pop documents like Taylor Swift’s 1989 rely on a more polished but related combination of stadium rock and percussive pyrotechnics. (This may be a case of pulling from the same influences—Max Martin, a producer on 1989, has long displayed an affinity for bands like Def Leppard.) And as the sound of arena electronica has gone mainstream, the imploding-building aspect of Sleigh Bells’s early records can be found shuddering through the airwaves.
With caveats, Krauss acknowledges that Sleigh Bells’s approach had a ripple effect in the larger pop world. “It’s hard to say my own shit sounds real distinct,” she says. “But Derek’s production, especially what he did on the first album, did sound different than a lot of stuff that was out. And obviously we’re currently in a lawsuit over what we think is an illegal use of one of our master recordings, so in some of the most literal ways, it did influence pop music.”
The duo’s decision to embrace a new degree of tunefulness on Jessica Rabbit also stemmed from their contractual situation. After three albums on Mom + Pop Music, they started a label to release their latest full-length. “Not to say that there aren’t a lot of great label people out there with good ideas about how to shape music, but in our experience, the push is generally toward—I don’t want to call it a radio-friendly sound, because there is a lot of amazing alternative music on the radio—singles that are going to sell lots of copies and appeal to a more mainstream audience and fit a certain sort of formula,” Krauss explains. “There’s a real pressure on alternative bands, indie bands, to have that one song that will appeal to radio.” While the band may not have received much radio play—Krauss notes that they refused to rerecord a higher-fidelity version of “Crown on the Ground” to appease programmers—they are beloved by soundtrack supervisors for movies, television, video games, and advertisements.
As their own bosses, Krauss and Miller subjected their songs to an intense level of scrutiny. “Our standards were higher,” Krauss says. “We really wanted to deliver something that we could be incredibly proud of—not to say that we haven’t been proud of our past three records, but we were setting the bar a bit higher. We wrote a lot more parts, and we really worked on arrangements more meticulously.”
Additional input came courtesy of Mike Elizondo, who offered a helping, exacting hand. Elizondo has a formidable résumé—he has played bass for Dr. Dre, written songs for Mary J. Blige, and coproduced 50 Cent. He is credited as a writer on two songs on Jessica Rabbit—the first time a nonmember of Sleigh Bells has written on one of the band’s records—and producer on six tracks. “He really encouraged us to think about our songs more ruthlessly: Every note, every idea needed to be as quality as possible,” Krauss notes. As a studio pro, Elizondo is adept at molding himself to the specifications of his collaborators. He helped write “I Can’t Stand You Anymore,” which is the closest Sleigh Bells has ever come to pure pop; on the other end of the spectrum, he produced “Rule Number One,” a cruel, hammering track on which Krauss sings about—and approximates—a violent tornado.
At several points on Jessica Rabbit, the skies clear, and Krauss approaches quiet reverie. “I love writing lush melodies that lend themselves to a lot of harmonies,” she says. “I think a lot of people might be confused by a song like ‘Torn Clean’—‘This is an acoustic Sleigh Bells song; that doesn’t make sense! We want heavy guitars [and] chanting vocals!’” But you never really hang out in that beautiful space for too long before you’re getting smashed over the head again, Krauss points out. The band wrings as much as it can from contrast; the energy swings on Jessica Rabbit are severe. “Derek’s instrumentals are pretty schizophrenic,” says Krauss. “We like to play with that juxtaposition of heavy and soft. It’s more extreme on this album than ever before.”
One of the record’s gauziest moments comes during the largely acoustic second half of “I Know Not to Count on You.” The vocal on the album was the demo recorded by Krauss on the app GarageBand as she sat outside the studio. “In the past we would have turned that into something bigger and louder,” she says. “But it just sounded so right as it was.”