A Shoreline Dream celebrates third album

Denver shoegaze quartet A Shoreline Dream brings its reverb-heavy wall of sound home to hi-dive Thursday, just nine days after the release of Losing Them All To This Time. Frontman Ryan Pollicky took some time to chat about the album, traveling to London and the daunting task of covering Fleetwood Mac.

Q: Let’s talk about the new album. How are you feeling about it?

A: Really good. It was a two-year process of putting that thing together, involving multiple countries. It was good to finally let it loose.

Q: What was different this time around?

A: One of the things that was different was the fact that we have a new bassist, as well as this is the second full-length with a relatively new drummer. Just having that dynamic change up changed the overall flow of how we were doing things. Although, we still wound up doing a lot of it as room recordings, just jamming and trying to figure out what were were doing with the album. We didn’t just settle. We spent a lot of time figuring out what the production was going to be like. “Marrakech” was totally not what we would ever expect to do. The same with “The Chain.” Doing a remake of that was not something we would expect ourselves to do. We gave ourselves challenges.

Q: Was traveling to London to record with Ulrich Schnauss a logistical move or a creative choice?

A: I was planning on going out there to go on vacation, to meet up with (Ulrich) and hang out with one of the guys from Engineers and we had discussed that we would possibly work on music. Even when we went out there I didn’t know that I would be doing something with Shoreline. It was the last two days that it came together. We stayed up all night, every night working on that song. I had the flu; it was a blur. … It’s cool to do a song that will remind me of that.

Q: You’ve recorded all three of your albums without a label — what’s that been like?

A: We are the label and we have taken out a loan such as a label would do from the beginning. Even though we don’t have a big name label representing, we’re still taking the (financial) risk that you would on a label. … The one thing that’s an advantage is that we dictate how we put the album out there and how we want the album seen by the people and heard by the people. … It’s been good, and our goal has never been to make money.

Q: Is there any particular reason you covered “The Chain”?

A: We never even thought about doing a cover. … I think at the time I was listening to Fleetwood Mac for some reason. Those guys are cool because … they were trying to do something huge with that sound. They had multiple singers and they had this really big presence. So it was like, what would happen if we did that? Once again, it was just a challenge that we gave ourselves. It’s something we wanted to give its own life to, but we wanted to pay homage to the original idea.

Q: How do you approach playing live?

A: It feels the same (as recording). It sounds pretty much the same. Obviously, I don’t have myself singing 25 different tracks on a song. But we still approach it as ‘let’s do it the best we can’ … getting it as big and epic as we can possibly do live.

Want more Shoreline? Check out this short documentary on the recording of “London.”