Greg Mendez’s Beauty Land is made for quieter rooms

Greg Mendez’s – Philadelphia singer-songwriter Greg Mendez says his upcoming album Beauty Land was shaped as much by space, limits, and self-pressure as by melodies—recorded for about a year and a half in spare rooms without windows, then reshaped by new freedom. It’s release

On May 29, Greg Mendez will release Beauty Land. He’s been thinking about it like a kind of weather system—something you can feel building, even when you’re not actively playing.

“ I’m a little bit mentally and spiritually preoccupied with it. ” he says. describing the weeks leading up to release while he moves. The studio that became part of the record used to be “a little spare bedroom in our apartment.” Now. he’s moved out. “This bare room that you see used to be my studio. ” he says. “so I’ve been setting the studio up in a different space.” For the past couple weeks. he isn’t recording music. but the process is still happening in a different form: arranging the conditions where music might be able to grow again.

Mendez believes the room mattered—maybe not in a mystical way, but in a practical, almost bodily one. “I actually haven’t made any two records in the same space,” he says. The self-titled was made in a different. small. spare bedroom in a different apartment; he only recorded Beauty Land and the First Time/Alone EP in the one he’s now left behind. Still, he’s careful about turning that into a theory. “There’s this year and a half… so maybe I need a change. ” he says. adding that he’s been renting living spaces and moving. and only later realizing the pattern.

In the room he recorded Beauty Land, there wasn’t natural light in the way you’d expect. The window faced the street. To record. he had to block it off: he put an acoustic panel in front of it and closed curtains so the sound of driving and honking wouldn’t bleed into the microphones. He says he generally prefers lamps to overhead lighting. and he likes writing in front of a window when he can. But the new space has no windows at all—he laughs at the irony.

Those constraints shaped not only the sound, but the schedule. Mendez says he wrote a lot in the mornings. sometimes in the evening. and that midday is “my least productive time.” When he was recording. he couldn’t just work whenever he wanted. The microphones could pick up what was happening around the apartment. and he needed his wife to be out—“at work. doing something”—so ordinary apartment noise wouldn’t invade the takes. Their downstairs neighbors also limited what he could do late into the night. He calls it limiting. even as he admits it forced a kind of discipline: if he couldn’t do one thing. he could do another.

The quiet was part of his sound from the beginning. Mendez grew up during a mainstream saturation for pop-punk and nu metal. and he developed a taste for aggressive music while being inspired by the lo-fi. heart-on-sleeve songwriting of the Microphones. Elliott Smith. and early Emperor X. After moving to Philadelphia. he cut his teeth playing in hardcore and punk bands while recording his own songs with the built-in mic on his laptop. When he released his disarmingly intimate self-titled album in 2023. he’d already spent a decade and a half in the city’s DIY scene. That record dissects childhood trauma, addiction, and homelessness. The following year, it was reissued by Dead Oceans, which also put out the wistfully bare-bones First Time/Alone EP.

Beauty Land picks up that same emotional gravity—its themes are “no less thematically heavy than its predecessor. ” he says. but the expression is more unburdened. He describes the songs like loops and slow swells: looping a single thought over spare keyboard. or slow-burning into miniature symphonies. He’s also still recording almost entirely alone. and that solitude is part of the album’s appeal to him—stirring the songs “outside the confines of my own reality. ” where. as he puts it. “you could say that’s where the beauty comes from.”.

The connection between loud music and quiet expression keeps threading through what he says next. “I kind of always want to make louder music,” he says. He also says he has been listening to more loud and aggressive music than music that sounds like his. “Even when I was a kid. ” he says. “I feel like I wanted to make music that was more like that and less like mine.” He doesn’t describe a conversion so much as a transfer of feeling: when he listens to heavier music. he seems to try to bring the emotional temperature into softer forms.

One example he returns to is “No Evil.” That track has a video directed by Douglas Dulgarian. of They Are Gutting a Body of Water. with whom Mendez has collaborated in the past. “At the end of ‘No Evil. ’” he says. “I originally brought my friend in who drums in a punk band to put a D-beat over it… but then it didn’t exactly work how I imagined.” Even so. he keeps imagining ways to pull those elements—d-beats. punk intensity—into his quieter arrangements.

He also insists the choice to keep it soft wasn’t only aesthetic. Much of it was practical and personal. Earlier in life, he made music privately, living in spaces with other people and not feeling confident about sharing. “Making something that was quieter literally just meant that less people would hear me doing it,” he says. He describes it as starting with shame. while also liking the challenge: chasing emotions “more commonly expressed in loud. heavy. aggressive music” through “soft acoustic guitar.”.

If the album feels like it’s made for a different kind of openness now. he links it to pressure—especially once he became a “professional musician” on a label. When asked about the added layer of pressure moving from the First Time/Alone EP to the next full-length. he doesn’t soften the story. He says he was daunted by starting any new record. but there was “definitely an added… mostly self-imposed. pressure to have it be good.” There were people who “stand to either make or lose money off of it. ” including him.

He also says the signing didn’t just change logistics. It changed psychology. He read a book by Jean Baudrillard, which cemented his perspective. He decided he couldn’t honestly make records “in the same way,” even if he physically did the same tasks. In his telling. the difference between making something as a job versus making it because you love it can’t be replicated. “Even if you could make something that is convincing of it being done in the same way. ” he says. “it was. for me. an entirely different experience up here.”.

That new space—new room, new schedule, new breathing room—isn’t just about comfort. It’s about survival. As he worked on Beauty Land, he says he tightened the grip instead of relaxing it. “I really went pretty hard while making this record. ” he says. “and I didn’t really give myself too much breathing room.” He calls himself “a really bad boss to myself. ” and says he started to see things going badly in his life. He “slipped back into drinking a lot all the time,” then quit entirely. “The way that I did this one is not very sustainable,” he says.

He hears that progression on the record. “It feels, to me at least, like a pretty dark record,” he says, tying that to bleakness. He describes himself as “pretty self-destructive. ” with a natural tendency to do things that feel good “in the moment” but hurt him later. The danger. he adds. is how easy it is for those habits to seep back in if he loosens his grip.

Music becomes a mirror, but also a trigger. He wants to believe obsession can be productive—he calls it “fixating and stressing about things. ” and says at least half of it is “not actually productive obsession.” His hope is simple and hard: to make a record without it taking over his life. “I would love to make a record that didn’t take over my life,” he says. “All the people that are in my life would love that also.”.

His relationships help him stay tethered. His wife—he calls her Veronica. and often shortens it to “V”—appears as a stabilizing presence inside the process. even when he’s working in isolation. He says they work out a lot of their live parts together. and he’s always been isolated while making recordings. But “ever since I’ve known V. she’s a fantastic editor.” If he’s stuck. he brings options to her and listens to what she says. “You’re being crazy,” she tells him, he says, and urges breaks or days off.

On Beauty Land, her voice is also unmistakable. She sings on “So Mean.” Mendez says they started playing that song live first. and he had the feeling the end should be a big moment. They worked out harmonies in a hotel room on tour. He says he had started playing the song live solo. and she may have suggested the harmony idea for the end. During recording. he says he sang with that in mind. and she sang on the recording more towards the end—he adds that the drums were already done. In the mix. he says her voice is “almost is louder than my vocal. ” and it’s meant to be the focal point.

He also explains why some harmonies didn’t survive the tracklist logic. “There were a couple other songs on the record where we had also been playing them live. ” he says. including “Mary. ” which had harmonies from V. and another harmony instance he references. But during sequencing. he and V agreed those harmonies “fell flat in those other songs in the context of the record” and “diminished the power of the end of ‘So Mean.’”.

The record’s shape is also driven by the ways he can and can’t play. He says he’s not very good at keyboards. and because of that he’s not building intricate parts—he’s going note by note until something sounds right. The keyboard forces his brain to think differently. He doesn’t write keyboard songs on guitar, he says; he wouldn’t have happened. And he doesn’t write guitar songs on keyboard either, because he isn’t good enough.

Time, too, has always been part of his workflow. He says it took about a year and a half to make this record, and most songs are newer. But a few carry older histories. “Everybody Wants to Be Your Friend” is from 2011; he liked it briefly. then “tossed it off and forgot about it.” “Concussion” is from 2020; he tried recording it for the self-titled and it didn’t come out right. so he came back. “Geranium” is also from 2020, and he tried recording it for the self-titled too. He notes that “the simpler ones” can be “less forgiving.”.

He says no songs go past the three-minute mark, but that doesn’t mean length is the measure of completion. “I think it’s unrelated,” he says. He’s more concerned with whether the song feels like it’s come to an ending or taken him somewhere new. Sometimes a minute long isn’t enough, he admits, and sometimes a longer song doesn’t resolve.

He also tells a story of surprise across the tracklist. “Kind of all of them. ” he says when asked if any particular song resolved itself in a way that surprised him. “Looking Out Your Window” surprised him lyrically. “I Wanna Feel Pretty” and “Serving Drinks” surprised him too. because they feel like “a stream of consciousness”—and that was the way they were written. but he didn’t expect them to land where they did.

The organ on “Looking Out Your Window” becomes a hinge point for him. He says he was originally trying to make that song a Beach Boys song, with bass and a bouncy, ’60s pop feel. He was about to discard it until he figured out the keyboard part that “clicked it into place.”

Beauty Land has more songs than his previous records. which means he had to test how selective he wanted to be. He says the truth is simpler: “I just had more time to work on them. ” and he wanted to push himself. He’s done many under-10 song records. with runtimes around 20 minutes. and now he had extra time with the label backing to see if he could go further.

Still recording almost entirely alone, he frames the process as a balancing act between what he wants and what he can safely carry. He believes he needs more room—not just in physical spaces, but inside his life—so the music doesn’t become the only way he knows how to feel.

“Moving forward, I’m gonna be giving myself more space,” he says. For this release. that space is also literal: a new studio setup after leaving the spare-bedroom room where he spent a year and a half building these songs. On May 29. Dead Oceans will put Beauty Land out into the world—louder in reach than what came before. but still built out of the kind of quiet where his feelings could finally become songs.

Greg Mendez Beauty Land Dead Oceans Philadelphia DIY scene indie singer-songwriter hardcore punk lo-fi songwriting Elliott Smith Microphones Emperor X No Evil So Mean keyboard songwriting album interview