The Collection – ‘Little Deaths’

Track By Track: The Collection take us through their latest album, Little Deaths

Release Date: August 9, 2024

Indie-pop band The Collection has released their deeply personal new album, Little Deaths, via Nettwerk. Frontman David Wimbish’s journey to sobriety during the pandemic inspired the album’s exploration of vulnerability, using unconventional instruments to craft an intimate sound.

Follow along as The Collection discuss each track from Little Deaths.

“Our last record was triumphant. Little Deaths is about vulnerability. I’d been isolated and drinking a lot, and I realized I’d lost any sense of presence in the moment. When I got sober, I realized the best — and worst — thing about it was that I felt all my feelings. I felt really vulnerable.”

— David Wimbish

1. ‘Little Deaths’

I knew from the moment I wrote this that it needed to open the album. It felt almost like an emotional vignette capturing everything this record was about – the presence of hope among chaos. We recorded it live with me singing and playing the piano, and tried to make the mix as intimate as possible. I wanted someone to turn on the album and feel like I’m sitting right in front of them, singing into their ear.

2. ‘The Come Down’

This was the first track we recorded for Little Deaths, and all our giddy ‘new album’ energy made it into the arrangement as we experimented with tuned glasses, dueling vibraphones, and taped pianos. We’d been playing ‘The Come Down’ live for awhile, and the crowd always sang along with “I’m gonna be there when you come back down,” and we just couldn’t shake that sound, so we ended up having a group come in and sing gang vocals to try to match our live experience.

3. ‘The Mood’

This song almost didn’t make it on the album – it was the first song I wrote for this record, but when we tried to work on it as a band, it all fell apart. We couldn’t find any glue musically that we liked, so we ditched it. But our producer loved it and encouraged us to give it a shot. After a few hours of failing to find a through-line, we played with this little wooden midi opera singer, mostly as a joke, and when we heard it against the drums, it brought tears to our eyes and we knew we’d found it. The rest of the arrangement came together in just another hour or two, and it became one of the band’s favorite tracks.

4. ‘Medication’

I wrote this while snowed into a cabin in Maine. I’d been struggling severely with my mental health, and woke up one morning with the piano in my head. I put it on a loop and walked around the room singing gibberish until “I deserve to be well” popped out, and I burst into tears. I was so afraid to really believe that, and realized I had to write it for my own good. We decided to keep the arrangement pretty close to my original demo and try to really focus on the emotional content of the lyrics on this one.

5. ‘Rain It Down’

When I first wrote this song, I thought it was trash. I got so frustrated, I took off on a long walk, beating myself up for being a horrible songwriter. But when I came back, I listened again, and realized I totally loved it – I’d just needed some perspective. We wanted the chorus to hit like this giant wall of sound, and used this huge electric guitar tone played by slapping a chopstick on the strings.

6. ‘Firehose’

We wanted this song to feel like the chorus lyrics – like something you’d blast in the car in the late summer with the windows rolled down. The kick drum was a suitcase, and we couldn’t believe how huge and bass-y it sounded. Jeremy Lutito (our producer) told me to sing it “lazily,” which scared me, as I’m using to trying to put every ounce of emotion into a take I can. But when I heard it back, it was perfect – a late afternoon, relaxed driving song about wanting to experience everything possible, sometimes to my detriment.

7. ‘Spark Of Hope’

I knew the album needed a ballad, and I’d written ten or fifteen different ones, but they just hadn’t felt right for the album. While we were in the studio, working on another song, I brought a guitar outside and ‘Spark Of Hope’ came together in about 15 minutes. I knew it was the one. I recorded the vocals during a rainstorm, while our producer was in another meeting. I kept asking Reid Leslie (our engineer) to let me do another harmony take, and just went wild layering as many vocals parts as I could. The little “Ooh” repeat in the second verse as an accident – Jeremy had dragged the file there without realizing it, and when we listened through, we were like, ‘Oh my god, this is the thing.’

8. ‘Over You’

We’d already recorded two different versions of this song, and just couldn’t get it right. When we got to the studio, Sarah pulled out that opening piano part, and our minds were blown. It was supposed to be just in the verse, but we thought it needed to be the intro too. Jeremy had the idea for this full on vocoder chorus, which had always been a dream of mine, but for some reason, felt like something I couldn’t pull off. It was a challenge to figure out how to make each section feel bigger than the last through the post-chorus, but we ended up stacking layers and layers of trumpets and synths until our hair blew back. The electric guitar is so simple but so smooth and beautiful on this one, and I love that the bridge reminds me a bit of a “fun” arrangement.

9. ‘The Weather’

I wrote this in an airport in Portugal after an emotionally exhausting several months. When a cashier asked me, “How are you?” I realized I had no capacity to answer. My original demo was really upbeat, very energetic pop sounding. But Jeremy and the band helped us hone it into something that matched the lyric content much more. A lot of the guitars are on a rubber bridge, some tuned an octave or two down, and we used a giant sounding snare to really make this feel loud and haunting. One of the group vocalists, Anastasia Elliot, had this amazing ability to sing operatic an octave higher than anyone else, and I love the way her voice sneaks through on the choruses.

10. ‘Long Way Down’

Early in the writing process, the band demoed this song, and then totally forgot about it. When we were trying to find a closer for the album, I was digging through files and stumbled onto it and realized that the arrangement sounded so in line with everything we’d already recorded for the album, and the band agreed it was the right one. The “acoustic guitar” sound on the bridge is a strummed violin, and there’s a lot of horns running through pedals to make the pad sounds throughout. My parents came to the studio to watch me record, and I was so happy to get my mom to sing a lot of the harmonies on this, as she was the person who first taught me music.

The Collection immersed in the creative process for Little Deaths.

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