Release Date: November 18, 2022
Genre: Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Pop Punk
Label: Independent
You may remember Alexa San Román from her previous musical projects Love, Robot and Heirsound. Alexa has always been a DIY artist, never being signed to a label, but always found major success in whatever project she was in and whatever genre she was performing. "I've never been signed to a record label or anything like that. I've been lucky enough to be in charge of all my own releases and the pace at which I'd like to release them," Alexa recalls. After the disbandment of Heirsound, Alexa took a hiatus from music altogether. She then got into directing music videos and commercials for Journeys, D'Addario, Hopeless Records, Fearless Records, and an assortment of artists. She became a very sought-after director and found success elsewhere in the music industry. Now, Alexa is back after stepping away from music over the last five years with her brand new eponymous project SAN ROMAN. For Alexa, it's been a thrilling experience to return to the limelight. "It's been quite the journey, but I definitely feel ready to get back out there," Alexa confidently shares.
What resulted in Alexa returning to music after all this time stemmed from a period of loss and grief -losing loved ones close to her. She wrote a lot about this time of her life in her journal, and it all translates into each of the ten tracks on MESSY. For Alexa, writing the album was a form of therapy that gave her quite the much-needed catharsis she was in search of. "All of my grandparents passed away during a few years span, as well as my best friend's father. I was facing my own mortality and trying to come to terms with my childhood being over and everything that I once knew -traditions and older generations- were changing and leaving," she sorrowly discloses. As a result of this, Alexa returns to her roots by writing an entire album directly pulled from her journal. Something she hasn't done since her previous band Love, Robot on their debut album Rebuild | Rebirth (2012). "This album kind of took me back to my roots. I would say this solo record feels closest to Love, Robot's first album -which was all songs from my journal. I think I got a little lost after that. This record brought me back to center," she reveals.
Sonically, MESSY is a huge-sounding debut record for the project that offers up a little bit of the various sides that alternative rock has to offer. It's undoubtedly also a return to roots for Alexa with a pretty similar sound to Love, Robot, but it has a crystal clear influence of early 2000s alternative music mixed in. "This record has helped me understand my sonic structure will probably always be rock centred, and that has always come naturally to me. I feel very comfortable in the indie rock space, and I think moving forward, the music I will be making will lean more that way," Alexa admits. Right out of the gate, Alexa delivers the poignant emo track, "Anxiety Cry Night." As the album progresses forward, the title track, "Messy," and the track "Everybody's Dying," are very pop-punk-driven tunes. Alexa gets very shoegaze-y on the melancholy song "Julia." On the album's penultimate number, "Stay Where You Are," Alexa offers up a track that amalgamates every element and genre heard on the album into one distinct track. Whereas the remainder of the album with tracks such as "Hang Around," "Somewhere Over There," "All Of My Life," "Rain Cloud" -which also has emo elements- and the album-closing "Will I See You," are all in the realm of indie rock and alternative rock. On the writing and production side of MESSY, it was practically all done by Alexa herself. Considering MESSY is a solo project, she lived for the empowerment of writing a record that is solely hers in every aspect, but she did miss the comradery of having official bandmates to collaborate with and bounce ideas off of. "It was definitely a change to not really have a lot of collaboration on this. I was so used to collaborating with other musicians in my previous projects," she shares. While Alexa did write every word and composed every single instrumental you hear on MESSY, when it came down to recording the project, to bring a bit more fun to the process, she recruited a few friends -Brando Hom on drums, Jackie Kalafut on guitar, and Holly Desautels on bass. "I was in such a low place at the beginning of writing this record, and I honestly wasn't sure if I would ever step back into the music world again like this," she discloses.
The important message these ten tracks on MESSY convey is connection. Alexa hopes listeners of her album can take away that everyone is connected in some form or another and that everyone will go through these same feelings at some point in their life, and that she hopes her own personal experiences can make some type of difference to somebody. "I hope that people need the record the same way that I did and that they can let my words tell some of their stories. I know we are all connected, and everyone goes through feelings of grief, loss, and rebirth. I just want to share my experience so in the event just one other person needs to hear it, I've made some sort of a difference in the world," Alexa divulges. You can stream MESSY on all music streaming platforms now.
Read our entire interview with Alexa San Román here.