Four-piece indie band Atta Boy—made up of vocalist and guitarist Eden Brolin, keyboardist Dashel Thompson, guitarist and bassist Freddy Reish and drummer Lewis Pullman—have been friends since middle school and making music together since high school. 15 years after their formation, the band is bolder than ever with the release of their fourth album, Silt.
And though the band was originally formed in L.A., not all of its members still reside there, making the album a long-distance effort of sorts. After initial studio sessions, its songs were allowed to sit a bit, coming together over the following months through collaborations across time zones and continents via FaceTime, remotely recorded pieces and separate studio revisits. The result is something far more expansive and experimental than we’ve seen from the band before, with the title reflecting the cyclical nature of life, with all of its periods of murkiness and clarity, and how everything must eventually return to the dirt from which it came. Ahead of today’s release, we had the pleasure of hopping on a Zoom call with Eden, Dashel and Freddy to dive deep into the band’s history, what makes Silt different from their previous work and the shows they’ll be performing next. Read our full interview with them below.
Sweety High. Tell us about the formation of the band. How did you all meet, and when did you realize you clicked an ensemble?
Freddy Reish: The three of us [Freddie, Eden and Dashel] met in sixth grade. We were all in the same home room from all of middle school from sixth to eighth grade. Then Lewis came to the school in seventh grade. And we all were in and out of the music program throughout high school. Dashel and I really wanted to be in a band. We tried so many different formations of bands—we did surf rock, we did more of a garage rock thing, it’s it was all over the place. We also didn’t have a drummer. It was a mess.
And then one day, we asked Eden if she wanted to be in a band with us. She said yes, and we went to the park and had our first songwriting session. But we still needed a drummer. And we’d played with Lewis so much in the music program, and he was such an awesome drummer, so I asked him at some point in 12th grade. Like, “Do you want to be in a band with me, Dash and Eden?” And he was like, “Oh my God, that sounds like so much fun.” A few weeks later, we had our first band practice and we started writing music and came up with the name Atta Boy.
(Photo credit: John and Kathryn Brolin)
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SH: What are each of your roles in the band?
Eden Brolin: I sing and play guitar. Freddy plays lead guitar and rhythm. Dash plays keys and then Lewis plays drums. We usually have our friend Jason, who’s been recording our most of our records for us since we were young, on bass for us. But Freddy also did some of the bass for this record.
SH: What does your average songwriting process look like?
Eden: It typically changes from record to record. Our previous records have been made in like a pressure cooker, where we got together for a very limited amount of time to make the record. Usually we have about half of the songs pretty baked and then a lot that are very raw—or not written at all. That’s where the collaborative process comes in as far as either continuing to build a song or just spending an afternoon building a song from the ground up. Usually if it’s a lyrical collaboration, we’ll sit around a table and talk about something and then try and do little exercises. You do a line, then you do a line. I do that with my husband too, where we’ll switch off lines. I really like to find a way to make the phrasing of the song work with whatever weird sentence you might have. We did that with the song “Lucky,” where every single person got to go line by line.
As far as this record goes, a lot of it was music that the boys had written that I then put lyrics to. That’s one of our classic writing styles—we work separately, where the boys will come up with music either individually or as a group, and then they will send it to me and I will typically write music and lyrics to it. Sometimes the music is inspired by a musical or a melodic idea that came out of a session, too. Then sometimes I’ll write on my own and give it to them and they build on it in their way. It really varies.
SH: Freddy mentioned the naming of the band. Where did “Atta Boy” come from?
Freddy: When we had our first practice, I don’t know why, but we decided we needed to come up with a name on our first day of being in a band. We were in that mode. We got a whole bunch of different newspapers and spread around like Lewis’s parents’ house, just going through them, trying to find random words that sounded cool. Someone got ahold of the comic strips in the L.A. Times and was like, “Oh, this guy in this comic strips just said ‘atta boy.’ That’s a cool name.” All of us thought it was really fun. That we should just use that name. It’s stuck ever since, and we’ve never had a different name as a band.
Dashel Thompson: It’d be fun to say that we really love it because it’s about encouragement and empowerment and all this stuff, and I think our music kind of plays that role for a lot of people, but that’s not the true answer. The true answer is that it was something that we came up with when we were 18 and has kind of always worked. But I do like the fact that it does have that message of cheering someone on.
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SH: What does the album title Silt mean to you all? Why is it representative of this project?
Eden: We’ve been answering this question in very similar ways when it’s been asked, and I completely forgot that part of the reason why I named the song on the record “Silt” was because I wrote that song in a songwriting exercise in a class, and it was inspired by a photograph that the whole class was given by a photographer named Genesis Báez. The photo series was called “Silt of Each Other.” It ended up having a really nice ring to it and providing this thematic throughline for the whole record that just made sense. I had completely forgotten that the song, and the record, are named after this series of photographs.
Dashel: One of the things we’ve kind of come back to over and over again with the silt imagery is this image of swimming underwater on a river or a lake. As you swim along the body of water, the silt at the bottom gets kicked up and your vision’s obscured, and now you can’t really see, but you keep going, and as it settles down and clears out, you can see again. There’s this cycle of that can happen that’s part of a much bigger cycle, and that’s a lovely metaphor for life, and the ways in which you go through periods of where things are uncertain and the only way through is forward. That felt like a really nice summation of a lot of the stuff that we put into the record, but were also dealing with in our own lives during the course of the last two years in the making of the album.
We all had pretty rough 2025s as a band, and seeing each other, and having this band, and being able to make Silt together made for an easier time getting through what was a challenging period for all of us. But something about the record name always felt right. We went back and forth between some other things, but we always landed back on Silt. In reflecting more upon the whole record and its themes and the process of making it, It’s the thing we keep coming back to, and it just feels perfect.
(Silt via Many Hats Distribution)
SH: Earlier you described trying on different genres in working to find Atta Boy’s sound. Do you think you’ve landed on something specific? How have you refined what you do for the new album?
Freddy: So before each album, we make playlists and send them to each other of the songs that we’re really into right now, or songs we think could be inspirational to the music we’re going to be making.
Eden: I don’t know if it’s ever wise to firmly land on one sound, because tastes change so much. I think it can be hard for listeners when tastes change. At the same time, exploring sounds as a band is such a cool thing. I think that we’ve managed to explore some things we’ve been curious about, especially because we produced a lot of this record on our own, not in our usual setting. That gave us more of an opportunity to get into a f*** it mode, where we could be a little bit more fearless with what we were willing to throw out there, and what we were willing to try.
Musically, digital technology has just come so far. It’s such a luxury to be able to try stuff or take it away and and really try to find a balance in the whole process, including when you move on to mixing. We were definitely able to experiment, and I’m really, really happy with the place the songs got. It took a lot of courage for everybody, and a lot of patience, and a lot of time to throw out these new ideas and and take more risks.
At the same time, we tried to be intentional about not alienating the Atta Boy listeners who are really attached to those first couple of records, so it was an interesting balance to find. At the same time, I think the sound will continue to evolve. It’s definitely matured a little bit, and it’s nice to see a little bit more courage come out in the tunes.
Freddy: When we go into it, we’re not thinking about wanting an album to be in a certain genre, or a song to be in a genre. When we were done recording at the end of July in 2025, it was closer to what an older Atta Boy album would be. It was just our basic parts—drums, kets, guitar, vocals. And then we sat on the album for like two months, we wrote out ideas. “What if we added this?” “This is the feeling I want this song to invoke.” For “Pale Blue Sky,” we got to the visual of floating down a lazy river, this continuous floating.
It was a lot of FaceTimes with the band while I was in the studio trying things out and polishing the songs to a point that we were happy with. Either we’d go too far and then delete a whole bunch of stuff, or we’d land on a sweet spot and decide to stop there. I think each song found its own happy place that we didn’t necessarily have the time to find in previous albums. Before, it would sound closer to what it would be like if you were in the room with us if we were playing the songs for the first time. Whereas with these songs, our brains got to wander a little bit more and we got to try a lot new things. It was really fun. And the old Atta Boy sound that’s more stripped down is still in the song, there’s just a little more decoration around it.
(Photo credit: John and Kathryn Brolin)
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SH: Do you each have favorite tracks from the album?
Freddy: I’m gonna go with my two favorites. I love “Full Cloud.” I’m really grateful that I’m in the band that wrote it and I love listening to it. And I’m really happy with “Pale Blue Sky.” Our friend Keenan O’Meara played lap steel on that song, and it really took it to the next level. We kept trying things, and Eden from the beginning was saying it should be lap steel. I was like, oh, we can try this, we should try this. Finally we asked Keenan to put lap steel on it, and I was like, Eden, I’m sorry, you were right the whole time. It has all these beautiful textures and I love the melody of it and the feeling of living in that song listening to it.
Dashel: I’ll also choose two. The first, “Oh, Mama,” represents the grown-up Atta Boy that is comes out on this album. Like Freddy and Eden said, we had the time to do stuff that was different and more out-there. The arrangement with all the different brass Dave Nelson was doing, it’s actually hours, basically. The song was originally called “Guitar Melody,” because that was the voice note that Freddy had recorded of himself on his iPhone playing what is now that brass part on a guitar. We didn’t know what to do with it. Again, Eden had the vision of it being a brass arrangement, and we finally got there. Dave did such a fantastic job bringing to life this thing that we only abstractly understood. He really did it and it’s so incredible. Again, the culmination of having time to work on stuff further and getting these really awesome results.
Another side of the production of this album and the iterative process being the way that it was is the title track, “Silt.” It came such a far way from where it started when it came to those little details that Freddy was describing—adding and adding. We couldn’t get stuck right for a long time, and it just stands out as a specific moment being in the studio. I’d flown back to L.A., was with Freddy in the studio and we were trying to figure out one of the little piano parts that you’ll hear on the song. We just couldn’t get it right. Again, Eden knew what she heard in her head. We ended up just calling her and being like, “We just sent you the latest take we did, listen to it and let us know.” And she’s like, no, you’re actually off by a half beat here, and the line is actually ending too early. All of those little details. We did that for the better part of an afternoon, going back and forth, and it was such a wild way to collaborate, but the end result is so lovely. I hope it speaks for itself.
Eden: I have songs that I’m looking forward to people hearing, but I think my favorite song is “Haven’t Yet.” There are other songs I’m proud of, of course, but “Haven’t Yet” was like my baby song. It’s so simple, and the process stopped really early on as far as how we built on it. I remember having that moment in the studio where I was like, I don’t think too much is gonna need to happen on this. Freddy ended up coming in and doing this great guitar part at the end that I love so much. It just scratched an itch for me as far as what I wanted to hear on the track. To juxtapose this wild guitar solo at the end of it brought everything home. I love the simplicity of that song. I remember being in the studio and thinking, this one feels really nice. That’s my favorite, even though it’s probably the simplest of all of them.
SH: You also have some shows on the horizon. Is there anything you’re looking forward to most ?
Dashel: I think the opportunity to essentially do new arrangements of these songs is exciting. Realistically, we haven’t really played the songs—all of us together in the same room—since January 2025, so we’ll be sitting down with these songs for the first time in a lot of ways. That presents a really exciting opportunity to both honor what’s on the record, but also come in with a fresh approach. I love when bands do that. I love seeing live music and having a band do something interesting with the arrangement of their own song. I’m really excited to see what listeners think of the new music and how they respond to it live. I don’t want to speak too much for these guys, but I think we all really love playing live. We only started doing it a couple of years ago, but it’s been such an impactful experience being able to bring the music to folks. So we’re really excited to get out there in a couple of weeks now. It’s coming up pretty soon.
Eden: I feel like that applies to all of us. I’m excited for free Philly show. I think it’s funny because we can usually see like the numbers and get a gauge on the venue and who might be there. It’s exciting to think about doing a free show series, which I think is such a great idea for a city to do. For some reason I feel really excited and nervous and curious about that show. We’re we’re also getting to headline at some pretty exciting places for us and dream venues—getting to do the Troubadour and Bowery and go back to DC9. It’s really crazy to be a band that thought touring was probably not going to be for us, and to have people coming out to these shows and getting it to a point where we can we can play these venues. It’s really special and exciting.
Freddy: I’m also excited for the Philly show. Playing outside during the summer is always fun. We got to do that with Shaky Graves a few years ago at an orchard. It’s always a good vibe—people sitting out on the grass. It’s lots of fun. I’m also born and raised in L.A., so The Troubadour is super exciting. My mom is really excited about that one. It’s crazy. I’ve been to a lot of shows there. I’ve been like talking to my friends and family, like, “I’m playing The Troubadour.” And then the tickets went on sale, and it’s like, “Oh my God, I’m playing The Troubadour!” Really, really stoked for that one. I mean, I’m excited to play in every city that we get to play in.
(Courtesy of Atta Boy)
SH: Was there anything else we should know?
Freddy: I’m really excited because I’ve had records that I’ve listened to where I heard a song and I’m like, that didn’t do much for me. And then the band does something special with it live and I’m like, this is my favorite song of all time now. I hope that people come to these shows with that same mentality. If there’s a song that didn’t hit you on the record, maybe we do it a little bit different live and it finds a new special meaning to you. That’s always an exciting experience.
You can listen to Silt in full here:
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