Stereo Six: Letters Sent Home Discuss Favourite Songs and Albums

Amongst its many qualities, music can be an outlet for the artist, which is the main attraction for Emily Paschke and her band Letters Sent Home. After recently signing to SharpTone Records, the German quartet is finally set to release their debut record. Titled Forever Undone, the record drops on April 12th and has been a long time coming. (Check out the new single “Ignorance” feat. Sumner Peterson.)

Letters Sent Home was formed in the northern German countryside in 2015, so this album has been in the works for some time. By 2017, it had become a serious recording project after Paschke and bassist Lara Ripke spent some time studying in North America. Their music is an energetic mix of pop-punk, alternative rock, and emo. The whole purpose of Letters Sent Home’s music is to hash out personal trauma and how you learn to deal with it.

Even with the infectious melodies and large-sized choruses, the band’s backbone is their heart. This shows in the depth of their lyrics. It’s as personal as you can get for Paschke, which has made her nervous about its release. But on the other hand, the writing and recording of Forever Undone was therapeutic to her. It helped her finally deal with some emotional weight that had been anchored within her conscious and subconscious for quite some time. With such a relatable approach, it’s not surprising that the band is quickly rising in notoriety.

Joining us today for another Stereo Six is Emily Paschke, in which she discusses a combination of six of her most influential songs and albums.

1. Yonaka – “Seize The Power” (2021, Creature Records)

“When this song was released, we just started the first writing process for the first songs that made it on the album, but at the time we didn’t know yet what will become of it. The four of us instantly agreed on how much we love this song. It has such a cool, female power, punk attitude from the beginning. We barely ever felt such a badass vibe in a song before. We were impressed and we took from that song that we want to have such an attitude in our music as well.

“In addition to the attitude and energy of the music and vocal, we loved that Theresa’s (Jarvis) rapping and especially singing is so catchy and memorable that it perfectly combines catchiness, attitude, and power.”

2. Holding Absence – The Greatest Mistake of My Life (2021, SharpTone Records)

“This album is also one that the four of us agree on to be absolutely amazing and very much an inspiration for what we strive for musically. The songwriting throughout the album became so much more straightforward compared to what Holding Absence did previously. It contains insanely catchy hooks and always stays interesting because of so many little musical choices the band made.

“For our guitar writing, we really admire (lead singer) Scott’s (Carey) attitude towards songwriting. He once said in an interview that he loves to create beautiful sounding chord structures over heavy riffing or soloing. We really like the approach to only think about the way every note and chords serves the song as a whole to make it an overall feeling of music instead of showing off certain skills at instruments. This was always our aspiration when writing songs so it was so great to see Holding Absence carrying this approach forward in such perfection. And man, ‘Celebration Song,’ ‘Curse Me With Your Kiss,’ ‘Beyond Belief,’ or ‘Mourning Song’ are such beauties in themselves.”

Artwork for the albums/songs Letters Sent Home lists in this Stereo Six

3. Nothing Nowhere – Trauma Factory (2021, Fueled By Ramen)

“Coming from his beat-producing hip hop style background, Joe (Mulherin) is an inspiration in how he lets his music evolve from album to album, creating the most vibey music in the alternative scene by combining his different influences. After his first two albums that focused on trap beats, mainly rapping and ambient guitar sounds, Trauma Factory sounded different and huge. The album really benefitted from his special type of guitar writing and catchy songwriting that’s also found in his previous work, but it evolved from bedroom production with basic and less elements to a huge full studio-sounding full band produced album in a very good way.

“The songwriting is so on point. Every melody is as catchy as it gets, his lyrics hit hard and are creative in their own ways and he included amazing pop rock band elements in some songs that made him grow out of his rapper-corset. We love the approach of continuing the musical development from album to album.

“Although this will be our debut, we already released four EPs over the course of our six year band history and always had the same approach to always rethink and evolve our sound first and foremost to what we like most at that specific moment when writing the songs.”

4. PVRIS – Use Me (2020, Warner Records)

“PVRIS has always been one of the biggest inspiration for us musically because of their talent in combining rock and pop elements. Use Me was the first full-length album that focused more on pop and electronic music rather than rock and it showed us that even as a rock band writing new, modern songs including electronic elements and pop melodies works as well. We have released songs that are more on the pop side before but we were always a little bit nervous about it.

“Listening to this album we realized that as long as our hearts are in it, it doesn’t matter what elements you’ll find in our music. Also, Use Me definitely is a no-skip album which inspired us to write no filler songs for our upcoming debut album, which hopefully we didn’t.”

5. Palaye Royale feat. LP – “Line It Up” (2022, Sumerian Records)

“When we were almost finished writing the album, we listened to ‘Line It Up’ for the first time and we immediately knew we had to put such a powerful ballad on our record as well. The song triggers something in us that we cannot describe. The lyrics hit hard, the music is emotional and powerful at the same time, the way the energy builds up throughout the song is heartbreaking. This song was the sole inspiration for the instrumentals of ‘I hope I die first.’ We wanted it to have the same energy, but of course, create something totally new.”

6. Badflower – “Family” (2021, Big Machine Records)

“This song immediately caught our attention because of its song structure and verses that only contain vocals and drums. We loved how the verses focused solely on the gut wrenching lyrics and as it goes on the song breaks out into an epic post chorus you’ll sing your heart out to. The song inspired us to not always stick to the verse – chorus – verse – chorus – bridge – chorus song structure and taught us that sometimes less is more. You can hear the influence of the song very clearly in our song ‘Hysteria’ which comes out with the album, although the vibe of the song is less sad like ‘Family’ and more desperate.”

Letters Sent Home ‘Forever Undone’ album artwork