Pool Kids to headline Patterns in Brighton on back of new album

The band first started playing together on Tallahassee's house show circuit. Even before they had a name, the band – then Caden Clinton on drums and Christine Goodwyne on guitar and vocals – booked visiting acts in Goodwyne's backyard, slotting themselves in as the opener. They started touring the United States by cold-calling bars and asking to play their stages.

They recorded their debut album, 2018's Music to Practice Safe Sex To, in a friend's kitchen.

In the following years, Pool Kids rounded out to a four-piece with Andy Anaya on guitar and Nicolette Alvarez on bass.

For Easier Said Than Done, Pool Kids returned to Seattle to work with Mike Vernon Davis. The band funded the studio sessions with money they’d saved from years of steady touring, eager to explore the freedom that comes with making a record independently. They spent five weeks recording in Washington in the summer of 2024, staying with friends, at motels, and in the studio itself to save money. They recorded late into the night.

Christine said: “We felt a lot of pressure to recreate the magic that happened last time. We did a lot of searching, playing each song a million different ways and deciding which one sounded the best."

Songs evolved through multiple versions, assuming different genres as they went, from synth pop to slacker rock and back again, or from gentle acoustic balladry to driving anthemic rock.

Nicolette said: “We tried out new ideas on the fly, wrote and reworked songs, keys, chord progressions, and runs together. We looked at everything as a collective through an even more powerful microscope than before.”

Piece by piece and day by day, the record started to take shape: “We dove into these rabbit holes trying to figure out the right sound for each note. It was a deeply exploratory process.”

Andy added: “We tried to take the trust we have in each other and pour it into a collective belief in our band. We weren’t going to wait around for outside support because the goal at the end of the day was to make something we believed in.”

Christine added: “I actually was diagnosed with OCD a week before going to the studio. I thought I had it, but after getting the official diagnosis, I looked back at a lot of the lyrics, and I thought ‘This is kind of an OCD record.’ It’s hard to explain because it’s such a misunderstood disorder, but a lot of the themes on the record are fixations that my OCD latches onto.

“OCD can just rob your life of joy. Things can be going so well, and then it just sucks any enjoyment out of it.

“There’s a lot of Florida imagery and a lot of really specific glimpses from tour on this album. By letting myself get specific, I feel a lot more emotionally connected to the songs. It's a very personal record for me and for the whole band, too. I was writing about what life has been like for all of us over the last few years. I feel like all of us can relate to a lot of the songs.”