Musical inspiration can be a funny thing. Sometimes, the songs only emerge after months of work in a high-end studio packed with expensive gear and just the right mix of collaborators. Other times, all you need is one brain overflowing with ideas in a tiny room. That’s how it is for Kai Slater when he records as Sharp Pins. The Chicago-based musician, who recently celebrated his 21st birthday, has spent the last few years rocking out as the lead singer and guitarist of Lifeguard, a loud, jittery trio who released a terrific debut album this summer. All the while, he’s been quietly crafting one incandescently catchy DIY pop hook after another on the side with his solo project — and with Balloon Balloon Balloon, the superb new Sharp Pins album he’s releasing on Nov. 21 through K/Perennial, you’ll get to hear more of them than ever.
“I recorded this album basically whenever I had time, which was not that much, compared to the average Joe,” Slater explains over Zoom from the bedroom where he makes all of Sharp Pins’ music. He was home for a while in between back-to-back Lifeguard tours when he knocked out most of the songs on the album in early 2025, “just working on stuff in a kind of therapeutic way, having fun with it.”
Balloon Balloon Balloon is fun for you, too — a sheer delight for any fan of homemade guitar pop. Every song on this album is full of psychedelic sunshine and jangly joy, teeming with melodies that snuck into Slater’s head and wouldn’t leave until he got them down on tape. There are ample echoes of the Beatles and the Byrds, to the point that if someone told you this was a lost private-press LP by an unknown band from the mid-to-late Sixties, you’d probably buy it.
Slater got that sound by embracing the limitations of his home-recording setup, wedging a snare drum into an open dresser drawer and playing nimbly tumbling electric riffs on two guitars that he describes as “a fake Vox Phantom” and “a fake Rickenbacker” — affordable knockoffs of two of the most iconic British Invasion models. He recorded the majority of the album on a boombox-style cassette deck that his friends in the Chicago band Answering Machines turned him on to. “When you’re recording on a four-track at home, you have to think creatively,” he says.
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A student of classic recording techniques, Slater has read Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick’s 2006 memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere, “a few times, because it’s just so inspiring for me.” For this album, he tried to get into a Revolver mindset, taking the songs as far as they could go with his makeshift equipment. “A lot of stuff on this record, my four-track was breaking,” he adds. “I was bouncing so many harmonies on it, in a very Sixties Beatles way, and you can sometimes hear it kind of melting a little bit. I don’t think that would’ve stopped the Beatles.”
Many of the songs on Balloon Balloon Balloon were written for his girlfriend, photographer/director Grace Bader Conrad, who was living more than 700 miles away in New York at the time. “I’d be like, ‘I want to wake her up with a new song.’ Just something very purely romantic like that,” Slater says. “Or she’d be like, ‘I’ll call you in 30 minutes.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I’ll have a song in 30 minutes.’ Just love letters or whatever — songs written in a state of being in love.”
At the same time, he was seeking a release from the pressures of touring as the frontman of a buzzy rock band. “You play a show and you’re seeing all your friends,” he says. “I can get very introverted, so I’m like, ‘OK, I’m ready to crawl into my shell and go crazy for a bit.’ But I’m also feeling inspired by all this music. It’s a perfect combination for me to go on the four-track in the middle of the night and see what happens.”
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The first song on the album, “Popafangout,” began as a nonsense phrase he was humming to himself, before he decided to take it in an undead direction (classic goth literature and vampire movies are a big interest of his). He estimates that the Lennon-esque “Ex-Priest/In a Hole of a Home” came together in about 15 minutes, while the radiant “Queen of Globes and Mirrors” took more like a day. “Really, all the songs you hear on this record are my initial thoughts,” he says. “That was how I pictured them in my head. The first idea is the best idea. First take is the best take.”
Next month, Slater will be back on the road with Lifeguard on a run of dates opening for fellow Matador Records torchbearers Bar Italia. In the meantime, he’s made an album that feels like a secret AM-radio broadcast from another world. Before logging off, Slater explains the title he chose for the album with a smile. Sharp Pins, Balloon Balloon Balloon: “If you put it together… pop!”
