“I was like, ‘I’m just going to move my hand around the guitar until it makes sense and sounds similar to the melodies in my head”: Meet Spiral XP, the indie shoegazers sparked by a game-changing guitar breakthrough

Spiral XP’s Max Keyes wasn’t a natural-born guitarist. Though he tried picking up the instrument a few times in his youth, something about a six-string just didn’t connect with him back then. That’s why he started honing heavy rhythms as a drummer – most notably for Seattle-based noise-pop band Versing.

It wasn’t until a Versing tour with cult Canadian jangle-pop trio the Courtneys – where he began obsessing over the latter outfit’s gliding open-tuned melodies – that Keyes changed his, um, tune.

Later, after a friend gifted him an old Epiphone SG, Keyes was inspired to experiment with drop-D and open-D arrangements from his living room. This led him toward developing an elementally intuitive approach to fretting that finally unlocked the guitar’s potential for him.

“I was like, ‘I’m just going to move my hand around the guitar until it makes sense and sounds similar to the melodies in my head,’” he says of that game-changing period. “That method of creativity was something I’d never experienced before.”

Keyes founded Spiral XP as a solo project while living further north in Bellingham, Washington (he’s since returned to Seattle).

From his earliest EPs up to the band’s new I Wish I Was a Rat album – the latter also featuring guitar work from Jordan Mang and Kyle McCollum – Keyes has paired that open-style texturizing with gorgeously undulated licks that speak to his love for shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine, who knew how to write “really good pop songs… and then found ways to fuck it up a little bit.”

Spiral XP - Luna - YouTube

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While Rat’s opening Luna and the infectious Sinner feature graceful trem-bar dips in their fuzz-blown choruses, the melancholy crush of the record’s Window Room goes expertly gonzo with seasick, full-chord pitch-bending. On Horse Money, Keyes grips his PureSalem Reverberation’s vibrato arm hard through a raw and vulnerable guitar solo.

Indeed, both Keyes and Mang are whammy-loving offset aficionados – the latter hoisting a Jazzmaster. They also double-up on Fender Vibrolux amps, and fittingly both used Jam Pedals’ gnarly, Pro Co-cloning Rattler boost throughout the recording of Rat.

But while Mang proudly talks up the extra heft Spiral XP harness while locking into riffs in unison, he also wonders whether he’s putting himself on too similar of a tone journey as his friend.

“The thing about gear [and] bandmates is… [sometimes] you’re like, ‘Am I about to buy all the same stuff?” Mang says through a sheepish laugh.

While he reiterates that he’s generally EQ’ed into a bassier range than Keyes, he briefly hesitated at slapping the same boost onto his board. “I bought the Rattler and was like, ‘Max, I have to apologize, but this is happening… it just sounds too good.’”

• I Wish I Was a Rat is out now via Danger Collective.