Caufield Schnug and Lira Mondal on eighteen years of making music together

Transmission 418: Interview with Sweeping Promises

Sweeping Promises are a post-punk duo from Lawrence, Kansas, made up of Caufield Schnug and Lira Mondal, who bonded over a shared love for No Wave and other underground sounds. The two went on to study music together in college, eventually forming Sweeping Promises almost by accident in the fall of 2019, while both were still involved in several other musical projects. Their debut album, Hunger for a Way Out, was released through Feel It Records and quickly caught attention, leading to a deal with Sub Pop.

Title: You Say I Romanticize
Artist: Sweeping Promises
Release Date: 2026-08-14
Genres: Alternative Rock, New Wave, No Wave, Post-punk
Label: SubPop
Description: Sweeping Promises talk to Retrofuturista about You Say I Romanticize, out now on Sub Pop, their Kansas studio and new drummer Spenser Gralla.

After their careers took an unexpected turn during the pandemic, the pair moved to Kansas and bought a house that came with a large studio space already built by its previous owners, once used for pottery and painting. They converted it into their own recording studio, where they not only make their own music but also produce and record other bands from around the world.

On August 14th, 2026, Sweeping Promises released their new album, You Say I Romanticize, via Sub Pop. The record marks a shift toward a fuller, more live oriented sound, thanks in part to the addition of drummer Spenser Gralla, who helped the band capture the energy of their live performances in the studio for the first time. To celebrate the release, we sat down with Lira and Caufield to talk about the album’s long and demanding writing process, their unconventional approach to recording, and the ideas of authorship, idealism and independence that run through the record.

Featured image: @ Shawn Brackbill

What were your earliest influences? Musical influences.

Lira Mondal: Oh, boy. Well, I think we both really had a love for classic early 80s post-punk, a lot of experimental music, electronic music, new wave.

Caufield Schnug: We met when we were teenagers in a small town called Conway, Arkansas. That is truly the boonies in America. We were the only ones we knew who liked the music that we liked.

No Wave was something we bonded over.

What got you making music together and how did it lead to Sweeping Promises?

Lira Mondal: Well, it was purely by accident because we met in college and I was in another… well, I use the term band loosely because it was just a bunch of music majors in college jamming together. Then Caufield knocked on the door of the music building and said, can I be in your band?

From there we’ve led so many different musical lives. Sweeping Promises happened pretty spontaneously. It was the fall of 2019 and we were already in three other musical projects.

In a moment of inspiration, or exhaustion, I don’t know, we essentially wrote what became the first side of Hunger for a Way Out in one session late at night. We realized it didn’t really fit all the other projects that we were in at the time. So I thought, well, we might as well turn this into its own thing.

We just kept writing for it. Fortunately enough, we were able to send it to Feel It Records and they put it out. And now here we are.

How did your house become both your house and the recording studio?

Caufield Schnug: That’s a weird one. We were in an odd situation where our careers were kind of wrecked by COVID and our records sold a lot. It was weird.

Hunger for a Way Out took off. We were signed to Sub Pop and it wasn’t like we had a ton of money. It wasn’t like we were rock stars or anything.

It was indie rock money. So we thought, I don’t know what we could do here, but maybe we could move to the cheapest state in America and buy a house. And that’s what we did, and basically converted the house into our makeshift studio.

Now we’re pretty lucky to drag bands from all over the world here and record. And of course, we record ourselves and it’s still really low budget. But I think we’re happy to own our own means of production.

Lira Mondal: It was also kind of an unusual circumstance, because the house we bought, the previous owners were also artists themselves. They had built this thousand square foot addition in the back that was a pottery studio, a painting studio. It had lived all these lives before.

We came to Kansas and looked at so many really cheap houses, thinking that we would turn maybe the living room into our studio. It didn’t matter how small it was, as long as we had a space that was our own. We really did just walk into this home and it had this ready made space.

So we thought, well, we would be foolish not to pass this up. And it was affordable. I feel like there was this spirit guiding us, like the ghosts of the house, leading us in.

Are those the changing circumstances that shaped the album?

Lira Mondal: One of them, I think, also being on the road a lot and having other people coming in and out of the house. Then, of course, there’s the act of songwriting itself, thinking that you have an idea you like, and then you wake up the next day and say, oh my gosh, this is the worst song I’ve ever written.

So I feel like constantly being in a creative space is part of those shifting circumstances that you just learn to roll with and adapt to. We’ve been here for about five years now and I feel like we’ve firmly established ourselves in this local community. But at the same time, nothing in life is secure, especially in music and the arts.

So it’s a fight. It’s just every day. It’s like a new lesson, being adaptable, being pure of heart and intention, and just trying to pursue this life to the best that you can.

Is there a thread that ties together all the tracks of the album?

Lira Mondal: I think, more generally, as with all Sweeping Promises music, there’s a stress on independent creativity and defiance against oppressive forces, whatever those may be, emotionally, politically, societally. I think, more so in this record than the last two, there’s this idea of authorship, whose stories get to be told and who gets to listen to them. And I think a lot of that is, again, a reaction to arts infrastructure.

I feel like it’s kind of crumbling all around us, be it the death of independent music journalism, streaming disenfranchising artists and essentially making them completely valueless at the behest of Spotify and Meta and all of these big corporations taking money away, straight out of artists’ pockets.

Caufield Schnug: I think we were also trying to write about the situation of the far right, but in a way that wasn’t message mongering or didactic, not entirely direct. We were trying to capture some of the absurdism as well. But I don’t know if there’s a really strong intellectual idea running through the lyrics or something.

I think there’s more of an ethos in the sound and how we play.

Lira Mondal: I think, more than anything, again, this independence is owing to us, self-producing our work, recording ourselves, and trying to make it as much a reflection of our own location, abilities, and where we’re at in our musical life.

How has your sound evolved since Good Living is coming for you?

Caufield Schnug: We got Spenser to play drums on this new album. We finally started to feel like our band is good live, like we wanted to capture the sound of our live band and not this sort of mystical band that couldn’t actually exist in real space time. I think we were trying to do that.

We had a slight budget upgrade with this album, the slightest. Our previous albums were recorded with one or two microphones. This new one is multi mic.

We kind of came up with our own chamber recording method, our wall of sound method. I think there’s maybe a greater fidelity to the live band. But I think we still try to find ways to stylize and distantiate that.

Lira Mondal: I think one really obvious point in how it occupies this interesting intersection between a very studio sound, or a studio enterprise, and also a live sound, is there are stacks and stacks of voices, lots of vocals, lots of harmonies, lots of counterpoint, which, of course, you can’t do live with just one vocalist in a three piece band. So I think we really enjoy playing around with that tension between, oh, I’m hearing a band play at a show, and, oh wait a minute, there’s no way they could have done this in real time, just the three of them, without lots of overdubs and a little bit of studio trickery.

Any new musical art or ideas that shape this album?

Caufield Schnug: Yes, we went deeper into electronic music. I don’t know if you can hear that in the album, but Lira and I are just really into electronic music. I think you could hear a greater presence of synthesizers and stuff.

Maybe we’re a little less afraid of pop music. The pop side that’s always been there for our projects, I think, is maybe a bigger ratio now.

Lira Mondal: I feel like we’ve always been very melody driven, and that has continued on in this record. Especially as a vocalist, as a singer, I will always be a student to melody, that’ll always be the thing that drives me.

So it’s about listening more to really hooky music and trying to think, okay, how can I make something that’s incredibly catchy but still has room to grow within two and a half to three and a half minutes?

What was the hardest part of this record?

Lira Mondal: We wrote at least 20 songs that we then had to shave down to 10. Within the writing and recording of those 20 songs, each one went through several mutations. I think it was really just believing that the choices we were making were the right ones, and not falling into analysis paralysis of, well, I could approach this this way and that might make it better.

But then knowing deep down I’m going to abandon this because there’s something innately about this vocal line or this composition that I don’t like, that’s not really making itself known to me at the time. So that was a lot of the back and forth over the past year and a half that was really a struggle for us. And that was compounded by the fact that it was such a hodgepodge of a bunch of mixers and Caufield’s laptop that we were recording this on, and it was crashing all the time.

So there were these technological issues that were not helping with the decisiveness we needed to approach this project with.

Caufield Schnug: Our recording studio is not legitimate.

Lira Mondal: I think it’s even questioning the idea of legitimacy, again, it’s that question of authorship, who gets to decide that your studio is state of the art, or legitimate, or a place where real work is made and real music is made. So I think there’s a little bit of that going on too, because while we’ve been making music together for almost 18 years, Sweeping Promises has been around for six years at this point. It still feels very new.

This is the only band we’ve ever toured behind, for example. So I think there’s a lot of this push and pull between, we’ve been doing this for so long, but also we’re still learning.

Caufield Schnug: Ideologically, too, we’re primitives. I’m a primitive amateur musician. I love other primitive amateur musicians and I hate it when things sound formalized. But this band is our career.

And when we set out to make this record, we wanted to make one of the best rock records. We wanted it to be viable, and that feeling needed to gel with our primitivism.

Lira Mondal: I think there’s this importance on the democratization of music, and just wanting to put forth the idea that if you have this desire to make it, then you can do it. It doesn’t have to be gatekept. But then also, there are standards, and you should rise to the occasion of those standards, and also always push yourself.

And I think that we’re always trying to make the best thing that we can do. So that’s, I think, going to be a lifelong process.

What’s the story behind the title, You Say I Romanticize?

Lira Mondal: That is a line from the very last song on the record, called Write Lightly. With Good Living is coming for you, I feel like there’s sort of a double meaning to it, where it’s lodged as an accusation from the perspective of the person in the song, who is trying furiously to catalog her life or write her story down.

And then, at the command of somebody else, being told to do that, but also being told that you’re romanticizing your life, or you’re not a serious person. And just taking that accusation and throwing it right back, saying, well, you know what? I think it’s not a bad thing to be an idealist, and that’s something that drives us both.

Caufield Schnug: Something our last two records were about, too. Idealization and how that can drive you crazy and make you misaligned with the ruined society that you live in. But also, it’s powerful to be an idealist, and you should be.

Do you produce other bands in your studio?

Caufield Schnug: Oh, yeah. I’m learning still, although I’m getting on in years doing this. I think I needed to make the switch from being like a decades long home recordist, esoteric weirdo, who just recorded all of our own projects. Over the course of 17 years, that’s sort of where my experience comes from.

Bringing that to other projects, being adaptable enough and not being dogmatic or telling bands how they should sound. I’m such a talker, I don’t know. I try to find ways to be open ended and allow people to be themselves. And I think my answer, most of the time, is just to be really enthusiastic. Whenever a band is obsessed with an idea, you have to find that obsession for yourself too.

At the same time, I try to challenge and push people where appropriate. And every project is different, and how you wear that producer’s hat, or if you’re just an engineer, it’s something you have to negotiate in real time.

Lira Mondal: I think that we also find it incredibly inspiring, because it gives us the opportunity to see other people’s process and how they approach their craft. And while we have a lot of experience, I don’t think that either of us would claim ultimate expertise in anything. I think that we always want to approach music as collaborative, even as it’s also very personal to us both, in terms of how we approach our own songwriting, how we even approach Sweeping Promises.

But we also are very aware that none of this is created in a vacuum. One of the most wonderful things about being a musician is the ability to interface with other people, to share your work. So being on both sides of that is incredibly meaningful to us.

Caufield Schnug: When we started recording other people, well, we needed to make money and we wanted to do it. We wanted to help other people realize their art. But another reason was practice.

We started recording as many people as we could to practice.

Are you currently working on new material right now?

Lira Mondal: We’re always working. Yeah, we started demoing for another record. We’re not going to say anything in terms of when to expect it, because it could be in a couple of months, it could be in a couple of years.

But it’s always, we’re always working. We’re always writing. We’re always just thinking about what comes next.

Photo courtesy of Sweeping Promises

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others