Sweetbreads Talks Punisher of Love, Anxious Attachment and Finding Beauty in Imperfection

There is a looseness to Punisher of Love that feels especially right for an album built around uncertainty.

The debut record from Sweetbreads, the project of New York City singer songwriter Melody Stollp, arrives September 25 after years of quietly collecting songs. Across eight tracks, Sweetbreads moves through anxiety, longing, self criticism and the uncomfortable space between what we feel and what we think we should feel.

For Melody, those ideas were never mapped out as an album concept. They were simply the things that kept showing up in the writing.

“I think songwriting is the way I process my discomfort with life's uncertainties,” Melody tells Everyday Jams. “I have to work against my initial black and white thinking all the time.”

That willingness to leave some questions unresolved is part of what makes Punisher of Love feel so intimate. These songs are deeply personal, but they never close themselves off around one exact interpretation.

Giving the Anxiety a Name

The album takes its title from a character Melody stumbled into almost by accident.

She wrote “Punisher of Love” only about half an hour before needing to submit something to a weekly songwriting group. A friend had recently explained the idea of a “punisher,” essentially someone who overstays a conversation long after you want to leave it. Sitting alone and spiraling through her own anxieties, Melody realized the same description could apply to the negative voice in her head.

“My negative thoughts about myself were acting like a punisher in my own mind,” she explains. “The term ‘punisher of love’ seemed kind of evocative and abstract.”

What began as a last minute song eventually became the name for the entire record.

There is a tenderness underneath that anxiety too. Melody talks about songwriting as a place where she can catch herself being unnecessarily cruel, reconsider the thought and find a little compassion on the other side.

“Sometimes a thought will come out and I’ll have to be like, ‘Jesus, Melody, take it easy,’” she says. “Having grace for one’s self is a lifelong practice.”

Letting the Record Stay a Little Messy

Producer Quinn Devlin helped Sweetbreads lean into a more organic approach once the songs entered the studio.

Rather than having the musicians arrive with completely rehearsed parts, Melody would play each song through and the group would build the arrangement together. On “Empty” and “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back,” everyone gathered around a single microphone and committed to a full take.

That looseness became central to the album.

“When everything feels a little less precise and calculated, it frees me and the rest of the players up for fun and possibility,” Melody says.

The initial tracking happened over four days at The Creamery Studios in Greenpoint with a close group of friends and musicians. Melody remembers the sessions feeling almost like summer camp, intense but communal, with everyone working toward the same thing. One of the biggest transformations happened on “The Anvil,” after drummer Jordan Wolff introduced a beat that completely shifted the song's energy.

That sense of community runs deeper than the instrumentation.

For another session, longtime friends Hayley Rose Harrington, Molly Ganely, Sarah Trabue and Kait Pelkey joined Melody to record backing vocals. Hearing their voices now immediately brings her back into the room.

“When I hear the bridge in ‘The Anvil’ I get so emotional because my mind immediately transports me back to that session,” she says. “It’s like a battle cry for a better tomorrow.”

The Imperfections Became Part of It

For someone who had saved some of these songs for the right moment to make a debut album, the finished version of Punisher of Love ended up being less pristine than Melody once imagined.

She is happier for it.

“I think it is a lot messier, in a good way, than I had planned,” she says.

There is even a wrong guitar note left on the album. When Melody started beating herself up over it, Quinn jokingly compared it to a famously imperfect moment on Let It Be. Now those small mistakes are some of the details she loves most.

“There’s little imperfections on the record that take me back to the place and time we recorded them,” Melody says. “Those little mistakes bring me a lot of joy and add character to the songs.”

It feels fitting for a record so interested in resisting easy answers.

Punisher of Love does not arrive with everything neatly resolved. Instead, Sweetbreads lets the uncertainty, the wrong notes, the anxious thoughts and the moments of grace stay visible.

After independently building the project since fully committing to music in 2020, Melody says having a complete debut album finally feels different from putting individual songs into the world.

“It feels like I'm putting my big girl pants on,” she jokes.

And beneath all of the introspection, what she hopes listeners carry away from the record is actually pretty simple.

“I think self acceptance and self compassion can be radical acts of resistance,” Melody says. “I hope people feel less alone when hearing my music. And I hope it can help them to be gentler toward themselves and the people in their lives.”

Punisher of Love by Sweetbreads is out now.

Photography: Sandy Honig (@sandhonig)