Making music can often entail demanding physical and emotional hardships within a band trying to crank out as much music as it can. Pure X, the indie-garage trio from Austin, TX is one of those instances — lead singer and guitarist Nate Grace was on crutches for six months after busting his knee in a skateboarding accident, and the romantic involvements of multi-instrumentalist Jesse Jenkins and drummer Austin Youngblood made for a somewhat sour environment.
But those hardships have strengthened Pure X and propelled the group to produce sounds more meaningful than it could have imagined as the band performs on March 25 at the Majestic Theatre in support of a new album and as part of its current tour with Real Estate.
As Pure X makes its way here on Tuesday, the three-piece has new music to share with its new album, Angel, dropping on April 1. A single from the album, “Starlight,” s a slow-jamming acoustic piece with flowing electric guitar lines similar to those of Real Estate.
On Pure X’s last full-length Crawling up the Stairs, significantly more production effort went into the album compared to the band’s previous works. Longtime collaborator and producer Stephen Orsak along shrewd Nashville studio master Larry Seyer helped polish Pure X’s electronically effected sound in the 111-year-old Weid Hall in Hallettsville, TX which provided the band with abundant natural reverb.
Pure X’s strong connection precedes the point when the group was formed in 2009. Grace and Jenkins had been jamming for years, and Jenkins had played in a group called Silver Pines with Youngblood in the early and mid-2000s. Grace said the newly formed group “clicked right away” and produced a tape within a week of making music together. While Grace came to the table with some fully-formed material of his own, he said that the song writing came from a variety of sources.
“[We like] mixing it up, getting different vibes,” Grace said. “It’s awesome.”
Skateboarding was another connecting thread of the members. All three band members grew up as skateboarders, and Grace went to bed as a teenager dreaming of becoming a pro skateboarder. Grace learned about a lot of music growing up thanks to the skateboarding scene, hearing groups like the Sex Pistols.
“That’s kind of how I learned about a lot of music was through skateboard videos,” Grace said. “[It was] pretty much all the ’90s.”
Pure X’s material is created through every manner possible — writing complete songs, collaborating on pieces together, and crafting songs spontaneously while recording. With the band producing an incredible quantity of music with multiple tapes, 7-inch records, and compilation tracks, the group picks and chooses the songs they think will flow together best for an album.
It’s easy for the group to come up with so much material when the members are almost always in the same place. In a four-bedroom house in Austin, up to six people have lived and collaborated together, with Jenkins and Youngblood currently living there.
“It’s just a house that we’ve all been jamming in for a while now,” Grace said. “A lot of stuff has been recorded there, too.”
Even with Angels being released on April 1, Pure X is constantly writing new material, even on the road. As part of Fat Possum Records, Grace said that the band now has the means to continue to produce music at a high level, something that audiences should definitely as part of Pure X’s current tour.