For the Los Angeles-based duo Angelsaur, the road to their second album was less of a linear run, and more of a slow, searching exhale. Built during a transitional period marked by personal unraveling, long stretches on the road, and quiet revelations in living rooms and hotel rooms, their latest record The Girls Are Stressed, out now, is as much a sonic evolution as it is a journal of emotional survival.

Logan McQuade and Jonah Feingold, the duo at the core of Angelsaur, met while attending music school at University of Southern California. But the real chemistry didn’t spark until they were deep into touring with King Princess.

“Jonah was her guitar player, and I’m still a bass player and music director,” McQuade recalls. “On the road on days off in hotel rooms, we were like, ‘Oh, we should start a band.’ We had all our instruments with us. So we started writing.”

The beginnings of the Angelsaur project involved a two year series of spontaneous on-and-off writing sessions, before their 2023 debut Children Disguised As Adults came to life. But by the time the second album took shape, things had shifted. “We were writing for like six months, and we had a lot of songs that were kind of like 50 to 60 percent done,” says McQuade.

Initially, they considered dropping “Looking Up!,” the album’s second track, as a standalone single. But when they brought it to engineer Andy Baldwin, who is best known for his work with Björk, things started to expand. “We realized that we had a record’s worth of stuff, so we brought him in as a production partner to finish the record,” McQuade explains. “We definitely made a bulk of it in the studio while we had the sessions booked, and we were like, ‘Okay, it’s time to make a record.’”

The result is a louder, lusher, and more layered version of Angelsaur. While their first album was self-driven and intimate, The Girls Are Stressed feels more cinematic, thanks in large part to Baldwin’s sonic sensibilities. “He’s just this crazy old Australian man from Melbourne, and he’s a little bit of a production wizard,” says McQuade. “We just wanted to make something that was a little more elevated.”

That elevation doesn’t come at the expense of emotional intimacy. If anything, it pushes deeper. The album, written in the wake of a seven-year relationship’s end, centers vulnerability without reservation. “I would say that’s how I process my emotions and my feelings,” McQuade says of his songwriting process. “I just really couldn’t write from any other place. It was definitely a pretty crazy year when we were making this record. So, it was very cathartic.”

Lyrically, the album explores themes of identity, validation, sobriety, and heartbreak, but not in a way that feels overly polished or rehearsed. The writing, McQuade explains, is “kind of like the way I journal.”

And though Feingold and McQuade have both worked with high-profile artists like King Princess, Omar Apollo, and Mark Ronson, the lessons they’ve carried into Angelsaur are more about craft than clout. “I wrote a lot with Mikaela [Straus, known by her stage name of King Princess] over the past couple years, and she’s such a prolific writer,” says McQuade. “She taught me to be a little bit more decisive on the spot in terms of lyric writing specifically.”

Despite the album’s personal weight, McQuade resists prescribing how listeners should engage with it. “Whatever they desire,” he says of what he hopes listeners take away. But, he hopes the core themes resonate: “I would hope people would find confidence through the record and realize that a lot of people are very self-conscious. It’s okay to love somebody with your whole heart, but also just to guard yourself and be okay with yourself.”

You can stream The Girls Are Stressed below.