For Neptune’s Core, their latest album Pivot, out now, seems to have arrived after a long period of becoming. The Chicago-bred band (made up of two sets of sisters, Sofie and Hannah Richter and Jackie and Kaitlin Cywinski) has spent years with a bond that only comes from knowing each other on such an intimate level, evolving that bond into a band that continues to grow together. The result is a debut album that feels comfortable with contradiction, and offers songwriting prowess that belies a group of young artists releasing their debut album, feeling more like an album released by a veteran band. Within its eleven tracks sit songs that can be tender, loud, playful, stripped back, and restless all at once, whilst still remaining cohesive. 

That range came naturally to the band. “It all comes from the same honest place,” Sofie Richter says. “We always put our genuine self into our music, so inherently all of the songs will be knit together through that.”

The record also reflects years of personal history reflected within the band. The four have, in every sense, started from zero together. But, Sofie says that shared beginning still informs the way they make music all these years later. “A lot of our teachings and the way that we approach songwriting and just playing music is one and the same because we have such a similar foundation,” she says. “I think we kind of have almost some sort of telepathy when it comes to creating music and performing it too.”

For Jackie, that familiarity provides a sense of comfort that makes the harder parts of collaboration easier. Writing songs within a group requires room for disagreement, and just the nature being sisters alone means that each member has already seen plenty of one another beyond the studio. “We’ve seen the worst and the best of each other,” she says. “We’re able to go through those harder conversations and know that there’s still mutual respect at the end of it.”

That openness and ease carries into Pivot, a record that was assembled across three recording sessions over roughly two and a half years. Kaitlin says that the band had written a sporadic group of songs that had been ruminating for a while, until they finally reached a point where releasing them felt necessary. “We were just kind of like, ‘we need to release this, reset,’” she says. “Like, this is who we are.”

The album was initially going to be called Cut My Garden Bare, after one of its songs, but the band eventually recognized something larger in the idea of Pivot: a period of growth and change. “We wanted to present it as like a pivot or just as like a moment of growth and change and development for us,” Kaitlin says.

There is a sense of rediscovery in that idea. Though the band has released music before, having released singles and EPs for years, there’s an inherit change (or pivot, so to speak) that comes with the milestone of releasing a debut full length album. “We want [this album release] to kind of feel like our first time because we have a new identity,” she says. “We want to make it clear that we’re putting our foot down and saying that we’ve evolved and changed since a lot of people have last seen us.”

Along with choosing an album title, the band understood the value in using track sequencing as an essential part of selling the record’s overall story. Jackie says the band spent considerable time deciding how the songs should sit beside one another, with the more stripped-down “Mind Blinker” and “Skeleton” bookending the record. “There’s a shape to it,” she says.

That shape allows the album to move freely between its different moods. For example, “Skeleton” is particularly bare, giving a literal meaning to a “bare bones” track, while “Easel” went through a significant transformation in the studio. Sofie says the latter song began as something much slower and more acoustic before the band sped it up, added layers, and pushed it toward rock. “We just felt very free in the studio,” she says. “We felt very comfortable to just literally try anything.”

That sense of freedom is well reflected across every one of Pivot’s tracks. The songs don’t seem interested in staying in one emotional register for too long, being open to taking the listener on an emotional and sonic rollercoaster, while still remaining cohesive. The band wanted the record to, as Sofie says, “showcase all of what we can do,” and the sequencing keeps its lighter and heavier moments in conversation with each other.

While the band clearly operates as a coherent unit, Kaitlin and Jackie are the first to admit that the process of getting to the crux of a song often lies with Sofie’s knack for songwriting. She typically starts with a melody, allowing lyrics to arrive later. Sometimes the words emerge from something as ordinary as a phrase overheard or imagined. “Cut My Garden Bare” began with the line “she told me to trim those weeds, so I cut my garden bare,” which came to Sofie while she was in the shower.

“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that is meaningful. I want to write a song based on this,’” she says. From there, the song moves into the hands of the rest of the band. Sofie doesn’t necessarily arrive with a detailed blueprint for what everyone else should play. “I can’t tell Kaitlin to play this part, or not to play this part. It’s up to her to decide. And same with Jackie. Same with Hannah,” she says. “What they add, it just adds so much to the song, and it really just makes it complete.”

But the collaboration doesn’t stop when the song is finally written or when recording’s finished. The band puts just as much thought into their live performances. Growing up around Chicago’s independent music community gave Neptune’s Core plenty of examples of what a compelling show could look like. Kaitlin points to the city’s smaller venues and the opportunities they provided as an important part of the band’s development, from early shows at Old Town School of Folk Music to opening slots at places like Schubas Tavern and Metro Music Hall. Sofie sees that community as something deeply shared. “There are so many artists who really seek to uplift others,” she says. “We all have this shared value of honest performance and honest music.”

Opening for Twin Peaks over the last year brought that lesson into sharper focus as they found themselves not only performing on larger stages, but alongside a band they had grown up listening to. “You kind of have to put your all out there,” Jackie says. “[Twin Peaks] just existing and allowing us to share the stage with them pushed us to have better stage presence and more energy.”

For Kaitlin, that energy is something the band hopes to pass along. “The energy is contagious,” she says. “We want to be able to contribute with that and connect with people in the same way, whether that be through just sheer energy or melody or rhythm or lyrics or whatever ways that we can exchange energy with the audience and share in the emotion and experience of music.”

When I ask the band what kind of memories they hope listening to Pivot years from now may bring back, they wistfully reflect on particular shows, recording sessions, or nights in Chicago. For now, though, the memories seem less tied to individual moments than to the feeling of making the record together.

“I just felt so incredibly in the moment and joyous and just fully like myself,” Sofie says. “I think in five or 10 years I’ll look back so fondly on the record and just the creative process and just all the love that was put into it and all the laughs. We just had so much fun creating this record.”

Kaitlin describes something similar: “Whenever it’s the four of us in the studio together, it kind of just takes us to the same creative place in our mind.”

For Neptune’s Core, that place has taken years to reach. Pivot is what they found there.

Pivot is out now.

_{Photos by Braeden Long}