Haley Dahl – who records as Sloppy Jane – also released her new single/video “Party Anthem” today, which you can watch here. “Party Anthem” is a soaring orchestral ballad that comes on like Kate Bush leading Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Laura Nyro fronting Olivia Tremor Control. It’s accompanied by a captivating video shot in 16 mm and filmed inside the Lost World Caverns in West Virginia, the place where Dahl recorded all of Madison, bringing in 21 bandmates from all around the country to make an impressive and ambitious orchestral album recorded deep inside the caves. It’s the first time someone has ever recorded an entire album in a cave, and the results are sonically stunning; Madison is an astounding, glorious record of highest order melodrama.
For Madison, Dahl spent three years exploring caves that could capture her vision for the album. Her search took her across the USA – obsessing over the different acoustics of each option – before landing on Lost World Caverns. The result is a beautiful, personal labor of love; a sweeping grand gesture, a powerful statement about obsessive love, and about growing into yourself in the aftermath of a life-changing relationship.
Dahl and her 21 bandmates recorded all of Madison from inside the caves from 3pm to 8:30 am each day over the course of two weeks. To access the space, they’d enter through the back of a gift shop, down a long tunnel where they’d walk down 200 feet of stairs to reach the entrance. Dahl and her bandmates did this steep walk with a piano. The ceiling of Lost World Caverns is massively high and is a perfect dome. The inside was also 98 percent humidity, leading to both stellar sound and also problems with tuning and gear. Engineer Ryan Howe sat in his parents Subaru above the cave with his mixing board and computer, and threaded cables down 90 feet through a hole in the ground to the ceiling of the cave.
This album, so fully realized and diligently executed, is a long time coming for Dahl, who has been performing as Sloppy Jane since she was a teenager. In those days, Sloppy Jane was a three-piece punk band. Its earliest members were Phoebe Bridgers on bass, Sarah Cath on guitar, and Imogen Teasley-Vlautin on drums. Now the band has over a dozen members, and has transformed into a chamber pop project. Dahl also learned so much as a musician: on Madison, she learned how to write for chamber instruments and taught herself the piano. The record is difficult to categorize. It’s David Bowie but also when the song “Crying” by Roy Orbison plays at the end of Harmony Korine’s Gummo. It’s My Chemical Romance meets Sgt. Pepper. Courtney Love and Queen. It’s a huge, flowery, velvety thing full of toy horses and stalagmites. It follows one major throughline: a grand gesture so large that it moves the whole Earth. | 
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