An Interview With Spencer Chamberlain
on slo/tide and The Blur.

slo/tide's The Blur hits differently.

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For many fans, Spencer Chamberlain’s voice is likely best known as the frontman of Underoath, and he has spent two decades screaming into the void for those who needed it most with the Florida-based powerhouse. Stepping away from the intensity of Underoath, Spencer’s solo project slo/tide released its debut album, The Blur, in June of this year. The record drops the breakdowns for breathing room as slo/tide leans into a sense of vulnerability, creating an atmosphere unlike anything we’ve ever heard. Spencer has never been afraid of emotional honesty, but The Blur presents just that in its most exposed form yet; the project carries an emotional weight that listeners can connect to. slo/tide delivers a deeply personal album that trades all of the chaos for vulnerability and hits just as hard. 

So, how did this solo project come to be?

“Well, it’s a bit of a long story. I've been making music my entire life, pre-Underoath, during the breakup, and currently. During Underoath's breakup, I was doing a duo project called Sleepwave. During that time, I had a manager push me out to LA to write with a bunch of strangers, which at the time was unheard of. I ended up making some cool stuff that never came out, but it did inspire what I wanted to try next sonically. Fast forward through the UO reunion, and Sleepwave disbanding, to around COVID hitting, during that time, I was writing a lot of music for/with other artists, and just decided, hey, why not make an album for me. And that’s what I did, I made something I wanted to hear in my car that wasn’t ‘heavy’ ”.

Rather than setting out to make a “solo album,” Spencer approached slo/tide as an experiment, one rooted in curiosity and a love for music in all of its forms. What started as something just for himself slowly became something worth sharing. As he puts it:

“I wanted to use that side of my brain because I do love all sorts of music, of all shapes and forms. I at first had no intention of putting it out. It was just a record I made, but I eventually decided to obviously release it”.

Sometimes an album is born from intention; other times, it starts with boredom, curiosity, and a song that refuses to stay forgotten. For Spencer, slo/tide found its sound in a song that initially lived in limbo, called 'Paranoid':

“I wrote this song with my friend Nick Bailey, which I never used. We were bored and made this song called ‘Paranoid’ that had this kind of indie surf pop feel that I loved. Eventually, I just wanted to make a record that had this vibe and leaned more on a vocal melody than a guitar riff”.​