SCALED ALPS made LET THE ALPINE PLAY at speed: two days of demos, two days in the studio, and sixteen tracks that refuse a single genre. Vocalist and lyricist James Quentin Devine spoke with Leerecs about the record's four-person chemistry, its Los Angeles pulse, the hand-numbered CD edition and what it means to work outside conventional industry channels.

Explore LET THE ALPINE PLAY in the Leerecs Rock Registry, or listen through the official Bandcamp release.

From thirty demos to sixteen tracks

Leerecs: You described two days of writing and demos followed by two days in the studio. What was already decided when you went in, and what changed once the four of you were playing together?

James Quentin Devine: I don't know that anything was preconceived. Everything was really up in the air. I picked up Anthony Percoco, the other composing member of the band, at Burbank Airport and we immediately shuttled off to the studio.

We spent two days in the smaller B-room at The Altar Studios with extremely minimal gear and recorded 30 demos in the span of two days, which were then whittled down to the sixteen tracks recorded in the main studio that you'll find on Let the Alpine Play.

We didn't go in with any explicit genre concerns or expectations, and I think that's readily apparent in the finished product, which is full of wildly-varying material that nevertheless retains a throughline, an essence, a distinct personality.

Sean McCarthy's drumming on the record brought a sense of both lyricism and a martial intensity to the affair and Steve Fishman's bass performances rounded out a lot of the ideas that Anthony and I had brought to the table.

How do you build the balance between vocals, guitars, keyboards, drums, and upright or electric bass? What does each player bring that changes the direction of a song?

SCALED ALPS is a pretty top-down affair, truth be told — I know a lot of people want to hear that it's some democratic process or whatever, but it's not. If Anthony and I agree on an idea, that's the idea. That said, we try to leave room for the players involved to bring their own touch, nuance, and expression to the project. I'd say that Steve's buoyant bass on “Space/Time” and Sean's elegiac, frenetic performance on “I Think We Met in Setagaya (Maybe It Was Seville)” may be the most obvious examples of the players we elected to work with making a strong imprint on the finished material.

Balancing the instrumentation is tricky — Anthony's a multi-instrumentalist, which is an asset that can leave you spoiled for choice. Give him something with keys or strings on it and he'll start spinning things up for you. At this point he's primarily a pianist, which conveniently suits my vocal register. The choices to emphasize different instruments are really contingent on the needs of the songs — a track like “Pink Diamonds” for example could not be much more intense and bass-heavy, whereas a track like “T.T.M.S. (Sunyata)” requires a light touch.

Knowing when an idea is finished

The sixteen tracks range from the brief “Selling It” to “Slow Motion.” How did you decide the sequence and the amount of space each idea needed?

We tried to trim as much fat as we could. If someone wants to hear a chorus again, or extend a track, or whatever it is they think we should have done differently, it's easy to achieve on the user's end. The album was produced with full knowledge that we live in an era where it can easily be decompiled, reassembled, reworked, rejiggered, adjusted, etc.

When an idea felt spent or exhausted, we let it be.

The sequencing scarcely differs from the order in which the tracks were recorded, which was primarily an accident of fate. We moved a few tracks around, but it all kind of fell in the right place, especially once we tightened up some of the intros and outros.

How does Los Angeles enter the record—in its places, rhythms, people, or imagery?

Los Angeles enters the record like a hollowpoint bullet. Whether it comes out the other side or hits the spinal cord's hard to say. I'd say that “Muffler (Chroma Viscera)” and “You Got H-O-R-S, You Want E Too?” are probably the most “L.A.” tracks on the record. There is a sense of abandon here, lawlessness, that is simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

“It's warm blood”

When did the hand-numbered CD edition become part of the project? What does its physical form communicate that streaming cannot?

Confidence, if nothing else. Pressed hubris. It takes nothing, or next to it, to push a recording to streaming services, at which point you're now competing with all manner of bot farms, payola-enabled musikprodukt, post-human output, AI-generated bullshit.

A CD's a commodity like anything else, but it's something you can pull out of a jacket pocket and hand someone. It's warm blood.

What is the Owner's Manual meant to add to the listening experience, and how should someone approach it alongside the album?

It functions like any album insert might, really. Window dressing, but well done, or so we hope.

Read the official Owner's Manual.

Outside the club

What has releasing through BLUE HELL let you do on your own terms, and what has been hardest about getting the work discovered and accurately documented?

Conventional record labels are dead as a doornail, with few exceptions. They have little or nothing to offer us, and believe me — they've tried. Their primary value is identical to that of any other vestigial entrenched cartel, which is to say that they effectively function as a protection racket that ensures that nothing other than neutered pre-approved sanctioned pseudo-cultural capital-P Product appears on the radar of the sort of person who might be influenced by novel ideas.

This obviously creates some problems for us, because we're Not in the Club. So what do we do? We've got to jump the fence, kick in the door, scramble the security cameras, and get it our own way. Distribution's the bottleneck, and far too many people are beneficiaries of the deliberate sludge for it to be solved by some free market, fair market-type idea. The reality of regulatory capture means that agile, novel, individual actors have the deck stacked against them from the jump.

What would you most like a first-time listener to notice, and what is next for SCALED ALPS?

Their own unconscious or subconscious sensory reaction to the overall package, the “total work of art,” the Gesamtkunstwerk if you'll allow me flagrant pomposity. Take the record on a ride or let it take you on one, then see what happens next. Ideally you'll want to paint, or pick up an instrument or implement of your own, maybe go on a long walk or make that phone call you've been waiting to make. I am disposable, literally. What you get from the record is yours. Take it.

LET THE ALPINE PLAY was released digitally by BLUE HELL on July 24, 2026. SCALED ALPS is James Quentin Devine (vocals and lyrics), Anthony Percoco (guitars and keyboards), Sean McCarthy (drums), and Steve Fishman (upright and electric bass). The album was recorded by Stewart Tuttle at The Altar Studios in North Hollywood.