There’s a kind of quiet power in telling the truth before you fully understand it.
Vs Self writes from that edge, where memory collapses into meaning, and sound becomes a way to carry things too sharp to hold alone. Their work traces a personal geography: blackout years, self-erasure, the slow uncovering of identity.
On Everything Seems Better Now, the title misleads with purpose. It’s not resolution, it’s resistance. The refusal to pretend healing looks like a clean break. What follows is music made in the aftermath. Songs that name joy without choking on it. Songs that hold anger without apology.
Vs Self doesn’t offer clarity so much as they commit to the process of arriving. Each track is a breadcrumb, a confession, a signal flare.
It’s not about becoming someone else. It’s about returning to yourself with nothing left to prove.
I sat down with Kyle Schlenker (guitar/vocals, they/them) of Vs Self to talk about the emotional scaffolding behind the band.
"Between the Knumears split and your newer work, have you noticed a shift in the kind of sadness you’re writing about? Was there something that triggered that change?"
Desert Pt. II and Frances were written during the same time period as the songs on the split. Desert pt. II is about feeling the need for a change of surroundings to match the changes in my life.
Frances is a fully positive song in my eyes. It only hits on sadness to highlight the joy and belonging I’ve found by listening to other peoples’ music. It’s named after Frances Quinlan from Hop Along. They’re my favorite song writer of all time. They came out as Non-Binary around the same time I was figuring out my own gender identity. It made me feel as if I must have been drawn to their music and lyrics because there was something in them that I recognized, even if I didn’t know what it was at the time. It was oddly validating in a very awkward time for me.
I’d say I honestly notice a bigger shift after Everything Seems Better Now. I was still drinking when we wrote that album and was at the lowest point in my life. Despair is the perfect transition song in my opinion with the lyrics fully focusing on how deep of an alcoholic pit I was living in.
Tide & Swell was written a bit more recently and is about finding myself and my gender identity and how that was the missing piece that finally allowed me to get sober. I guess the shift I see is that in the older material I was writing about current sadness, while in the newer material I’m talking about how I finally got past most of it. LJP.HTPaPSTLBM for instance is about friendship. The title as well as one of the verses is a reference to friends’ bands I’ve had some small hand in, whether it be a few practices, a single show, or recording on a song or two. The bands I’m referencing are Littlest John, place., How To Paint a Picture, sunspot, and Travis Lees Beat Movement.
In “Leave Everything” there's this exhausted kind of anger simmering under the surface, almost like the anger is pointed inward as much as outward. Was there a specific event that fed into that double-edged feeling?
Yeah I’d say that the anger in this song is 100% pointed inward. The lyrics are kind of switching perspective between my own thoughts and how I think my ex must have felt, so any outward resentment in the song is still aimed at me. It’s about the longest relationship I’ve ever been in coming to an end because I couldn’t stop drinking. It got to the point where I had broken my promises to get my drinking under control that I just stopped making them. I felt completely powerless.
The title "Yesterday by The Beatles or: Imagine by Yoko Ono as Sung by John Lennon" feels like it's mourning something Why did you frame the song title around two of the most iconic songs about memory and hope?
This song is mourning the time I wasted blacked out and the friendships my drunken/drug fueled paranoia ruined. The title is actually a cop out. The first title I thought of was “Yesterday”, but there must be a million songs with that title. The second title I thought of was “Imagined” so I just gave up.
On the Knumears split, the songs feel like they are grappling with the concept of "home" not just a place but a version of yourself. Was that intentional, or did that sneak up on you after the fact?
The home as place aspect was completely intentional, but the home as a version of myself aspect snuck up on me. I was traveling for work at the time of writing those songs and would spend 6-9 months out of every year living in hotel rooms all up and down the west coast and in Nevada and Arizona. It was a very lonesome experience and I often felt that I had no home. I was also discovering a very different and better version of myself at the time.
Is there a "sleeper" song in your catalog, one you personally feel is one of your most important, even if fans don’t talk about it as much?
Maybe Maudlin. I wrote the lyrics while hanging out with my friends one day. We were watching live videos of Amy Winehouse and the topic of her dying after a relapse came up. We ended up looking up statistics on how often people relapse and how likely they are to die if they do.
How much of "Everything Seems Better Now" was written during a time when things actually felt "better," versus looking back at harder moments?
Everything Seems Better Now was 100% written during hard moments. Greg and I wrote all of our own lyrics on that album and “Everything Seems Better Now” was his line. I don’t know if this was his intention or not, but to me it always felt like a lie, not only to the person the line is being delivered to, but to the speaker as well. I suggested we use the line as the album title because it affected me so much.
