Date Signed: September 2024
Label: SideOneDummy Records
Type of Music: Indie Rock
Publicity: Caroline Borolla, Clarion Call Media
A&R: Phil Bender-Simon
When two business entities enter into contract negotiations, risk factors of indeterminate size are almost always at play like bargaining chips on both ends of the conference-room table. Some markets are less volatile than others; the art-business market is on the other end of the spectrum.
With that in mind, when a band meets with a label to sign a deal, they are wise to tuck an ace card up their sleeve: a new, unreleased record that can have enormous value as a bargaining chip. A completed album can even function as a brass ring that clinches a contract.
Frontman James Palko and partner Matt Cook of Brooklyn brawlers Pretty Rude had that secret weapon—an already completed record—when they attended the annual Good Things Are Happening Fest in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was there that they met SideOneDummy Records President Phil Bender-Simon through a mutual friend, Palko recalls.
Palko further details the circumstances surrounding Pretty Rude’s eventual signing to the label, “We met [SideOneDummy Label Manager Phil Bender-Simon] at the fest because he was managing our friends in Carpoo." “Technically, when the record was finished in mid-May of last year, we signed the papers and started planning the release,” Cook adds. “There was a general excitement and good hang between each other. And when we showed him what we were working on with [Pretty Rude’s debut LP, Ripe], he was super-excited and kept following up."
“Plenty of people and labels can express excitement [over a young band’s music] and then disappear into an email thread,” Cook continues. “But Phil checked in with us and constantly asked what we were up to and how things were going.”
Palko chimes in: “So it felt natural to finish the record with Phil. And since then, it's been nothing but a positive rollout [with Bender-Simon]. By the time we got to the last track [‘No Moment'], I think that I had more or less exhausted all the things that I had wanted to say.”
He continues: “I feel like the last song really encapsulates the mood of the record. The lyrics on that song are about how not everyone gets to win. Sometimes you end up being some guy who has a reckoning about whether they’re going to continue to pursue music or figure something else out.”
With the wind at their sails and a fertile fanbase growing at a rapid clip, don’t expect Pretty Rude to throw in the towel anytime soon. As Larry David would quip, the band is doing "prettay, prettay, prettay good.”
