About

New England quartet Otis Shanty return with their third album Shadow of Doubt, a set of searching, layered indie rock songs. Playing on the idiom "without a shadow of a doubt," the band turns that phrase on its head by focusing on the anxiety, bottomless questioning, and uncertainty that underpins any belief or feeling.

Beginning as college classmates, Otis Shanty has evolved into a true multi-purpose collective. The band moved together to Somerville, MA in 2021 and since then have been active around the Boston music scene—playing festivals, selling out headliners, doing semi-annual tours through the northeast, and opening for touring acts at home. Shadow of Doubt features songs written over the past year, mostly in an apartment sunroom that looks out onto the street. The band's neighbors were kind enough to let them workshop songs at full volume with windows open, the noise spilling out over Prospect Hill. But needing a change of scenery, the band arranged two songwriting retreats—one to the Adirondack mountains last winter and another to Cape Cod this spring.

"Play a song that makes you cry / let a pretty stranger catch your eye / put a whole finger in your mouth / see if you can reach into your snout" singer/multi-instrumentalist Sadye Bobbette intones on opening track "Where to Look for Things," a rousing, psychy rock cut that lyrically and spiritually evokes Samantha Morton's scene-stealing body horror performance of Circe in Nolan's The Odyssey. On the following number, "Around the Bend," Bobbette sings "half a breath and two steps in / I'm a well-oiled machine" which could be said for the band as a unit—the interlocked instrumentation and lilting vocals of singles "Echoes of a Blue Moon", "Hemlock", and "For Once” are buoyed by rhythm section Jono Quinn and Julian Snyder, who also mastered the album; while "Lowballer" features dueling vocals between guitarist Ryan DiLello and Bobbette that intertwine as intricately as their spindly guitarwork, recalling Rather Ripped-era Sonic Youth. Elsewhere, the band recalls The Feelies at both their most excitable and most tender, and crests the same dreamy peaks as fellow Bostonians Horse Jumper of Love, whom the band shares a label with in Disposable America.

Written at the band's namesake "Otis House" and recorded at a former mill building in Big Nice Studios (Squirrel Flower, IAN SWEET, Friendship), the sense of like-minded camaraderie is powerful and palpable on Shadow of Doubt. On each track the band blooms and swells around Bobbette's introspective lyrics and vocals, creating an expressive and widescope sonic palette. In turn, the album's songwriting and lyrics conjure kaleidoscopic, multidimensional details on varying kinds of relationships—romantic, platonic, and existential. The band's more developed and enveloping sound provokes this complex reflection, a funhouse mirror in which Bobbette and the group examine their personal growth from the perspectives of friends, family, and lovers both new and ex. Three albums into their run, Otis Shanty prove beyond a Shadow of Doubt that they deserve to be bulwarks of not just Boston indie rock, but the greater scene as a whole.

Bio by Luke Phillips