Soft Palms Interview: IN ECHO, Black Glitter Vinyl, and the DIY Music Business

There’s a particular kind of band that doesn’t just make records; they build a whole working language around the survival of their career including community, self-reliance, all betwixt the strange weather of modern life. Soft Palms — the Long Beach duo of Julia Kugel and Scott Montoya — are just that.

The duo’s new album, IN ECHO, is not background music and it is not nostalgia. It is a tense, analog-warm, dream-pop-adjacent transmission from the last five years of overload: media panic, emotional burnout, fractured relationships, and that low, constant hum of modern fight-or-flight living. The band has described this new sound as “low-key punk,” which feels about right — not punk as posture, but punk as pressure, restraint, abrasion, and some refusal.

But Soft Palms are also doing something else with this moment. Alongside the album, Kugel and Montoya have written How To Be Self-Reliant In The Music Business, a plainspoken guide - a book - drawn from more than two decades of writing, recording, touring, booking, producing, organizing, and figuring out how to keep going when the music industry keeps asking artists to do more with less.

And for physical media folks, IN ECHO is arriving in a fittingly tactile edition: black glitter vinyl with a band-exclusive Gold Rainbow foil jacket, a hand-screened and autographed insert, a 3-inch glitter sticker, and a 2-inch rainbow glimmer button — those versions are limited to just 75 copies worldwide.

So today’s conversation is about IN ECHO, but it is also about the ecosystem that made it possible: independence, royalties, community, burnout, discipline, survival, and the stubborn belief that artists can still build something meaningful on their own terms.