Mintz: All four songs are from the same era. The songs [from Shelly 2 EP] are from five years ago, but with current updates and reflections. “Hartwell” was a Voice Memo I sent Josh in 2019. “Cross Your Mind” was a demo I made in 2020 that I think we had in our group chat, where we would just send ideas that we thought would be good for the band and then we would forget about all of it. A year would go by, and we’d collect the demos that we want to work on, and then we’d forget about it again, and then we would just come back to it. In April, we gathered demos that we wanted to cut, and earlier this summer was the first time we actually went to a studio to reproduce a lot of the older ideas and make them sound a little bit more professional.

Getzug: I remember we all stayed at a house together during Coachella weekend, and we had the best time swimming and running around. One night, we were like, “Should we see what happens and just go to the studio? When we get back to New York, let’s try a day or two and just re-record things and see how it goes.”

Mehling: I would say 95% of the time, it was just us doing bits. The other 5% is the actual recording. I feel like half of the day was just us finally getting to be in the same room, just the four of us, which doesn’t happen that often. The first or second day, it was a lot of us just goofing off and hanging out. And then in the last hour, it just all comes together.

Getzug: I think if you look back to five years ago, from 2020 to 2025 we lived through a lot of experiences. That inherently changes your outlook on your taste and your creative process, too. Shelly 1, it’s fun, it’s messy. At 25 I’m still having fun, but now I’m a little bit more responsible. I’m working on myself. I just think it’s cool how that is reflected [in the music].

Cottrill: A lot of bands talk about “demo-itis” which is falling in love with your demo. If it gets produced out, you sort of just lose the magic, and you always revisit how the specific demo sounds. With “Steeeam” and “Natural,” we kept those as demos. It was finished to us, it was perfect to us. So I think when we were working on the Shelly 2 EP, we’d be very careful to not lose the demo feeling, or what we loved so much about [those songs], and why we held onto them for so long. There was some additional production, but we kept it the same.