Love Stories

Catching up with Thee Sinseers ahead of their new Colemine Records release, Love Stories, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this is not an LP that explores a neat and tidy love story.

The vision of love put forth on this record is full-spectrum. Think of the seminal 1993 East LA film Blood In Blood Out — three protagonists bound together through hardship, strife, and diverging roads, who ultimately circle back to reckon with why they remain. It's a similar story here. Love Stories isn't interested in the happy ending. It's interested in everything that comes before it, after it, and in spite of it.

Of course, none of this is accidental. More than a new record, Love Stories is a portrait of a band that has finally grown into itself — one that knows exactly who it is and isn't shy about saying so. As Quiñones puts it: "It's a solidifying statement of where we are now. This is our style."

Bassist Christopher Manjarrez described that confidence as something you can hear: "Everything was just that notch up." In contrast to Sinseerly Yours, which had developed organically from a four-piece into an eleven-member ensemble, Love Stories was built from the ground up as a collective effort — every role established before the band entered the studio. "We went in knowing these are the roles that are gonna be played by these people," Quiñones says. "Everybody was considered wholeheartedly in every arrangement aspect."

That collective approach extended into the sonic choices themselves. Every member zoomed out — listening not just to their own parts but to the record as a whole, what Quiñones calls thinking like "a beautiful painting" rather than a collection of individual tracks. With that foundation in place, the band handed the final mix to engineer Kelly Finnigan. "We could get so far with our opinions," Quiñones admits, "but at the end of the day there's still 10 or 11 of us trying to figure out what's right." The band also leaned into earthier instrumentation — standup bass, guitars run through amplifiers for a warmer sixties-adjacent tone — pulling inspiration from wherever it presented itself, even the most unlikely of places. It's that cross-genre thinking that Quiñones sees as the record's defining quality. "It didn't feel like we were making soul music at any point," he says. "It felt like we were making our music."

Like an unsent love letter finally delivered, Love Stories carries the weight of everything that was felt but never quite said. The universality of that feeling is perhaps best captured in Quiñones's own words: "It's never too late to change. It's never too late to tell a person you love that you love them." After any song on this record, Eric Johnson says, there's really only one appropriate response. "Damn."