Interview with Golden Apples

September 15, 2025

Last month, Atticus had the opportunity to chat with Russell Edling, the frontman and lead creative force behind Golden Apples. In this interview, he told us about the making of Shooting Star, the band’s latest album, as well as his musical inspirations, recording techniques, and the origins of the “Golden Apples” name.

Shooting Star is out this Friday, September 19, on Lame-O Records. Watch the full interview below.

Atticus: We’re about a month away from the album—Shooting Star—when did this whole album process start?

Edling: I think I started writing for it, probably… in the spring of 2024, then wrote and recorded throughout the summer and fall, and then had everything mixed by like December or January. But yeah… it was pretty much totally wrapped up by the start of this year.

Atticus: Wow, so like half a year pretty much?

Edling: Yeah, I guess I kinda was in like, a mode. I had some ideas … floating around for a little while before that; “Breeze” is a song on the new record, and that one is maybe the first one that I had written. I had done a demo of that, maybe like a couple of months after our last record had come out. There were some songs floating around, but then I sort of got more into the writing mode… and I feel like when that starts to happen, it's best to just roll with it.

Atticus: What’s left to do before the album goes live?

Edling: We’re making a music video for another single… I think it’s gonna be done soon, because the next single (“Freeeee”) comes out next Tuesday (watch it here). I have a bunch of merch to print, and then we’re gonna go on a little tour right when the record comes out, so that’ll be cool. Just making sure everything is ready for that.

Atticus: I was looking at the Golden Apples Instagram and it seems like y’all play a lot of shows… When you recorded this album, was the studio process kinda just playing the songs live, or was it more piece-by-piece?

Edling: It’s generally more piece-by-piece. I have a tendency to kinda like… go into mad scientist mode and dissect and tinker a lot. But, there definitely were songs that were more… spontaneous, I guess, like “Devine Blight.” My partner and bandmate Mimi and I kinda just recorded that one real quick one day, and I was like “maybe this will be a demo,” but then I just liked the way we did it, and that’s the version that’s on the record. There’s a song called “Fantasia” that we did most of the tracking for live at my friend Dan Angel’s studio. Those are kinda the exceptions.

Atticus: Are each of the bandmates playing stuff (on the recordings), or is it mostly you playing the instruments?

Edling: Well, I am not good at playing drums, so there’s always someone else playing drums. This record is kind of all over the place as far as who played on what, but the majority of the songs, my friend Zack Robbins played and engineered the drums… Generally speaking, the band that plays live was not really the band that recorded… with the exception of our bassist, everyone who plays live recorded something at some point. Mostly, it's me slowly building things up, bringing people in here and there.

Atticus: Your bandmates are in a lot of other bands… do songs kind of blend in between bands or somehow, between all the groups, y’all find a way to sort stuff out pretty evenly? Do you ever trade or mix-and-match ideas?

Edling: Not really… Usually someone is at the steering wheel creatively for each separate project. Our drummer, Melissa Brain, I don't know how many bands she's in at this moment, but there was a point where she was in like six bands at once. For our record release show here in Philly, every band that’s playing is a band that she generally plays drums for, but she’s only gonna play drums for two of the bands that night. Mimi has a band called Eight, and I play in Eight and Mimi plays in Golden Apples… but I feel like our sensibilities are pretty different, so I don't feel like there’s too much sonic crossover. One thing about the Philadelphia music community is that it is very intermingled, at least our little ward is… everyone is involved in everyone’s records and I really like that… It feels communal in a cool way.

Atticus: One thing I liked in the description of the new album was the quote describing the songs as “songs about writing songs”... are you a big “demo person” before the studio?

Edling: I’m a big “demo person” for sure… in fact, a bunch of the songs on this record are like, weird hybrids of demo tracks with added live drums, which is like a really kinda neurotic move I think. I’ll make a demo, and then I’ll start from scratch; I’ll do the “real version” of it and like, rerecord everything. And then there’s something about the demo that’s like… better. The song “Mind,” our second single for this release, I re-recorded it… changed it a little bit… but then I just didn’t like it. So we took the demo, and Zack just drummed along to it. Sometimes I hear it and I’m like, “man the vocal performance wasn’t really that great…” and there’s some parts where like, maybe I wouldn’t have said the same thing over and over again.

…The more I do this, the more I’m comfortable with just kinda letting it be what it is, if it feels right. It’s hard to allow that to be true sometimes… you think “I can’t just have this song that I recorded in an hour on my laptop, it has to be better than that,” but sometimes it doesn’t.

Atticus: Speaking of recording vocals and stuff… it seems like you have kinda dialed in this warm, fuzzy but not too distorted vocal tone, … it goes with that sometimes demo-esque sound you may end up going with. Are there any specific recording techniques that you would be down to share with us?

Edling: Totally, yeah. I've spent a lot of time trying to find a way to get my vocals to sound like Lou Reed’s vocals in “Take A Walk on the Wild Side”... it's really crisp and kinda dry… it’s really close to feeling overdriven, but it’s not. I think one of the things that I can’t stand the most about vocal sounds is when it just sounds… plain. Some people can really pull that off but my voice doesn’t work with that. I feel like it needs a little bit of an edge to it. One of the things I’ve found is this microphone I borrowed from a friend once, and I bought my own… a Beyerdynamic M 201. I run that into an old Shure limiter… it gets that like, almost blown-out sound… I get it right to that spot where you hear it breaking up a little bit, and it just sounds kinda like from another time. Then I’ll put some reverb or something on there…

Atticus: Nice, I kinda assumed from what I heard that you’re into the analog gear and you like to affect the stuff before it goes into the computer.

Edling: Generally… it does depend though, I do a lot of stuff in the computer for sure. Over the years, I’ve done it a bunch of different ways… the first thing Cherry ever did—which was this band before it was called Golden Apples—this 7” called Gloom, that was all on a tape machine and I didn’t use the computer at all. Every effect was basically a guitar pedal I ran through the mixer… I do like to do that, but with this record and the last one, just the nature of working with a bunch of different people, I would get like the digital [drum] files, and then I would add to it. If I have the actual physical keyboard I do try to do things analog but… I do use plugins and they are cool. Sometimes it feels nice to do the all-analog thing because it feels like, freeing, but I also find that I am really particular about what I want, and sometimes the only way I can get what I want is through a plugin… so you kinda have to pick your battles.

Atticus: Yeah. In this day and age… It's cool to use the gear too, but recording a full studio album would be kinda dumb to do fully through analog gear, without touching the computer at all.

Edling: Unless you have wonderful gear, I don’t, so I kinda make the most of what I have. …Maybe I wouldn’t use a computer if I had the real deal of everything…

Atticus: The challenge of it is wild, like the editing of everything…

Edling: I’ve never been able to figure that out, like the way they used to do things by splicing (tape)… and reading about how The Beatles made their records back in the day with like four-tracks and stuff, it’s unbelievable. It’s a whole other realm of mastery that I don’t think anybody really has today.

Atticus: I love this activity you just announced a day or two ago, having people design 1-of-1 album sleeves through a creative storefront you’re involved with. Is that a studio that you run, or are you just involved with it?

Edling: I’m involved with it, I’m like a co-owner of the Freehand Art Supply store, it’s in Fishtown. We do these art nights every Thursday, so I thought maybe we could do something for the album… a fun get-together to raise some money for some organizations, and make some art. …You’ll still get the record and everything, but you’ll also get this one-of-a-kind art.

Atticus: Are you a record collector?

Edling: I am, but I’m not obsessed with it at the moment. Sometimes I’ll get into these patterns where I’ll be buying, like, at least a record or two a week, but these days not so much. On a whim yesterday, I bought a couple Broken Social Scene albums off of Bandcamp. I had the CDs when I was younger,,, my CD collection is just at my parents’ house now. Those albums—You Forgot It In People and Broken Social Scene—those were so huge for me.

Atticus: I’m not super familiar with that band, but I saw that they just did an anniversary version with a bunch of covers, is that one of the ones you mentioned?

Edling: Yeah. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE—I know those folks pretty well—I think they did a song on that and it's just so crazy because like, I know how much [Broken Social Scene] means to them. It’s really cool that they got to do that.

Atticus: I have one more question. I had to ask this when I saw the name of the band. Do you know about the game Minecraft Ultra Hardcore, or UHC? Are you familiar with Minecraft at all?

Edling: No, I’m too old.

Atticus: In that specific game mode within Minecraft, there’s a very heavy emphasis on the item ‘golden apple…’ It's the only way to regenerate health; you have to make golden apples.

Edling: I will say though, the one thing about the band name that has been funny is how many times it has referenced something for someone… The simplest version of how I arrived at this for a band name was that there’s this song by the band Country Teasers called “Golden Apples,” and it’s a song I really liked. I always thought it was kinda cool when bands would name themselves after other bands’ songs like, so many bands have taken Fugazi songs and made them into band names and stuff. I also really like the band Silver Apples, so It’s kinda like an homage to them in a way too. But I've had so many moments where people have been like, “is it like an The Apples in Stereo reference?” I also think there's a poem by Yates… but I'm just like, “no, but that's cool too!” It feels like all those coincidences… they've gotta mean something.

Atticus: A lot of the players in that game mode would call them “gapples…”

Edling: The funny thing is like… we have a practice space with a shared calendar, and sometimes I would just write “Gapples,” not even knowing the context there.

Atticus: Do you have a favorite type of apple?

Edling: I always get like, the boring looking apples like…

Atticus: Pink Lady, maybe?

Edling: Yeah, Pink Ladies are pretty good, Honeycrisps are good. I remember being a kid and liking like… the Granny Smith apples a lot and like Red Delicious… just like these classic apples. I haven't really eaten an apple in a long time.