Pain Gain (Forrest Green Vinyl)
Pain Gain is the sound of a left turn that became a calling. In 2023, the supergroup trio of Chloe Kaul (Kllo), Hamish Lefevre (SWIM), and Samuel Cooke (CRUSH3d) each shed an electronica persona as they loaded a car with guitars, modular synths and a tape recorder for a weeklong hideaway in the woods. The result is Pain Gain, a debut album that trades velocity for gravity, moving fluidly between indie rock melodrama and expansive pop balladry while rejecting genre as a fixed idea.
Despite folding into the project from different directions, for its bandmates Pain Gain doesn’t posture as a reinvention so much as a recalibration. In stepping away from their solo careers, Kaul, Lefevre, and Cooke together found a shared language rooted in trust, instinct and play. What began as a retreat from their day-to-day lives to the beachside forests of southern Australia soon became something much deeper: the discovery of an entirely new way of working, with an immersive, familial presence, and the result is a debut record that looks for beauty in friction, finding a new start in the wreckage of something past. The journey of Pain Gain is reflected in the converged paths of its creators, in the space they created for themselves. And after its endurance, the only thing left is the sound of an exhale.
Description
Pain Gain is the sound of a left turn that became a calling. In 2023, the supergroup trio of Chloe Kaul (Kllo), Hamish Lefevre (SWIM), and Samuel Cooke (CRUSH3d) each shed an electronica persona as they loaded a car with guitars, modular synths and a tape recorder for a weeklong hideaway in the woods. The result is Pain Gain, a debut album that trades velocity for gravity, moving fluidly between indie rock melodrama and expansive pop balladry while rejecting genre as a fixed idea.
Despite folding into the project from different directions, for its bandmates Pain Gain doesn’t posture as a reinvention so much as a recalibration. In stepping away from their solo careers, Kaul, Lefevre, and Cooke together found a shared language rooted in trust, instinct and play. What began as a retreat from their day-to-day lives to the beachside forests of southern Australia soon became something much deeper: the discovery of an entirely new way of working, with an immersive, familial presence, and the result is a debut record that looks for beauty in friction, finding a new start in the wreckage of something past. The journey of Pain Gain is reflected in the converged paths of its creators, in the space they created for themselves. And after its endurance, the only thing left is the sound of an exhale.
