Talking Sadcore and Melancholia With Denver Singer-Songwriter Isadora Eden

Isadora Eden enjoys making melancholy music. Her songs, she suggests, are typically best enjoyed while walking home alone after a party or doom-scrolling in bed until the sun comes up. Her latest single, “Haunted,” which dropped February 24, evokes nostalgia, sending listeners' minds to their own hometown, driving around aimlessly while thinking about calling their best friend from high school.

Experience the phenomenon yourself at the Skylark Lounge on Monday, March 20, when Eden opens for Laveda; Autumnal is also providing support. Eden will be at the Skylark again on Wednesday, March 29, opening for Cal in Red and Mainland Break.

On the surface, Eden’s voice is nothing but sweet and soothing, like milk and honey, but it’s her words that turn the song sour: “Some days I think I’d kill you," she sings. "Some days it’s all in my head."

A self-described “sad slowcore” addict, Eden lists the Cure, Tomberlin, Elliott Smith, Frightened Rabbit and Soccer Mommy as just some of her many muses. Her collaboration with Duke Justice on a rendition of Bush’s 1994 hit “Glycerine” is so heartbroken that the source material doesn’t immediately reveal itself, with the two essentially making it their own original.

The trick, she says, is to make tunes that aren’t too sulky. Mixing in a buoyant beat tends to cut the poignancy, which is where her collaborator and drummer, Sumner Erhard, comes in.

“I like just really sad music a lot more than Sumner does, and I think that’s what makes it a nice balance. I love sad music, but I don’t want to write a full album that’s just slow, sad and relentless. I think writing with Sumner, he brings a little bit more upbeat elements,” she explains. “For example, Frightened Rabbit, some of their songs sound devastating, but some of them sound like an upbeat pop songs, and then you listen to the lyrics and it’s really sad. Between the two of us, it balances out so we’re not writing super-sad music all the time.”

In that sense, sadness is an art form for the local singer-songwriters, who have described what they’re doing as “fuzz folk.”

“Once we started trying out writing music together, we were able to find this sound that was more of a mix of folk and shoegaze," Eden continues. "That was something that we were both really interested in exploring. And we were able to get a sound that we really liked out of that first single, ‘Anhedonia.’” (That word means the inability to feel pleasure, so, yeah, sadcore.)

Erhard says Dive and Fenne Lily are some of his constant influences that meld well with Eden’s more morose offerings. The result is an upcoming,= eleven-track LP, forget what makes it glow, which is due out July 14 and evokes “real-life horror as it channels not-so-great memories of religion, nostalgia, love and loss,” according to its promotion.

“You know, we met and tried out writing together for that first single and really liked the way our different influences combined, so that last EP [2021’s All Night] is more shoegaze-y,” Eden explains. “This coming album still definitely has shoegaze influences and that dreamy vibe, but it’s a little more vocally focused and has more audible influences of indie pop or indie rock — a little more on the dream-pop side of shoegaze.”

Erhard agrees, adding, “I feel like this new LP is more of us maturing with that sound, and also introducing more electronic elements and more experimentation.”

Other than the live shows, the duo plans to release three more singles and music videos before the July release date. There are even chimes on the new record, which Eden admits is directly inspired by the Cure. But it wasn’t unusual to pull bits and pieces from both of their favorite artists when creating forget what makes it glow.

“We’ll collaborate on playlists and share a lot of new music that we’ve been listening to a lot recently. … A lot of the sounds that went into the record are like, ‘I really like the drums in this French Kicks album, and I really want that roomy drum sound,’ and just picking out some of those little elements of production and making those all come together into something that’s a blend of something that might be poppy or sad or shoegaze-y or straightforward rock,” Erhard explains. “For a lot of this LP, we would spend a lot of time just talking about music and aspects of songs that we really liked, whether it be structure, production or the tones that are in it.”

The process allowed them to “work on songs individually," Eden adds, "and whatever served the song best, we were going to do."

“I think that it was almost a challenge at the end before recording, because we spent so much time with these songs, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, is it awful? Should we completely overhaul everything?’ — because we just listened to them eighty times,” she says. (For the record, the new music is the furthest thing from awful.)

But it’s that self-deprecation that allows Eden to do what she does. She laughs when she calls the band’s live shows, which also include guitarist Ben Pisano and bassist Jose Amaya, “a gentle roller coaster.” The band typically includes a cover of the Nintendo Wii theme song, too.

“We start with some more upbeat stuff, and then we have some slow sad stuff, but it’s not just a sad cry-fest," she assures. "We have some fun songs."

Isadora Eden, 7 p.m. Monday, March 20, and Wednesday, March 29, Skylark Lounge, 140 South Broadway. Tickets are $12-$15.