Stalemate

Stalemate was a revolving quartet of high school friends from the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island who spent the 2000s making ambitious, eclectic power-pop records while navigating the rapidly changing world of affordable home recording.

True to its name, the band revolved around friendship and the competing songwriting instincts of Cory Waldron and Matt DeMello. Waldron specialized in emotionally direct pop songs informed by the Warped Tour era, often filtering bubblegum hooks through alternative rock, hardcore, and even occasional nü-metal influences. DeMello, meanwhile, was already developing the musical omnivorousness that would later define his solo work, pulling the group toward psychedelia, classic pop craftsmanship, progressive arrangements, and increasingly strange conceptual detours.

The result is a band that often sounds like an impossible collision between The Olivia Tremor Control and New Found Glory: earnest, experimental, melodic, and occasionally gloriously overambitious. Those instincts first emerged on the homemade and wildly eclectic *Grand Experiment* before reaching their fullest realization on 2009's *We Will Carry You Out to Sea*, a remarkably assured studio album that transformed the group's basement-recording origins into something far larger, more polished, and emotionally expansive.

Several musicians who passed through Stalemate's orbit would go on to become fixtures of the Providence independent music community, including Casey Belisle of Rice Cakes and Bradford Krieger of Big Nice Studios and 14 Foot 1.

For longtime followers of Matt DeMello's later work, *Grand Experiment* and *We Will Carry You Out to Sea* offer a glimpse of the foundation beneath the broader discography. The Gershwin-sized ambitions, emotional melancholy, stylistic restlessness, and damn-the-torpedoes production instincts are already present here—first in the exuberant chaos of a garage-band experiment, then in the confidence of a group discovering just how much larger its musical world could become.