Leo: There were a couple songs that were in a similar tempo and had this real catchiness and stickiness to the melodies, and I’m really glad this one made it on. This felt like the clearest thesis. It’s kind of simple and the chords don’t change that much, and the song is about masculinity.
Trey: It is. I like that it’s just acoustic guitar, rock-and-roll. The chord structure and the rhythms and the vocal melody are all pretty masculine to me but I think that the lyrics subvert that initial impression, in a way that feels kind of celebratory and almost like some version of a thesis for the record.
Leo: The bridge is about a coworker I had whose name was Vinny, who I worked really closely with last summer. He offered me a really interesting and new view of what it meant to be an adult male. He drank literally ten red bulls every day and smoked two full packs of cigarettes and had three daughters whose names all rhymed. He was the sweetest, coolest, funniest dude.
Trey: I feel like he represented a refreshing take on being a man.
Leo: Vinny found his way into this record in many ways.
Donna: In what ways do you feel like he was different from what your traditional view of masculinity was?
Leo: A lot of the older guys in my life are really closed off and really hard to talk to. I had seen, like a lot of people have, success as men and as father figures, but I just wasn’t sure how to walk that path myself. Also that is just not me in many ways too.
Trey: I think that that’s something that we kind of share.
Leo: That’s a huge thing we’ve talked about over and over again for years.
Trey: It’s a big part of our friendship; kind of finding our own path in being a man and masculinity because we don’t have role models, or at least I don’t feel like I do. Almost all the men in my life have kind of inflicted damage in ways that feel avoidable. I feel like this song for me has something to do with growing up and seeing men do things and act in ways that are harmful, and trying to break out of it while also finding yourself doing the same things.
Leo: I feel like masculinity has felt really confining, like a prison to me before. I feel like I had a really unhealthy vision of it presented to me. If I judged myself against what I understood masculinity to be in my youth, then I am a total failure. I’m not that, but I am masculine and I am a guy, so where do I fit into it all? It feels like a good time to end the record. I can’t totally explain why, but it’s definitely the last song in the album.
finnish postcard’s debut record “body”: a track-by-track commentary
Words by Donna Borges ★ Photos by Colin Treidler
April 14, 2025
In their home in Pasadena, longtime friends and roommates Leo Dolan and Trey Shilts of Finnish Postcard swear they have found the best way to listen to a record: together in the same room with the lights off and a headphone splitter. Listening, living, and creating in the same space prevents anything from slipping through the cracks of a busy life, fostering transparency that lends itself to closeness both corporeally and spiritually. Somewhere in the ether was the inception of Body, their debut record – reflecting on the parts of being alive that we all face but rarely want to discuss.
Drawing inspiration from Melania Kol to YHWH Nailgun, Body proves that Finnish Postcard is a band that cannot be defined. Organically folding in electronic samples and emo-inspired guitar riffs with their familiar mellow sound, the diverse sonic soundscapes mimic the ebb and flow of our subconscious, as lyrical content tackles concepts like masculinity, corporeal fragility, nostalgia, and the void. This is best reflected in every story behind each track on the record:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your Nothing
Leo: The first part of that song that existed was actually the vocals that happen after the chorus that are wordless – that’s Nicola, Brooke, and Pearce all around one microphone in the garage and they were riffing over a different song actually. I just had that vocal and I chopped it up and rearranged a bunch and wrote the guitar over that. The title was first; I thought it would be cool to have a song called [your nothing], with that “your” because it’s about when you love someone or you get to know someone deeply, you see that everyone has their own relationship with the void. Everyone has a lot of nihilism and doom and gloom in them somewhere, and to love someone is to get to become familiar with that. Like, in what way does complete hopelessness and terror about even existing show up for this person?
Trey: It’s funny because I feel like this song was one that I had to fight to get on the record. I just think it’s so beautiful and it seemed like the sonic temperature that you would expect from us. It felt like a nice acknowledgement of the music up to that point.
Leo: I think it was a good first song in that way. There’s a [sound] at the end that happens, which is actually a recording of a gigantic church organ being tuned that I took on my phone in Utah in a Mormon temple from 60 feet away. There’s just a lot of sounds on that song that were from strange sources or used from other songs. There’s a guitar part that I put in a sampler and it became really rhythmic at the end.
Donna: It’s interesting to talk about the void because I feel like I was getting a lot of existentialism in all the songs [on the record] and lots of the topics I’m thinking about the older I get, when you just start reflecting on things and learning things about the world.
Leo: Life is really terrifying.. Being alive is really, really scary. So, I agree.
Gun Shaped Key
Leo: Gun Shaped Key is about when I broke my hand and I saw the fragility; I had never broken a bone before. It made me feel really exposed and scared and I kind of snapped into this awareness of how much power I have over my own life and a lot of other parts of other people’s lives too. During that period of life when I wrote it, I was dealing with a lot and it seemed very clear to me that this neurotic place I was in did not start with me, that I was dealing with generations upon generations of people behind me who were struggling. I felt like I was carrying the weight of hundreds of people who had had all sorts of successes and failures. That’s what that line “I can feel all of history is happening violent within me” is about, I saw my place in a long lineage of people that I’m related to and friends with.
Trey: I have a memory of the first time you played it for me in this room. Do you remember that? I just remember I loved it, and it was pretty much all there lyrically.
Leo: It was, but it was so different.
Trey: Then I had a really specific vision for how it could be arranged, what the guitar parts could be and what the progression of the song could be.
Leo: It would have been a lot more similar to Your Nothing. It was kind of foggy, way slower. The lead line at the end is so emo.
Trey: It feels very rock-and-roll in a cool way listening to it back.
Leo: That song probably changed the most between writing and recording and it was totally different.
Trey: That was an example of a song too, that we had played as a means of trying to figure out how it should feel in hindsight, I guess. We had that song in our set list for a really long time and then recorded it – which is pretty much the opposite process of most of our music since we’re kind of a recording project first in a lot of ways.
Leo: Gun Shaped Key is about power and realizing that you have a lot of autonomy, which is kind of the wrong word, cause it wasn’t a very good feeling to realize. It’s that the problems I’m dealing with right now did not start with me and it didn’t start with the person who gave it to me. It goes back forever; it’s about the web.
Trey: That’s such a human thing of [realizing] – oh I forgot that my life isn’t just on rails. You have so much power and are capable of so much good and harm. I like the way that that’s expressed in this song.
Leo: When you’re young, you feel bulletproof. You can do anything. You can make all sorts of bad decisions and [the consequences might not] immediately show up but this shit is real fragile, actually. That’s the scary thing to look at.
Asking
Trey: Once Asking was recorded, we were like – okay, that’s gonna be on the record. And then the record was kind of built around it almost.
Leo: Totally, it was the first fencepost for me. Asking was written and recorded in like, an hour?
Trey: It was over three or four hours, but it was in one night.
Leo: The mix is basically the rough mix from that night.
Trey: I wrote Asking after I was working at a cafe at the time and I closed and then I think I actually said… Did I say I’m gonna take a break from music for a couple days?
Leo: Yes, you said you’re gonna try to not write. That’s so you.
Trey: We have this awesome studio in the garage but I was in my bed with my laptop and the vocals and guitar and that song are all just from the laptop mic. The rest are soft synths and drum machines that I already had. It was just one of those things where I felt when I made it, that this felt really special, like this was not mine.
Leo: I never considered any other song to be the first single. That’s how it always felt for me. It’s crazy how long that song has been around too, it’s been a part of my life for a year and a half. We played it at the residency at Permanent Records a year and a half ago.
Trey: I can’t really say what it’s about specifically, but the lyrics are pulled from these scenes. When I was in high school, there was this group of guys that were a few years older, like 20 or so, and they had a house called “The Mansion” they rented that was really shitty. They would basically throw parties for high schoolers there and I would spend a lot of time there, which is just one of those awesome things that, when you’re 20, you look back and you’re like wait, that was actually weird… But at the time it was really this place where I was just exposed to so much; it was kind of this place with no rules and so many things happened around it. It spoke to a certain earnestness and fragility in confronting the strangenesses of becoming aware of the weird shit of life – the bridge between childlike innocence and realizing there’s a guy with a knife that said that he could kill us if he wanted to, and it would be really easy.
I Almost Missed Everything
Leo: This song is about realizing how close you were to not doing the thing that now you couldn’t imagine living without – like how specific people can enter your life and expose you to this whole new world of beauty. How sometimes it takes a certain person to get you into a genre of music or something, and that’s the first time that you’re like maybe I’ll give it a chance. We used to play that song in early 2023 and it was a totally different song.
Trey: It was a little more straight ahead – rock-and-roll and bigger. It just kept not getting released because something kept not being quite right. I feel like it changed when you recorded a version with your drum machine and it brought it to a smaller place.
Leo: Definitely still very inspired by early aughts guitar bands that were making surging, fast rock-and-roll music. Trey changed the guitar part completely and I thought it sounded like a Finnish Postcard song finally.
Trey: I kept having in my head that this didn’t feel like the emotional temperature of the song, so I recorded this other thing. It’s a million tracks of the most quiet, gentle guitar notes. I think we both felt like we got it. It made this song feel a lot more [like you’re] snowed in and looking out the window.
Leo: I wrote all the synth parts on a plane, I remember I just had Logic in front of me on a plane. It’s the best because you have to just sit there, you can’t leave. It feels great to have such a limited toolbox so you have to work with it, [otherwise] you can get total gear paralysis. I wrote that song in like 20 minutes waiting for a phone call that I did not want to take. It was a super tense moment and I just played the easiest chords I could think of.
Trey: Honestly, what I was listening to a lot of at the time was that Samia record. We listened to the song Honey a lot for that period of time. We thought this song is all you need.
Leo: Just tried and true, fast, surging music.
Fever Song
Leo: I got heat exhaustion and I had to go to the hospital and Trey came with me. We had to stay in the hospital until 7am or something. We were in the hospital for like 10 hours.
Trey: The layman probably doesn’t know this about heat exhaustion, but it’s the same thing as heat stroke. It just depends on what your temperature is, and heat stroke is when it hits 104 degrees, I believe. It’s really not good for your brain.
Leo: And you’re losing permanent brain capacity once you’re burning that hot.
Trey: Basically Leo had a really high fever and was acting really crazy and wonky, but I had a show to go to that night so I told one of our roommates hey, you might have to take Leo to the hospital in a little bit. I was at the show and when Leo was getting taken to the hospital and I ultimately just didn’t play that night. Leo went to the hospital, took forever to get seen, and then they said he was okay so we went back home and [his] fever went back up. That happened I think twice but it turned out that we had a faulty thermometer at home that was reading more hot. It was such a stressful and long night.
Leo: I wrote the guitar for Fever Song in my head at the hospital while I had heat exhaustion, and then I recorded it a couple days later.
Trey: It’s funny because listening to it too, I can totally feel being in your head when you have that fever brain and your eyes are closed. Whenever I have fever brain, I think I’m in the middle of a conversation with somebody and then I open my eyes and I’m alone in my room.
Leo: It’s the most horrible mind palace. And then our friend Isabella sang on that, it’s all indicative of what we were into like the Casio keyboard with the flute setting. We saw Claire Rousay play at Human Resources. Her music has a lot of crinkling and scraping noises in it, so I recorded a lot of paper noises and drumsticks clacking in that song. They’re all kind of in this bed of very quiet rhythms just looping. That was lowkey a life-changer, that Claire Rousay performance.
Strawberry Smell
Trey: We wrote Strawberry Smell together. [We were] listening to a lot of Acetone and we wrote the main riff and the lyrics came really fast.
Leo: I was listening to the third DIIV album a lot and I wanted the end to have a big riff. The way we ended up doing the riff is not really a riff, and it’s definitely not the way DIIV would do it.
Trey: It’s kind of just a moment, it’s synchronized and meditative and long. There were so many extra elements that we were going to maybe add to this song, that we ended up taking literally almost all of them out. I think that’s an important part, and something that we’ve done a lot of times.
Leo: There were a bunch of tracks, like there was an Indian vocal chant in that song and there was a grime rapper yelling really quietly in the mix. I thought it was cool, but it felt forced.
Trey: We needed to do it to realize that we know what the song’s about, and it’s not that. Now it’s literally just a rock band song.
A Door
Trey: This record starts in a very familiar place for us; the first full half is pretty familiar. And I feel like Strawberry Smell starts this trip into new territory, where it’s a little bit more angular and brooding and minimal. I was thinking about our friend Ethan when I wrote the guitar part for [A Door], I was thinking about what guitar part he would like.
Leo: He has great taste.
Trey: I never talked to him about that, and I don’t even really think about that very often, but it kind of all started from the guitar part and a certain rhythmic feeling. This song’s basically about connection and the extent to which somebody is willing to or is able to see the full world of stuff that you are and what you have inside of you. It’s an expression of how frustrating it is sometimes; it’s a cathartic song.
Leo: It’s really fun to play live. It’s my favorite part of the live set right now. The only way I changed it was to make the outro twice as long.
Trey: Liam, our friend who drummed on that, just crushed it.
Nightsick
Trey: I feel like Nightsick is my version of my influences in emo and pop-punk adjacent music. I used to watch these YouTube videos of third or fourth wave emo bands in Philly playing basement shows, and this was kind of my version of a song that’s us doing that basically.
Leo: Pearce called it the prog-y emo song. We also got kind of obsessed with making really short songs.
Trey: We learned that it doesn’t matter. I built up this thing in my head where I thought songs have to be long, and the longer they are the better you are which is a weird subconscious thing that was there for a long time.
Leo: Nightsick was the one exception where we decided we can have one song that’s kind of long on the album. That’s the only song that’s above four minutes from the album.
Big Old House
Leo: Trey wrote it late at night and he showed it to me the next morning while we were both heading out the door to work.
Trey: I remember I showed you on my headphones and you heard it weird. You thought it was crazy and different keys but I feel like it was just early in the morning and really loud on the headphones.
Leo: It’s one where the bones were really good and we went a little different on the production. There were more electronic elements in that song; there’s a big auto-tuned melodica wash at the end. I love that song with all three parts of it, nothing repeats.
Trey: It’s very progressive. In my head when I was writing the lyrics, I almost wanted to write a Shel Silverstein poem about the weird period of time where you have graduated from high school and you aren’t anything yet, but you’re technically free to do whatever.
Leo: The opening of the world.
Kolesq
Leo: The whole bed of the song is little snippets of Finnish Postcard rehearsals, a collection of rehearsals from when we were rehearsing for the residency at Permanent Records. The compression on the iPhone is really cool where if you’re really loud, it’ll fade away for like two seconds and you can hear the room. Listening to iPhone recordings, especially of a loud thing, can be a kind of disorienting sonic experience. We just collaged Finnish Postcard rehearsals with that guitar over it and then and then you wrote the vocals in your head at work.
Trey: I was getting used to having a desk job and so much in my life was at this job, but I had this phase where I would write stuff in my head and then play it later and be like, oh, it actually sounds like how it sounded in my head. There’s only a few lyrics in this song, but they’re from this specific feeling that I remember having. It’s so potent, this feeling of driving home with my grandma after visiting my brother who had just gone to college. We went to visit him and went grocery shopping with him and it was just so amazing that I was seeing my brother again because he had been away at college. I realized oh, you’re independent now, this is so crazy, I wanna be like you so bad, I wanna be older.
Leo: It’s an interesting song for sure, but it came out in a true way. I feel like making music where you’re collaging together sounds can often come from an intellectual place, which is not how this band feels.
Trey: There’s something about this one that just felt right and resonated with the heart.
Answer You Say
Leo: There were a couple songs that were in a similar tempo and had this real catchiness and stickiness to the melodies, and I’m really glad this one made it on. This felt like the clearest thesis. It’s kind of simple and the chords don’t change that much, and the song is about masculinity.
Trey: It is. I like that it’s just acoustic guitar, rock-and-roll. The chord structure and the rhythms and the vocal melody are all pretty masculine to me but I think that the lyrics subvert that initial impression, in a way that feels kind of celebratory and almost like some version of a thesis for the record.
Leo: The bridge is about a coworker I had whose name was Vinny, who I worked really closely with last summer. He offered me a really interesting and new view of what it meant to be an adult male. He drank literally ten red bulls every day and smoked two full packs of cigarettes and had three daughters whose names all rhymed. He was the sweetest, coolest, funniest dude.
Trey: I feel like he represented a refreshing take on being a man.
Leo: Vinny found his way into this record in many ways.
Donna: In what ways do you feel like he was different from what your traditional view of masculinity was?
Leo: A lot of the older guys in my life are really closed off and really hard to talk to. I had seen, like a lot of people have, success as men and as father figures, but I just wasn’t sure how to walk that path myself. Also that is just not me in many ways too.
Trey: I think that that’s something that we kind of share.
Leo: That’s a huge thing we’ve talked about over and over again for years.
Trey: It’s a big part of our friendship; kind of finding our own path in being a man and masculinity because we don’t have role models, or at least I don’t feel like I do. Almost all the men in my life have kind of inflicted damage in ways that feel avoidable. I feel like this song for me has something to do with growing up and seeing men do things and act in ways that are harmful, and trying to break out of it while also finding yourself doing the same things.
Leo: I feel like masculinity has felt really confining, like a prison to me before. I feel like I had a really unhealthy vision of it presented to me. If I judged myself against what I understood masculinity to be in my youth, then I am a total failure. I’m not that, but I am masculine and I am a guy, so where do I fit into it all? It feels like a good time to end the record. I can’t totally explain why, but it’s definitely the last song in the album.
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