Snocaps are a new band, but not really. They’ve only been together a matter of months, and they’ve just surprise-released their debut, but the two mainstays – twins Allison and Katie Crutchfield – have been singing together for most of their lives. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, they were active in the local DIY scene, forming their first band, The Ackleys, when they were in high school and only splitting up when the other members went off to college. They rechristened themselves P.S. Eliot in 2007, released two well-praised albums of earnest, anxious indie rock, then disbanded in 2011 when they simultaneously realised, with twin intuition, that they needed to go in different directions for a while.

Allison quickly formed the scrappy indie-rock group Swearin’ and released an atmospheric, grief-addled solo album in 2017. Her sister Katie started releasing albums as Waxahatchee, her stormy guitar rock gradually transforming into musically graceful, emotionally thorny indie country. The sisters have performed together sporadically during the last 14 years, briefly reuniting PS Eliot in 2016 and performing a festival set in 2023 called “Katie And Allison Crutchfield Sing The Songs They Loved At 16”. They were bound to make music together again at some point; they’re family, after all.

For Snocaps the sisters invited two new people to back them up. MJ Lenderman plays guitar and occasionally drums, and the fact that he does not sing will likely irk fans who loved the way his voice melded so fluidly with Katie’s on Waxahatchee’s “Right Back To It”. Brad Cook returns as a producer after helming the last two Waxahatchee albums, and he occasionally plays bass. On their self-titled debut, the new quartet forge a sound that draws on both sisters’ past projects, but also adds new sounds and settings, which lends Snocaps its own personality even within their shared catalogue.

They dig deep into ’60s rock on “Hide”, which sounds like The Velvet Underground backing The Shirelles. “Brand New City” has the jangly buoyancy of The Byrds, while the rest of the album draws heavily from Byrds acolytes like The Rain Parade and The Bangles, particularly on the bouncy “Over Our Heads”. Thanks to Lenderman’s chiming guitars and the spry beats of whoever happens to be drumming, Snocaps sounds crisp, catchy, like the Paisley Underground was founded in the Deep South. 

Both Crutchfield sisters sound more comfortable in their own skin, more confident in their lyrics and vocals, as though bringing all those years apart to bear on the sessions. While they avoid making a big-statement kind of album, there’s a casual quality to the music, a sense of simple joy and escape – a rejoicing in each other’s presence. Of course their voices blend beautifully, just as they did in previous bands. Lenderman adds some punchy riffs and ominous textures to these songs (the distortion on “Hide” sounds like Spanish moss hanging off tree branches), but both he and Cook give the sisters a lot of space. Their performances, especially their vocals, are the heart of every song here; whichever Crutchfield is singing lead, they lock into what in country circles is called blood harmony: that supernaturally close, intimate togetherness that presumably only immediate family can achieve. Often it’s impossible to tell who is even singing, or if they’re singing harmony or unison, which only makes the songs sound wittier, wiser, more wounded. It also suggests a heightened sense of camaraderie that extends to the listener, too, although with repeated spins each twin’s own personality shines through: Allison penning the scrappier, catchier songs, Katie more prone to slower tempos and quieter moments.

Snocaps doesn’t constitute a reunion necessarily, but these songs do measure the distance both women have traveled in the last decade and a half. That’s nowhere more obvious than on “Coast” and “Coast II”. The former opens the album, with Allison describing her pedal-to-the-metal approach to life that leads, in this case, to one of the most exuberant choruses either of them has set to tape. “I could never just coast,” they yelp together, and the moment is so celebratory that they had to recruit new people to sing along. The starkly lo-fi closer “Coast II”, on the other hand, sounds like a demo recorded ages ago, when they were just starting out: Allison singing the chorus, Katie strumming along, and some birds chirping in the trees. It’s a surprisingly poignant set of parentheses for the album, an admission that they couldn’t have made this album at any time in the past or by themselves.