Tree Machines built a safe room in Los Angeles. Not for security of the conventional kind, but for a place to unleash, and make the kind of music that is at once vulnerable and strong, without fear of consequence. Anthems for times that don’t make sense, but carve a path forward. Call it a studio, if you have to. But you don’t have to.

Here, Douglas Wooldridge (vocalist, lyricist), bandmate Patrick Aubry, and producer Mike Giffin (all three contribute to the various instrumentation and music) have been creating Up For Air, the debut Tree Machines full-length album.

The upcoming album follows-up 2015’s debut Tree Machines EP, which contained the single “Fucking Off Today,” an impossible-to-ignore opening salvo that expressed Midwestern malaise (which these former Lawrence, Kansans know all too well) in a new way. That title, yo! Three more Tree Machines singles appeared during the summer of that year.

“Los Angeles is a lonely city.”

Wooldridge knows. Longtime L.A. residents are saturated by this loneliness, except Wooldridge isn’t one of them. Leaving behind a much larger, safer room in Lawrence in 2015 taught him this with a quickness. Moving into a house in the tiny L.A. neighborhood called Canoga Park, the guys turned one of the garages into a tracking room, and filled it up with gear.

“We went down the rabbit hole building a studio out here,” says Giffin. “Researching the right gear for us and the space. We thought it would be quick, but it quickly became eight months.”

Regardless, the band was determined to create a room where they could make music that moved, was moving, and was so much bigger than the space in which it was created. Once recording finally commenced, Wooldridge spent hours upon hours in the vocal booth, sweating bullets under Valley temps that clocked in at 103, with another 10 on top of it because, like they say, vocal booths always add 10 degrees.

“It was fucking worth it.”