Broken Dreams Club Interview: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Photo Credit: Pavla Kopecna
After breaking up in 2019, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart re-formed last year to support the 15-year anniversary of their beloved debut album. The dreampop band, signed to Oakland’s Slumberland Records, has a unique kinship with the Bay Area, as their influence is clearly found in the cohort of janglepop groups populating the current local music scene.
On February 19 and 20, the band will return to San Francisco for their first shows in the city in nine years, when they headline two performances at the Rickshaw Stop as part of the annual Noise Pop Festival. They’ll be supported by a collection of amazing Bay Area bands, including Cindy, Chime School and Still Ruins.
Broken Dreams Club connected with Kip Berman, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s founder, vocalist and guitarist, prior to the group’s SF shows:
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have this string of West Coast dates lined up for this month. How are you all preparing for this latest tour?
Kip Berman (KB): We made some shirts, rented a minivan, booked some Motel 6’s, we’re mooching amps and drums from friends…So, I think we’re “prepared.”
You all toured so extensively in 2025 after not playing live (in any iteration) for seven years. What was it like playing those shows? Did things fall back into place seamlessly—we're you all able to pick up right where you left off, or did it take a little while of playing together for that chemistry to return?
KB: It was super cool just being around each other– and I was kind of surprised to see people were still into these songs, which are now pretty old. And thankfully, we didn’t forget how to play the D chord.
You announced that Pains was breaking up back in 2019. What prompted the decision to return to this project? At the time you announced the breakup, did you ever anticipate that the band could re-form in some manner?
KB: No, not really. When my daughter was born in 2016, I was focusing on being home with her and not thinking about much else. We tried to do a couple two week tours in 2018, but it was just too soon and felt kind of weird to be away. Then my son was born later that year, and I was just focused on that and kind of figured playing PAINS shows wasn’t going to happen anymore. But it wasn’t a sad feeling, ‘cuz it seemed like we had gotten to do way more cool stuff than many of the bands that we looked up to– and it wasn’t ending for a sad or tragic reason, but pretty much the opposite.
Coming together again was likewise ,“not thought through too much.” We got asked to play some shows in Spain, and now that my kids are a lot older (They’re now in 4th grade and 1st grade) it seemed like it was actually possible to be away for a little bit. And when I asked the other PAINS about it, they were into it. But still, I don’t want to go away for a too-long time.
You also returned with the full original lineup, featuring yourself, Peggy, Christoph Alex and Kurt. How important was it for Pains to come back with all those members contributing to this second act?
KB: Man, I think it’s been so wonderful they’ve all been into playing, I really appreciate that. I think creatively, it makes a difference. ‘Cuz when I write songs for PAINS, I’m trying to impress the other PAINS. I’m not a great judge of my own stuff, and I’m usually really negative. I think that’s ok, but sometimes it just stops me from doing stuff. So having them around makes me inspired to try to write songs that they think are cool. I won’t show them stuff unless I think it’s worth their time.
Had you been keeping in regular touch with your former band members since the band broke up?
KB: I think the first time we all hung out was actually for a Depreciation Guild (Kurt Feldman and Christoph’s band) reunion show in NYC in 2023, and it was fun. Sometimes I worry that reunion shows are sad– and I have seen some sad ones, for sure. First off, it was “definitely not sad” to see Depreciation Guild play again, cuz they sounded great. And that made me realize getting a band back together can be a cool thing– like, I was just really happy to hear those “Preesh” songs again, and maybe people would feel that way about PAINS.
But also, it was good hanging out with everyone that night, and we partied the next night at Kurt’s and it was just… cool, ya know? I know it’s weird, but PAINS was always more about people that were hanging out anyway and “wanna start a band?” than people who came together to start a band. So yeah, I’m glad the feeling was still good between us all.
How easy was it to track them all down to see if they’d be interested in getting the band back together? Was everyone enthusiastic about the idea?
KB: I mean, no one was exactly off the grid, lol. It would be funny if Peggy was like, living in rural Wyoming or something– growing root vegetables and raising alpacas that look like Jim Reid. And I’d have to drive out there and be like, “Peggy, the band needs you.” And she’d be like, “I’m sorry, but the Jim Reid alpacas need me more.”
And just going back to the beginning for a moment. How did you all meet? Did you kind of instantly know that you wanted to create art together with these people?
KB: I drove to New York from Portland with my best friend, Danny Taylor (he’d go on to record some of our early stuff and even drum with us on tour for a bit). I’d been working the graveyard shift at a call center recharging people’s prepaid calling cards and cell phones and playing in bands that never really got anywhere. I loved The Exploding Hearts a lot and a guy at my work, Alex, also liked them, so we bonded over them and The Dirtbombs, Reigning Sound, and a lot of the cool Goner Records and In the Red Records type bands like that. He showed me the My Bloody Valentine Sunny Sundae Smile EP, and I had never heard that era of the band and I was totally into it. Maybe too much, hahaha.
And I met Peggy through a mutual internet friend, Shirley (she did an amazing public access tv show called NY Noise), and I don’t know why we got along so well, but we did. We’d make road sodas and go out to shows at Cake Shop to see bands like Pants Yell, Crystal Stilts, My Teenage Stride, and The Besties, and this cool indiepop dance party called Mondo. Afterwards, we’d go back to her place and just hang out and listen to music – and eventually I’d just pass out on Peggy’s couch and then somehow get to work the next day… and then do it all over. It was like falling in like.
One of the things Peggy and I bonded over was a lot of the Swedish indiepop on labels like Labrador and Sincerely Yours– and we soon learned we had both been obsessed with this New York band from the late 90s/00’s called My Favorite. I think we were their only fans left on earth at the time, but they were THE BEST. They’re up there with The Prids as bands that should be ubiquitous posters on sad teenagers’ walls in some more just universe.
Anyway, Peggy and I had both become hyped on this new band from Leeds called The Manhattan Love Suicides. They had put out a record on Magic Marker Records, which was the label based in the house where I used to go to indiepop house shows back when I lived in Portland. Normally the label put out very sweet and cool indiepop stuff like Dear Nora, All Girl Summer Fun Band, Kissing Book, even the early Voxtrot 7” singles… but this new band was different from that. It was really noisy and nasty sounding, like if a bad babysitter was fronting the Jesus and Mary Chain– it was kind of sinister and sweet. I dunno, we were pretty obsessed and wrote them fan mail. They wrote back! We asked them to cancel one of their upcoming New York shows and let us throw a warehouse party for them instead. They weirdly agreed.
We had no idea how to actually do that, but we did it anyway. I had a friend who was (maybe?) squatting in an old abandoned warehouse who said we could throw a party there. Anyway, Titus Andronicus played too and we decided to start a band to open the show. We wrote about 5 songs, the titles were longer than the songs, and we played for about 10 minutes. Then we drank vanilla vodka and danced all night and fell asleep somewhere in the warehouse. But we picked up the trash the next day, cuz I guess we weren’t total dicks. I remember opening the warehouse doors the next morning and it was soooo bright, and I felt a bit… not great… but also it seemed like the world we were stepping out into was different than the day before. Maybe that’s super corny, but it seemed kind of like something was starting.
We played as a 3 piece for a while with an iPod mini as our drummer. That was ok, but Peggy suggested we ask my roommate Kurt to play drums. Now, I make a big thing about “none of us really knew how to play when we started,” but Kurt was actually really good– and of course he’d say, “actually, drums aren’t really my instrument”-- but he was amazing at drums anyway, and really transformed our sound in a cool way. People reading this should check out the music he’s made subsequently as Ice Choir, he’s such a lunatic and an actual genius. So good.
The debut album sounds so fully formed—almost like it was meant to exist on Slumberland Records. What was your introduction to that label, and how did you end up connecting with Mike and the team about putting out your release?
KB: Peggy and I have been fans of the label since we were actual teenagers. Velocity Girl, Aislers Set, Black Tambourine, Lilys, Rocketship–basically every band they put out was great, and so when the label became active again, we got to be friends with Mike by bugging him on Myspace. Eventually he asked us to open for a band called The Lodger at Cake Shop, and he came to the show and drank too many beers and thought we were cool. Mike’s the best, he really runs his label with a disregard for capitalism, he just puts out records he likes and tries not to lose too much money on them. I don’t think we’ve ever even signed anything with him, but he always treats us so great. I’m glad we’re part of the Slumberland family! I’m also excited about the new bands he is putting out, like Tony Molina, Jeanines, Laughing Chimes, The Cords, Lightheaded… anything he thinks is worthwhile is usually cool in my book.
Were there specific bands on the Slumberland Records label that inspired the Pains’ sound?
KB: I think Aislers Set for sure - that song called “The Walk,” which is outwardly really pretty 60s pop, but Linton is singing pretty candidly about a life of open container violations, jumping turnstiles, and rhyming “watching porn for hours” with “back in the shower.” And it’s all through this lens of sympathy, of understanding, of solidarity. It sits somewhere between Lou Reed and Mo Tucker, an amalgam of tenderness and filth. And also, Peggy and I loved the Velocity Girl song “My Forgotten Favorite,” which is on the Clueless soundtrack, which is an amazing tune. I always like the dirtier, weirder side of indiepop more than the overly twee stuff - that’s why the Glaswegian bands like The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, Close Lobsters, The Pastels, Strawberry Switchblade, Orange Juice [they’re not from Glasgow– but Postcard Records was], JAMC, always were so cool. It was kinda dirty and sweet together.
And I think Slumberland always had noisy, weird kinds of bands, not just the “virtuous” or “correct” kinds of indie bands. There was usually something more going on… I mean, “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge,” ya know? It’s funny.
The reception to that first album was overwhelmingly positive. Pitchfork awarded the release its Best New Album rating and it was overall just a really critically acclaimed record. At the time you were writing the album, did you have an inkling that you were putting something special together? That it would resonate the way that it did—with fans and critics alike?
KB: Definitely no. I remember thinking it wasn’t good enough before it came out, and I was writing the songs of Belong as a sort of “well, if this doesn’t go well, we have these other songs too we could do.” Peggy and I even talked about, “maybe we should scrap the first record, and just focus on these new songs instead.” But I’m glad we didn’t do that.
What was it like revisiting that album as part of the 15th anniversary tour last year? Do you still have fond memories of that album? Is it strange at all to play songs from a time in your life where your circumstances were so different?
KB: I like the songs a lot. I feel really happy playing things like “Everything With You” and “Come Saturday.” I think there’s something really cool about playing a couple chords really loud and just feeling that rush… it’s like the purest feeling, just three minutes outside your own body, it feels weightless.
And “Belong” really reached—if not surpassed—the heights of the debut album, which was no easy feat. What was it like writing that second album, now that you probably felt like the extra weight of expectations?
KB: That’s kind of you to say. We wrote a lot of that record before the first album came out, kind of thinking that maybe the first record “wasn’t good enough.” The one thing that’s hard to convey now is how “weird” it was for us to do that record at all, I mean the way we recorded it and tried to make it sound. At that time, everyone was trying to do purposefully “lo fi” recordings– and the idea of thinking James Iha in shiny pants was the coolest thing in the world was… an unusual perspective at that time.
With Belong, we just wanted to show the kind of lives we had lived and the kind of people we actually were. We weren’t from Glasgow in 1988, even though we loved the bands of that era and felt that music really made sense to our lives. But we grew up in kind of nondescript American suburbs, hung out at the mall with awkward goths, and the radio played Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Hum, The Cure– bands that channeled oversized, unwieldy kinds of emotions.
Someone once told me how it’s so hard to understand how strange and jarring the writing of modernist authors felt in the early 20th century to the readers of that era, because it sounds so normal to our ears. I’m not saying we were innovative like that at all– but on Belong we were doing something really “other” in terms of our ideals than what was happening at that time, and the ability to perceive how “wtf, this is PAINS?” something sounded at that time is lost, because it’s become so normal for bands to make big, shoegazy, dreampop records that aren’t worried about what the Anorak Forum online message board is going to say about it (But seriously Anorak Forum– I still love you guys).
So, Belong sounds pretty “normal” now. And it’s been cool to see people take that kind of ideal and go different places with it. I really love what Winter did on Adult Romantix, and Dilly Dally did on their 2nd album, Heaven, and of course Nøthing continues to be just a crushing kind band that is so pretty, sad and heavy at the same time - I mean, I have no idea how they sound so massive, but it’s pretty jaw dropping to see them live. And thankfully no one is too concerned about “lo fi cred” or whatever these days.
Originally, the tour last year was supposed to be a shorter jaunt celebrating that debut album, but you extended it a few times and now you’re playing again this year. Do you think the band will resume a more regular touring schedule now?
KB: We just try to do stuff that seems cool if we can - but we can’t always say yes to stuff, cuz of “life.” I hope people understand.
And what about new material? Are you working on any news songs at the moment? What are the chances that Pains releases a new album of original material?
KB: We recorded two songs for a 7” for Slumberland. As of writing this, I don’t know when/if that will come out– it’s possible Mike (Slumberland), who hasn’t heard them yet is like, “THESE SONGS ARE TRAAAAASH.” So, we’ll see…
Will you still be making music with The Natvral moniker?
KB: Yeah, for sure. I feel really connected to that music, and have a bunch of new songs, but I’ve tried to prioritize the PAINS right now.
Ok—you’re playing two shows at the Rickshaw Stop here in San Francisco. I might be mistaken, but is this your first show in SF since 2017? Are you excited to be returning to the city? Do you feel like you receive a nice reception when you play here?
KB: Yeah, San Francisco is disproportionately awesome when we play there. Maybe it’s the Slumberland (Oakland) connection, but for whatever reason it’s unusually good and I don’t know why. SF—thank you, your city is very cool. One of our wildest earliest experiences was playing the Rickshaw Stop opening for Deerhunter for (and this shows you how long ago it was) a Myspace show. It was a big deal, hahaha. I remember I broke my guitar string, and Bradford from Deerhunter let me borrow his guitar. Deerhunter were way cool to us… cool band, cool people for sure. My boss at the time (Brooke!) was so cool and she was buds with them from Georgia, and playing that show with them prolly got me an extra six months before I finally got fired for basically just doing PAINS stuff at work constantly, lol.
The Bay Area has such a vibrant indie rock scene, specifically with janglepop bands playing on Slumberland, who sound very much in the vein of Pains. Have you been keeping tabs on the local music scene here at all?
KB: Well, I was a huge fan of Girls, which was a real special band to me. I think Christopher Owens is a gifted songwriter and just… effortlessly cool. I loved Weekend too - Shaun Durkan from that band toured with us a lot back in the day, and now he has a new group called Crushed which is really great. And Tony Molina is massively underrated, I love that guy. Reds, Pinks and Purples are good too. Oh, and back in the day, Aislers Set were gods to us - I think we wanted to sign with Slumberland just cuz Aislers Set were on the label. And when I heard Cindy, I didn’t know they were from SF, though now it makes a lot of sense, and I’m happy they’re playing with us. Finally, there was this San Francisco band called Mover from the late 90s– the drummer was this guy Paul Burkhart, who moved to Portland and started one of my favorite bands of all time, Cocaine Unicorn. He was so funny– and wrote such cool jangle pop songs at a time when everyone was trying to be super “garage rock” - it really stood out. Our song “Hey Paul” is sort of about him. Even though I know the city has been really negatively affected by too much money and a bunch of uncool people — it seems there are still many good artists making music despite all that.
Are you familiar with the bands opening for you all over your two nights? Cindy, Chime School, Living Hour, Still Ruins—these are really some great local outfits.
KB: Yes, we selected the openers ourselves - they’re all bands we really admire, and it’s always been a point of pride that when we play live, we almost always have an opener that’s better than us! I look back at touring with opening bands like Girls, Fear of Men, Twin Shadow, Depreciation Guild, Craft Spells, Weekend, Tony Molina, Twin Sister (Mr. Twin Sister now), The Manhattan Love Suicides, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Ablebody, Flowers, and so many more - it’s really a thing where we try, if we can, to make sure there’s a full night of stuff we love, mostly selfishly cuz we get to see them play each night too.
Anything else I might have missed?
KB: I don’t like to post this stuff to social media, ‘cuz the people that own those companies are owned by the same people who are a part of the problem and making it worse. But I was trying to explain to my daughter who is now 9 about how a preschool child in Minnesota was arrested at gunpoint, people protesting are being murdered by ICE, and families no different than ours being ripped apart for absolutely no reason. I didn’t even know what to say to her except, “it’s evil and it’s not normal– and can’t ever be normal.”
And I get that absolutely no one reading all the way to the end of an interview with “the guy from PAINS” is likely to be on the fence about this, for real I get it. But one of my daughter’s classmate’s dads was taken away by ICE after drop-off the other week-- just a dad doing the exact same thing I do every day, walking his kid to school. And I’m not like, the most thoughtful or eloquent person about this stuff and I’m sure people can point out a bunch of “well, actually” on me if they want to. I’m not even a “public figure” or whatever that people care about– I write songs about being sad or high while listening to the Pale Saints, or– if I’m feeling ambitious– sad and high while listening to the Pale Saints. But what’s happening in our country is so racist and wrong, every adult involved should know better. Like all those “don’t tread on me flag” people, they should know that also means don’t sign up to do the treading on other people either.
I know this all seems kinda, “duh, dude– we get it.” I don’t think anyone that sees this disagrees. But this planet is the only place we currently know of in the universe that has beings that can do things like try to measure and think about the vastness of space and time (or play the D chord and sing about being sad and high while listening to the Pale Saints), so I’d just like to use this space and time to say, “fuck nazis. always.”
And whether it’s happening in America or kids are having bombs dropped on their schools and homes in Gaza, missiles hitting hospitals in Ukraine, women are being killed for not covering their hair or just protesting injustice in Iran, it just goes against all human decency to be like “but let’s try to understand what the bully’s reasons are.” No, fuck their reasons, just let regular people live in peace. Life is hard enough.
And yeah, I’m always happy to talk about big muff pedals and obscure jangle bands from 40 years ago or why The Sharp Pins and Good Flying Birds are way cool, or how the best indiepop scene might be happening in Indonesia, or how I was playing my friend this Worldpeace DMT song I loved, and he was like “uhhh, that’s Fleetwood Mac, ya know?” and all the other shit that I care about…
But I’m sick of watching the people that have the most– power, money, influence– wanting more, at the expense of the people who have the least or are just struggling to get by.
Show Details:
Noise Pop Festival presents Pains of Being Pure at Heart with Still Ruins, Cindy, Chime School and Living Hour
Where: The Rickshaw Stop
When: 8 p.m., Thursday, February 19 and Friday, February 20.
Tickets: $39.38 for Thursday night show, available here. (Friday is sold out.)