Fenceline by Mildred

releases April 24, 2026

Mildred is a band from Oakland, CA of four equal parts. They don’t
have a lead singer, no one person writes the songs. The songs that
make up Fenceline come together as a group with their genesis
sprouting from any one of their members - Henry Easton Koehler
(vocals, guitar), Jack Schrott (vocals, guitar), Matt Palmquist (vocals,
bass, woodwinds) or Will Fortna (drums, production) - each time. The
songs are often wrestled from the lead writer by the other three, a lyric
might have been mumbled absentmindedly for a few days before one
of the other three grabs at it. If you ask any Mildred member what
their favourite part of Fenceline is, it will never be something they
wrote. If you pin them down and ask them what their favourite part of
something they did write was, it will always be something somebody
else added to it.

This is what makes Mildred - in many ways a timeless four piece - so
special. This wonderfully easy bond between four friends just hanging
out and writing songs is so palpable its intoxicating. Summed up
neatly by Clash Magazine saying, “imagine if Pavement went
Americana and you’d be close”, Mildred make music that is pure and
poetic, gently addictive and never overwrought. They describe the
creation of the band as being born from “deciding that playing/talking
about/thinking about music together is fun and something we want to
structure our lives around as best we can”. Mildred is a vehicle for
these four people to continue to spend time in each other’s company.
Most bands are formed so they can get out of whatever diy space
they start out playing in, Mildred was formed so they can spend more
time there.

The space in question for Mildred is a house. The Ward St. house in
Berkeley to be exact, already a landmark in Mildred lore. When
Fenceline began taking shape Henry, Jack, Matt, and occasionally
Will were living there together; Matt hunkered in an “extra-legal” room
in the attic where he bathed on his knees and Henry and Will would
have to stoop to visit. Jack and Henry shared a wall in adjacent
shoeboxes on the middle floor, Henry staring directly out at an old
walnut tree they nicknamed Walter. Will was away studying in the
desert but would stay whenever he was in town. While living on Ward
St. they would write songs in the porous space between the kitchen
and the living room after dinner, before they even knew they were a
band. After that they would go up to the roof - beautifully painted by
Jack for the cover of Fenceline -, Jones the cat often creeping up the
stairs curiously behind, and talk the songs over some more, or just
continue hanging out, talking about whatever. (The Mildred core belief
system goes as follows: “talking about the weather is a legitimate and
profound form of human discourse and exchange. So is talking about
grocery stores and produce prices. Front lawns are too tidy, let them
grow. Free associating is one of life's great pleasures. We believe in
the reality of pathetic fallacy. The crunch wrap supreme is the
pinnacle of modernity.”).

This is what makes the songs on Fenceline hang together, naturally,
as roommates do. These four people are very different in many ways.
Jack is a PHD student, often working underground, studying the atom
beyond any conceivable point. Will is an environmental lawyer. Matt is
an architect, a job he took up properly after a year in a Benedictine
monastery. Henry works in affordable housing, helps his dad grow
beans, and plays a lot of basketball. The lyrics for their songs are
written largely alone and often draw from their own individual lives
and experiences but there’s a shared something there. “It makes
sense when common threads emerge” they say, “because we do
things together a lot as friends: cook, laze about on a weekend, listen
to an album, go walkabout, read, go see movies etc. People will tell
us after seeing us live that we’re, “like... a real band.” There’s maybe
a shared rhythm and camaraderie in our lives that comes through in
the music.”

That shared something takes many forms: flaming pinecones floating
down the river, scattered papers and dog-eared books, exhausting
party conversation and Irish goodbyes, leaves the colour of UPS
trucks. Songs often take place across whole days: long days working
at Henry’s aunt and uncle’s farm, an afternoon down in San Francisco
on the day the sailors come in and booze all day in their cracker-jack
uniforms, one of those youthful afternoons that seemed to stretch
forever. Others stem from a shared love of a good reference;
breadcrumbs dropped from old favourite books, songs and poems, or
Matt’s favourite little red book on architecture, waiting to be found by
those who love to go over lyrics with a fine-toothed comb. Strikingly
literal or intriguingly oblique, Mildred have a remarkable way with
lyrics that lodge themselves in your head softly but with such
determination that they begin to feel like shimmering memories from
your own life. Fenceline is a collection of songs that you want to hold
close and delve into, and yet play to everyone you know.

Mildred were eventually turfed out of Ward St. and the songs were
fleshed out in Matt’s new abode - the garage of a handsome but
fragile 97-year-old ex-lawyer/taxi driver who likes to chat about
baseball - and for recording, the band took a week off work and
decamped to Luke Temple’s studio in Echo Park, LA, having all been
carried through the pandemic by his 2019 album Both-And.

There was one exception to this recording setup. While in Bristol with
a free afternoon, Mildred took ‘Fish Sticks’ to a friend, Jack Ogborne
aka Bingo Fury (The Cindys, Naima Bock), to give it another go in his
studio in the basement of a centuries-old pub across the street from
what used to be a prison, with a secret passageway connecting the
two. It’s not easy to tell that ‘Fish Sticks’ has a very different recording
setup as it settles so comfortably in with the rest of Fenceline; but the
change of scenery gave it new life and a final product - an endlessly
repayable distillation of the Mildred sound with a central guitar line for
the ages and irresistible harmonies - that they all liked so much it
became the lead single.

A bit of tinkering, overdubs and a beautifully cohesive final mix from Will followed by mastering from GRAMMY nominee Jason Mitchell,
and Fenceline was finished.

releases April 24, 2026

Recorded by Luke Temple
Additional recording by Will Fortna

Fish Sticks recorded by Jack Ogborne

Mixed by Will Fortna

Mastered by Jason Mitchell

Cover art by Jack Schrott
Layout by Matthew Palmquist

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