From Tape Delays to Tenderness: A Candid Talk with Endearments
Endearments pre-show at The Broadway in Brooklyn, New York (February 6, 2026) – All photos by Morgan Salzer.
For people who ponder, who meditate on what they feel and why, who are romantic in love and life, Endearments may be the band for you!
With the hometown crowd gathering at The Broadway for the release party of their single “Real Deal”, I stole a few moments backstage with Kevin Marksson, frontman of the Brooklyn-based band. The three piece group also includes guitarist Anjali Nair and Will Haywood Smith on drums.
Marksson gave some background on the band’s upcoming debut album, An Always Open Door, produced by Abe Seiferth (Car Seat Headrest/Nation of Language). We discussed his motivations in music writing, the specifics of the album and love of the analog experience, among other things.
What genre is Endearments?
We have called this band dream pop for nearly four years. We’ve started just calling it Indie Rock music, I don’t have a cool, fun, trendy, something-core thing to call it. It really is just synth-backed indie rock music. Which is cool.
Tell me about your songwriting process.
One of the important things for songwriting, for me, is that if something feels like it sounds right, then it is right. And sometimes those broken ways of saying things are their own fun thing.
“Bank Lights” one of the last lines of one of the verses is: ‘There’s a heaven in chance with me’ which sort of makes sense, but also doesn’t necessarily. It’s saying: there’s a potential for something really good here.
It’s communicating the feeling of the thing as opposed to necessarily being strict.
What is this album about?
I tend to be a very sincere person, and I think that there’s a lot of sincerity in the lyrics that I write. This entire band is really about those feelings of big emotional shifts. I think almost all of these songs and almost every other Endearments song interrogates questions like: What do you feel like in the aftermath of change? And what does it mean to love someone? And what does it mean to care about someone?
But also know that maybe you’re no good for that person, or they’re not good for you… I don’t know why that’s the well I go back to, but I think it’s just something that I’m good at articulating.
Is this album meant to be listened to chronologically?
I hope people listen to it start to finish, it’s not necessarily chronological — it’s not necessarily in narrative order.
There are narrative themes that run across the whole thing. We spent not a small amount of time trying to decide what the track order should be, and making a full length record is so exciting because it is a complete idea. That’s why I love listening to albums all the way through and part of the reason why it was so important to me to put this out on vinyl.
I’m very interested in the behind-the-scenes of the music.
I’ll give you a good one in that regard then. The last song on the record is a song called “Your Knight.” I actually wrote it when I was writing the first Endearments EP, the lyrics of that song are actually quite old.
We had a lot of fun in the studio with it. Abe (Seiferth) and I brought out a really old tape delay and put the synths and some of the drums through it, and would just let it run on playback and twist and turn the knobs to have really natural sounding delays, so not in the computer. It was something very physical. There’s some really fun analogue things going on in that song.
