Low can be traced back to 1983, on the snowy Midwestern terrain of Minnesota, when guitarist Alan Sparhawk and bassist John Nichols recruited Sparhawk’s wife Mimi Parker as a drummer to create minimalist, downtempo arrangements with them – breaking from the post-punk revival popular in Duluth at the time. Since then they’ve released over twelve albums on which they explore the musical edges of dark and light; and in that time venturing just close enough to the margins of their signature sound to position slowcore (a term which, for the record, Sparhawk calls ‘the cheesiest’) firmly in the here and now.
Photography by Paul Husband.