Winnetka Bowling League make energetic and emotional power-pop songs about the good times that never last. On their debut album Sha La La, the Los Angeles trio of singer and guitarist Matthew Koma, his brother Kris Mazzarisi on drums, and keyboardist Sam Beresford tackle youth and nostalgia with biting wit and a soft core of relentlessly infectious hooks. Over 10 transportive and welcoming tracks, the band stuffs the album with masterful melody-making, sardonic lyrical specificity, and a profound sense of rock’n’roll timelessness. Thanks to Koma’s deft storytelling and tasteful production that reveres the records he grew up with, this LP is a thrilling and relatable ride from front to back.
The origins of Winnetka Bowling League started with an existential crisis. Though Koma’s childhood was spent listening to Elvis Costello and Squeeze and growing up in the East Coast hardcore and punk scenes, most of his adult life had him writing songs for electronic musicians and pop stars. “It was successful and fruitful but I also absolutely despised it,” he says. “I felt like I was serving others and not really having the experience with music that I wanted to have.” He was still drawn to the rock music of his youth and wanted something rewarding and grounded that was wholly his. So, in 2018, he started a band. “It’s very stupid to go to your pregnant girlfriend at the time and say, ‘Hey, I know we’re about to have a kid but I’m going to stop working on big pop records and start a rock band,’” he jokes.
Compared to his role as a pop and EDM songwriter and collaborator, this band gave him the freedom to explore what he truly loved about music. “What I grew up valuing were these poets and the storytellers,” says Koma. “That’s what I was trying to channel with this project. I didn’t want to consider anyone else’s experience as much as I just wanted to tell the stories I wanted to tell… whether they’re universal or weird, esoteric experiences that only make sense to me.” In 2018, Winnetka Bowling League released a self-titled EP that kickstarted a breathlessly prolific streak of singles through 2022 that included viral songs like “On the 5,” “CVS,” and “Slow Dances.” A debut album was Koma’s next hurdle and he knew he had to creatively best himself.
“I’ve never put out an album before,” says Koma. “I’ve been signed to labels since I was 16 years old but something has always happened where I’ve never been able to put out an actual album. We live in a very ‘singles time’ so it didn’t dawn on me to even think about making an LP.” When his friend Taylor Goldsmith, the frontman of the folk-rock band Dawes, suggested he try writing a full-length, Koma had all the motivation he needed. Early on in the process, he wrote a wistful but peppy song called “Sha La La,” which became the title of the album and the North Star for the rest of the tracklist. “Whenever I’m sitting down to work on a body of work, there’s always one song that informs the rest,” he says. “I’m a sucker for the bittersweet and I am always after that feeling in my gut that dilutes the joy with some sadness: ‘Life is good, but how good is it? Was it better before?’ I think a lot about the past: more in a way of disbelief that it’s over.”
“Sha La La” with its woozy chorus and yearning lyrics became the bar for Koma to clear throughout the tracklist. Single “No One’s Ever Kissed You” reaches similar heights with its sweet dissection of what it means to truly be close to someone. Over lilting strings and enveloping synths, Koma sings, “Dialing your microdose of ketamine / To lullaby your senses from discovering / How you classify your mania as a signal of love / But it shouldn’t take so much to try & love someone.” He tackles the complexities of relationships with humor and heart but it comes from a more grounded place, “As somebody who’s spent a lifetime writing like heartbreak songs, when you don’t have our broken heart anymore you have to channel into something different so you can be honest,” says Koma.
Throughout Sha La La, Koma’s hyperspecific approach to songwriting leads to laugh-out-loud moments like in “Breakfast For Dinner” where he sings, “It’s how I hate astrology, usually / But with you I’m eating it up.” But each one-liner is in service of an emotionally cathartic center like the snapshot of listening to Anderson.Paak at a Halal cart to frame the relationship autopsy “We’re Not Having Any Fun.” All the heart-on-sleeve storytelling is imbued with a keen sense of alt-pop euphoria, especially on “Handsome,” the incessantly catchy. single. “It’s not that deep,” jokes Koma of the track’s earworm chorus. “There’s a lot on the record that’s pretty serious but this was a fun tune that works as a palate cleanser.”
Sha La La is a document of an artist rediscovering what he loves about music: a back-to-basics and grounded release that finds Koma taking risks while being in conversation with his younger self. “With this record, it wound up being a lot of looking back and a lot of trying to understand the twenty-something version of myself: what he was feeling and why he was feeling that way,” says Koma. “Being in a much different place in life now, I think I finally have a little perspective to be able to see it for what it was.” The resonant “America In Your 20s” captures this dynamic with lines like, “Is the party over? / Did tomorrow come too soon? / Is that what getting older is / The more you know, the less you do.”
For Winnetka Bowling League, there’s power in this realization on Sha La La. Sure, the years pass faster the older you get but there’s a galvanizing joy in remembering and reclaiming both the good and the grit of youth. “Your 30s are a weird time reckoning your 20s,” says Koma. “In these tunes, I hope that people feel like they’re revisiting versions of themselves when they hear it because that’s what it felt like to me writing it.”
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