The trio, brought together by a writing and production team and based just outside Nashville, are hoping for a breakout moment with their second album, “Shindo.”
The home base of the pop-R&B girl group the Shindellas is a yellow two-story house that’s been standing for more than a century in a pastoral Tennessee town. Inside, the group’s vision board fills an entire wall with its goals — for radio airplay, industry awards, television appearances, movie roles, high-profile collaborations and brand deals. On a slip of paper in the middle, the words “household name” are printed in marker.
“That’s probably the biggest one,” said Tamara Chauniece, one of its three members. “Because with that comes all of this.”
The Shindellas, which also include Stacy Johnson and Kasi Jones, stand out in the 2023 pop landscape: a vocal trio of women over 30, brought together by a writing-production team, trying to reach the masses with songs that recall the glory of powerhouse girl groups — 20 miles south of Nashville, in the shadow of the country music industry.
The group came to town in January 2017 to become part of Weirdo Workshop, a small music company started by the writing and production team Claude Kelly and Chuck Harmony, whose credits include Mary J. Blige, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus. The Shindellas each hailed from very different performing backgrounds, but were drawn by Kelly and Harmony’s vision for the trio — a concept dating back to a session in the late 2000s, where they found themselves reminiscing about the Supremes and wondering, “‘Where are the girl groups right now?’” Kelly recalled.
Their 2019 “Genesis” EP and 2021 debut, “Hits That Stick Like Grits,” remained below the radar, but the elaborately staged shows they did alongside Harmony and Kelly’s duo Louis York helped establish their poised, polished reputation in Tennessee. Their new album, “Shindo,” out Friday, has the potential to bring them to larger stages: It is their first release to receive an outside push from a label partner, the Nashville indie Thirty Tigers, and first to generate a radio hit: “Last Night Was Good for My Soul,” a day-after-the-party jam with a disco groove, reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart.
The group has been preparing for a breakout moment. Coordinated stage costumes pack a walk-in closet. (The aesthetic they request from stylists is “Afrofuturist and just classy, elegant,” Johnson said.) In their rehearsal room, the Shindellas often perform before a mirror, scrutinizing themselves while they practice projecting stadium-scale energy and their original, crisply synchronized choreography.
Though Harmony and Kelly assembled the Shindellas, they and the group all agreed on a crucial point early: that the women should be in control of their destiny, well aware of the erasure that minimized contributions from generations of female pop and R&B acts, especially those featuring Black women. “To act as if a group of women who have a powerful sense of style and artistry and songwriting and ideas should just be puppets for you doesn’t work,” Kelly said in an interview. “It didn’t work then,” he added, “and it definitely doesn’t work now.”
Before they came together, all of the trio’s members had developed skepticism of the Faustian bargains of the music industry. Johnson, 36, spent her youth in Chicago working with a family-run music company, singing jingles, then graduated to dance tracks. She briefly joined a girl group, but quit when she became uncomfortable with how she was asked to present herself. When Harmony, who previously had hired her to sing demos, pitched her on the concept of a trio built on demanding respect, she was intrigued.
“My little sister could listen to this. My grandma could listen to this. I could sing this and turn it up,” she recalled thinking of the idea. She dove into helping find the group’s other voices.
Jones, 40, stood out. She had done musical theater and theme park work and booked her own overseas tours as a neo-soul singer-songwriter. But she said she had experienced predatory behavior from some producers in Los Angeles: “People being sexually aggressive, going into a situation with someone you think you know well, and it turns into another thing,” she said. Warily, Jones flew out to visit Weirdo Workshop, where she found the safe space she’d been looking for.
Chauniece, 33, spent her childhood on the Texas gospel circuit, managed by her mother. Appearing on Season 5 of “The Voice” boosted her profile, but afterward she felt lost, posting videos of herself singing online that sometimes went viral before resolving to work with a small label. “I don’t want to be on a major label roster, get lost in the sauce,” she said of her mind-set at the time.
Initially, the Shindellas would tell Kelly and Harmony what they wanted to sing about and sound like, and gathered around the piano to weigh in on song ideas. Then, Chauniece said, the three women would contemplate how to interpret their parts: “Anytime you hear me, it’s me,” she said of that work. “People don’t consider that authorship, or they don’t consider that your creative property. But it is.”
On “Genesis,” they tried out vintage sensibilities, recalling the swinging effervescence of the Motown era and the Pointer Sisters’ knowing invocations of World War II-era vocal jazz. “Hits That Stick Like Grits” covered more stylistic territory and featured an interlude with writing credits for all three Shindellas. But on “Shindo,” named for a made-up word they use in the studio describing “that overwhelming feeling of chills,” Jones said — the group puts its charisma, attitude and personality up front.
The Shindellas sing about taking the lead in lust and lasting romance: announcing what they are looking for from a partner in the sleek, funky “Up 2 You,” demanding a lover’s discretion in regard to a hook up in the slow-burning “Kiss N Tell,” and playfully instructing a man how to give pleasure in the bass-driven “Juicy.” (They helped write the latter two.) The video for “Juicy” is all moisturized lips and ripe fruit — except for shots of Jones reading Angela Davis’s book “Women, Race & Class,” a reminder that the Shindellas are always paying attention to power dynamics.
“Last Night Was Good for My Soul” showcases Jones’s near-rapping and theatrical warmth, and she and Johnson also take their turns in the spotlight; however, the Shindellas have no lead singer. They combine their voices with pinpoint precision, often singing in softened yet self-possessed unison, then spreading into radiant, jazzy intervals.
Their recordings typically begin with piano, and Harmony later wraps exuberant dance floor rhythms or silken slow jam textures around their voices, using a combo of hand-played instruments, ’80s synthesizers and drum machines, and digital sharpening.
“Musically, I think to create the future, you need a healthy balance of the past and the present,” he said. “And I feel like live instrumentation mixed with technology is the dance in my head that I’m always doing with the Shindellas. And it’s intricate, because I want them to be formidable. I want them to be a legacy act.”
Right now, the Shindellas are focused on expanding their reach. “We know that we’re doing music that’s for everybody,” Chauniece said. “But when you actually see the faces of what that everybody is, it’s still like …”
Johnson finished her thought: “Literally everybody.”
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