Change and love may well be the overarching themes in the current career cycle of Electric Citizen. The two concepts are ironically dichotomous; both are malleable and potentially capricious, and yet they represent life’s most reliable constants.
In the wake of the aptly titled EC4, Electric Citizen’s fourth album and first new material in seven years, lead vocalist/lyricist Laura Dolan has considered the impact of those elements on her psych/metal band’s journey.
“This genre, this music, what we do, we’re probably never going to make a real living at this,” she says over coffee at Sitwell’s. “We’ll get free tickets to amazing experiences across the U.S. and Europe and connect with all these like minds, our fans and other fans that are right there with us. When you strip all that away, you have to enjoy this, and we do. We started it for fun, and we’re still having fun.”
EC4 represents significant band changes. Although the original quartet remains intact — Dolan on lead vocals, husband/primary songwriter Ross Dolan on guitar and the exquisitely thunderous rhythm section of bassist Nick Vogelpohl and drummer Nate Wagner — the new album introduces Owen Lee as a contributing member. Lee became a utility keyboardist in 2019, playing local and out-of-town gigs that accommodated his day job as principal bassist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
“It’s funny where life takes you,” says Lee. “I never imagined I’d be in a real rock band. I never imagined I’d be friends with them, much less playing in the band, helping write songs and playing on an album.”
Lee discovered Electric Citizen through CityBeat and became a constant presence at their shows. He eventually developed a friendship with the band, particularly with Vogelpohl because of the obvious bass connection. Accordingly, Vogelpohl asked Lee to play at his wedding.
“Nick asked me to play background music as people were coming in,” Lee recalls. “When I saw Ross and Laura, I started playing Electric Citizen.”
“We’re like, ‘Is that “Shallow Water”?’ It was beautifully transcribed,” says Laura Dolan. “Suddenly, our song could become a classical song. That’s why we wanted Owen’s double bass on (EC4‘s) ‘Tuning Tree.'”
Even with Lee’s brilliant “Shallow Water” rendition, he still had to audition to join the Electric Citizen clubhouse.
“That’s Ross,” Laura Dolan says, laughing.
“He’s a very good gatekeeper, in the most elevated, complimentary way,” Lee notes. “He’s keeping the standards. I respect that.”
The band had booked a weekend Wisconsin show and just lost their keyboardist. They’d already invited Lee to accompany them to man the merch table, and he took the opportunity to throw his hat in the ring.
“I said, ‘Would you want me to play keyboards?’ Ross said, ‘Yeah, okay, come to practice,'” says Lee. “I busted my butt. I worked as hard as I’ve worked for anything in my life, and I only had 48 hours to get it together. I played through the songs until I knew them cold. That first practice, they were like, ‘Wow, killing it!'”
EC4 is also Electric Citizen’s debut for Heavy Psych Sounds, the California label with a formidable metal roster. With the band’s three-album RidingEasy deal concluded, the Dolans began the new label search.
“Ross and I make these decisions together. We considered other labels but Heavy Psych Sounds was perfectly aligned with what we’re doing,” says Laura Dolan. “They’re the perfect medium of not needing too much from us.”
“I kind of lost it when I found out,” says Lee of the HPS contract. “I was like, ‘Pinch me!’ Bands I’ve loved for years are on there: Dead Meadow, Pentagram, Kylesa. We’re on the label with all my heroes.”
Electric Citizen intended to alter their sound and their approach to achieving it, which they did to spectacular effect. EC4 displays the band’s patented range of delicacy and density with a newfound sense of depth and integration as their two extremes are woven into a single blistering tapestry. Case in point: the aforementioned “Tuning Tree,” which began as a simple jam between Lee and Ross Dolan.
“Ross had the skeleton of the song and I played around with it. We were recording the whole thing,” says Lee. “We kind of forgot about it until it was time to record. I didn’t even remember what I did that he liked. It had been years earlier. I was playing like 5% of what I’d played in the moment, and Ross was like, ‘No, no, it was this,’ and he played it back.”
“Ross’ iPhone recording ended up being the final version,” adds Laura Dolan. “I said, ‘Don’t change a thing. I’ll find a way to write around it.’ Owen said it was the first time he’d composed anything on the double bass.”
“Because a symphony orchestra is really just a giant cover band,” says Lee.
The key to Electric Citizen’s new sonic direction was ultimately a shift away from the analog mastery of local genius Brian Olive, who produced the band’s first three albums, 2014’s Sateen, 2016’s Higher Time and 2018’s Helltown. Early on, the Dolans said they’d be happy to have Olive produce their entire catalog, but their desire to find another gear for EC4 inspired them to enlist the assistance of equally gifted studio magicians Mike Montgomery and John Hoffman.
“Ross consciously went into this saying, ‘I want something a little more mellow and a lot more layered,'” says Laura Dolan. “We love Brian and we always will. The shift was literally the analog-to-digital decision and wanting to explore those options. We wanted the freedom to layer, and to edit those layers back if they were competing. The patience to layer as much as we needed, that was Mike. For the first time since Sateen, we have acoustic guitar and bass layers, and the revelation with EC4 is that those sit in the mix in a way that fills the space without competing. It’s a really beautiful thing.”
Dolan and Lee’s most potent point while discussing EC4‘s success is the clear vision and relentless pursuit of quality embodied by Ross Dolan’s talent and work ethic. Lee notes that with the album essentially wrapped, the guitarist and chief songwriter scrapped three songs that he felt didn’t quite measure up.
“I admire that in Ross. I try to use that practice myself,” says Laura Dolan. “I’ll go through a few sets of lyrics and melodies that don’t quite click. There’s such a gift in standing back from your own art and saying, ‘That’s not it.’ If you’re obsessed with everything you do, you’ll never have the perspective to elevate it. Ross does that very well. He writes and plays guitar on everything, and has since he was 15 years old. He doesn’t want to replicate.”
Time also looms large in EC4‘s creation. The band wasn’t compelled to produce an album in a proscribed period, which allowed them the luxury of doing exactly what they wanted, regardless of a clock or calendar.
“The only pressure to create music that you put out into the world is that it will remain forever,” says Laura Dolan. “If it’s not what you want it to be, keep working until it is. That’s the approach we took. We feel pretty well embraced with the news of this album and tour. It’s always been a project of friends writing music they love, taking sounds of the past and pushing them into the future. Seven years went by in the blink of an eye.”
The long gap between albums was clearly not intentional. Covid erased Electric Citizen’s European touring cycle, while EC4‘s subsequent delays were expanded by the band’s collective full-time job responsibilities, the birth of Vogelpohl’s first child and, most seriously, Laura Dolan’s melanoma diagnosis.
“I dealt with that on the heels of Covid,” Laura Dolan recalls. “I caught it early and I’m completely fine, so if there’s a message to get out to the world, it’s to get your skin checked. That’s what saved my life.”
That observation leads inexorably to Electric Citizen’s very existence. Diligence saves your life, and love makes that life worth living. Love kept the band together through dark, troubling times, so when Laura Dolan says she loves the people they’ve worked with, the labels that released their music, the fans that support them and the day jobs that pay the bills, it’s an authentic expression of real emotion.
“We’re friends first. We love each other,” says Laura Dolan. “Between my delays, production delays and Covid, we never stopped getting together as a band. In fact, we made a side project (Siss) through it all. There’s something about being able to divide this from the necessities that almost makes it more enjoyable, then we get to toe-dip into these amazing experiences. If I designed this in some conscious way, maybe that would be exactly how I would.”
To learn more about Electric Citizen and to listen to EC4, visit electriccitizenband.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s July 23 print edition.
This article appears in Jul 9-22, 2025.