Improvement Movement Know Perfect Isn’t the Point.
We spoke with three of the four members of the Atlanta band about their new record, taking the music seriously without taking themselves too seriously, performing inside a glass box on the back of a truck, and why sometimes the most radical thing you can do is remember the people standing in the room.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS BY TRENT TOMLINSON
The first few minutes with Improvement Movement tell you quite a lot about Improvement Movement. Zach has just eaten a chocolate chip cookie from Sammy’s, Tony immediately wants confirmation that it was indeed from Sammy’s, and Clark is absent because he is attending his sister’s wedding, an apparently insufficient excuse that earns him a promise of future punishment. Marshall arrives shortly after. Three quarters of the band are now present, and before long the conversation has moved from cookies to the Beach Boys, disappearing public spaces, surveillance, sincerity, British cultural insecurity, technocratic collapse and whether humor is necessary when you care very deeply about what you are doing.
That combination makes sense once you spend time with Your Perfect Real Life. Improvement Movement’s new record is warm, frequently beautiful and slightly unsettled. There are recognizable traces of the ’70s Beach Boys in its harmonies and soft edges, the piano in Home Again especially seems to float somewhere near Feel Flows, but the references dissolve quickly. Songs bend as they move. Arrangements refuse to settle completely. Something that begins comfortably can develop a small crack halfway through and suddenly expose a completely different emotional temperature underneath.
The title works in much the same way.
“Your perfect real life is the life that’s a little unsure,” Zach says, “and maybe doesn’t fit together as well as you think it should.”
It is not sarcasm exactly. Nor is it an aspirational slogan. Your Perfect Real Life is closer to an acknowledgement that contemporary life increasingly requires people to hold several contradictory ideas at once: happiness alongside anxiety, connection alongside isolation, private experience alongside permanent public commentary. The album is less interested in resolving those contradictions than allowing them to sit beside one another.
On ‘Still Cold’, that collision becomes particularly clear, personal experience repeatedly interrupted by the larger world pressing its way into the room. The phrase “uncomplicated happiness” comes up during the conversation, and Zach pauses on it.
“I’ve never heard that phrase,” he says. “I really like that.”
Part of growing older naturally complicates happiness. Pleasure arrives with an awareness of cost, consequence and impermanence. But Improvement Movement also seem interested in something more contemporary: the degree to which almost everything now arrives with an enormous amount of context attached. Nothing can simply happen. There is a headline about it, somebody explaining it, somebody else explaining why that explanation is wrong, a video responding to both, and an algorithm waiting to present the argument back to you several more times. “There’s no pursuit or event or thing that comes without kind of a breathtaking amount of context that you have to process,” Zach says.
Social media adds another layer, requiring musicians to participate in a permanent performance of enthusiasm while the songs themselves may be addressing considerably messier feelings. On bad days, the band admit, that can feel like masking. But their way through it is surprisingly simple: keep separating music from the machinery that surrounds music.
“Playing music is deeper than the industry that we’re in,” Zach says. “Music has been around for a very long time. It’ll continue to be around for a very long time.”
Improvement Movement are careful not to pretend a concert is a political intervention or that a song can repair whatever is currently breaking outside the venue. The claim is smaller. Somebody arrives tired, worried or isolated. The band arrive carrying some version of the same feelings. For an hour or two, everybody occupies the same room and leaves feeling marginally better than they did before. The effect may only last through the night, but the band do not seem embarrassed by modest outcomes.
Touring has also fundamentally changed how they write. Playing night after night teaches lessons that cannot really be discovered in rehearsal. A collection of good songs does not automatically become a good set. A performance needs pacing, contrast and emotional movement.
“You could have 15 of the world’s best ballads,” Tony says. “Fifteen ballads in a row is kind of a lot.”
The ambition is closer to theatre: a complete arc rather than a sequence of individual songs. The band want a set capable of moving through different feelings, which in turn has pushed the records into broader spaces. That instinct also explains the unusual looseness inside their playing. Improvement Movement sound rehearsed without sounding locked. Songs seem capable of changing shape without losing their identity.
“There’s a shared intuition,” Tony says. “Most of the time it does feel like we’re moving as one organism in the sea.”
Nobody permanently directs traffic. Everyone writes. Everyone sings. Authority shifts depending on the song or sometimes the moment inside the song. Marshall describes feeling more confident performing his own material with the other three musicians than performing it alone, partly because Improvement Movement operate through a kind of mutual reinforcement.
“The baton gets passed,” Tony says. “Like a relationship.”
One person leans. Another happens to be able to carry the weight. Later the roles reverse.
IMPROVEMENT MOVEMENTS WONDERFUL NEW RECORD, Your Perfect Real Life, IS OUT NOW
That fluidity extends beyond individual songs. Zach calls the band “a big living document,” constantly rewritten by touring, new instruments, changing tastes and accumulated experience. There is an almost active resistance to becoming too comfortable with what Improvement Movement are supposed to sound like.
“The minute we start to feel like we’re starting to become a thing,” he says, “we’re like, ‘Oh, time to go somewhere else and try something different.’” Their humor operates in a similar way. The music itself can be extraordinarily sincere, while the people making it seem constitutionally incapable of maintaining solemnity for very long. That could easily look like deflection, but Marshall sees the distinction differently. “We take the music seriously,” he says. “We don’t take ourselves that seriously.”
He talks about discovering music as something approaching self-preservation, about favorite records becoming as structurally important to a life as people. That creates a genuine respect for what songs can mean to somebody else. What the band resist is the vanity that can grow around making them; the strange premise that an artist must announce themselves to the world and insist everyone pay attention. Humor punctures that instinct.
“We’re not trying to lecture anyone,” Marshall says. “It’s not a recital.”
That balance becomes particularly important on ‘Common Place,’ one of the record’s sharpest songs. It deals with the erosion of third spaces, the places where people once gathered without the interaction having to be mediated by a platform, purchase or screen. For Improvement Movement, the subject is inseparable from Atlanta.
Zach remembers the city’s pre-COVID DIY world as something unstable but alive: musicians, painters, dancers and other artists moving through temporary spaces, sometimes taking over abandoned buildings for a few years before rent, developers or authorities forced another relocation. South Broad Street became one center of that community before redevelopment cleared much of it out.
Years later, Zach says, many of the spaces that once supported Atlanta’s underground culture are either gone or struggling. Buildings that previously contained people and activity can remain empty while development plans crawl forward. The expansion of surveillance technology adds another dimension to the loss. “The underground is going away, basically,” he says. Touring has shown them that Atlanta is not unusual. Improvement Movement arrive in new cities and ask where people go, what bands they should hear, where the interesting rooms are. Too often, the answers begin in the past tense. “It used to be this, but that’s gone now.”
That line sits underneath Common Place. A venue closes. A rent increases. A block is redeveloped. Nothing looks historically significant while it is happening. Then suddenly an entire network that once allowed people to find one another has disappeared. “Look at the world we built for ourselves,” Zach remembers thinking about Atlanta’s old DIY community. “We don’t need infrastructure because we have a community.”
Only when the spaces vanished did the infrastructure reveal how much power it had been holding.
As Improvement Movement grow, they are increasingly conscious of not reproducing the same impersonality they are writing about. Marshall talks about artists who bring local charities into their shows and the band’s work with Songs for Kids in Atlanta. Zach focuses on something even more basic: knowing the people working in the venue.
Growth, he says, creates distance almost accidentally. Bigger rooms mean more staff, more moving parts and more opportunities to pass through a building without seeing the people who make the night possible. So he tries to find them, introduce himself and slow the process down. “Right now,” he says, “we’re starting with the folks in the room.”
By ’21st Century’, those concerns have expanded outward into a much darker picture: an unnamed technocratic figure helping destroy the world while everyone else watches. Its ideas find an unexpectedly physical counterpart in the visual project the band created around Your Perfect Real Life: Improvement Movement performing inside a transparent box mounted on the back of a moving truck through New York.
Tony describes it as “the highest level of voyeurism and also isolation.” Everyone could see the band, and the band could see everyone, yet inside the glass they still felt strangely private. It became a near-perfect physical expression of the album: constantly visible, constantly observed, yet somehow separated.
The original idea was also much less philosophical. They needed live visuals for eleven songs without eleven separate locations.
“A blimp was too expensive,” Marshall says.
That sentence probably explains Improvement Movement as well as anything else. They can build a record around loneliness, surveillance, disappearing communities and the strange friction of living through the present moment, then puncture the whole thing with a joke before it becomes self-important.
Your Perfect Real Life is not offered as a permanent definition of the band. They are already resistant to that possibility.
“It’s a snapshot,” Zach says.
The next record will move somewhere else because they will have moved somewhere else. There is no interest in reverse-engineering whatever version of Improvement Movement might travel furthest or fit most neatly into a cultural moment.
“We just have to make the music that we wanna make right then and there,” Zach says, “that sounds like what we feel like.”
For now, that means a record interested in what happens when community becomes harder to maintain, when visibility gets mistaken for connection, and when the systems surrounding music become larger than the human relationships that created it. Improvement Movement’s answer is not especially complicated: keep changing, keep playing, keep noticing the people around you.
And, whenever possible, keep the human beings in the room.
