“I wanted to continue along that journey of heavily effected psychedelic guitars, but I wanted to streamline my songwriting”: How Kylesa guitarist Laura Pleasants went from drop-tuned sludge to “skeletal” guitars for post-punk solo project The Discussion

If you first came around to Laura Pleasants’ guitar playing through the maximalist, effects-soaked sludging she brought to Kylesa – the cult metal quartet she co-founded in Savannah, Georgia, in the early ’00s – the sound of her current solo project, the Discussion, might come as a surprise.

On her debut album, All the Pretty Flowers, the now Los Angeles-based musician pulled herself away from a swampy drop-G aesthetic to explore a more harmonically approachable standard tuning. While stripping away her muddiest tendencies, she discovered a skeletal guitar style inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees/Magazine guitarist John McGeoch and minimal wave music.

“Toward the end of Kylesa we were doing more psychedelic stuff,” she says, adding of the Discussion, which she’d begun in 2017, “I wanted to continue along that journey of heavily-effected psychedelic guitars, but I wanted to streamline my songwriting.”

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Accordingly, the new album’s Fade Away is driven more by a brawny post-punk bass rhythm than the leanly-picked guitar spectrality Pleasants shimmers into the piece. That makes sense, she says, because the song is set in a “hollow house” and concerns a general thematic “emptiness.”

That said, by the time she and producer Jason Corbett – of the band Actors – wrapped up the sessions, they realized they’d pruned away quite a bit of Flowers’ overall guitar presence.

THE DISCUSSION: "In The Mirror" Official Music Video - YouTube

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“There was a shitload more guitar on this record before. Jason helped me hone my vision,” Pleasants says. “The guitar was maybe a little too proggy, so it was good to restrain myself. The chords and the notes were the same, but I changed the approach.”

Synth-oscillating pieces like Blue Light now find Pleasants harnessing a more textural, string-scraping style. Elsewhere, the focus is on throbbing low‑end melodies conjured from a short‑scale Mustang bass.

Still, some habits die hard. Take the guitar-blaring mid-album standout In Death & Life. This death-rock anthem was initially demoed with every instrument coursing through EarthQuaker Devices’ Life Pedal V3 boost/distortion pedal.

THE DISCUSSION "In Death & Life (Earthquaker Version)" OFFICIAL VIDEO #darkwave #postpunk #ARTOFFACT - YouTube

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The album version remodels the tones a bit, but retains a wiry, string-stretching solo that Pleasants wanted to sound “triumphant but not cheesy.” It’s the record’s biggest guitar-hero moment.

On top of her tour plans with the Discussion, Pleasants will also spend 2025 playing Kylesa shows for the first time since 2015. The guitarist doesn’t know if the reunion will yield any new metal music (“If we have time, and if the stars align…”), but the return of her heavier band has given fans plenty to talk about.

• All the Pretty Flowers is out now via Artoffact.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.