Trophy Wife’s debut album was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from those who listened when the band released it last year. In between the lyrics and beneath its musical stylings, “Get Ugly” also told a story of a band in search of themselves. They had just moved the group from its birthplace of Boston to Brooklyn, New York. They were forging new collaborative relationships in a new scene while working to maintain their existing ones. They had more on their minds than songwriting. But now, Trophy Wife has audibly grown deeper into who they really are.

Their latest single, “So Hard,” came out Oct. 24, marking a new chapter in the Trophy Wife story. Just after the release, lead vocalist and songwriter McKenzie Iazzetta was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

YY: How does coming from the DIY basement scene at Berklee compare to the greater Brooklyn scene, and what remnants of your old environment continue to influence what you create?

MI: The DIY scene in Boston taught us so much about how to exist in a community of musicians and artists. Something that was really cool about our time in that scene was how much everyone was on the same team. Everybody would play in each other's bands and take equal payment from gigs (if there even was any money). We try our best to bring that to everything we do in Brooklyn.

Reverie Magazine described your debut album, “Get Ugly,” as a “declaration of grit,” with “So Hard” being the “exhale that follows.” Can you speak to what that transition looked like for the band and how you arrived at the “emotional clarity” of “So Hard?”

All 3 of us were going through our own personal struggles during "Get Ugly" all while trying to get Trophy Wife noticed in New York. Those songs are drenched with shame, regret, and an overall sense of powerlessness, but I think in our new material the roles have reversed, and now we want to be the ones that are in charge.

The video for “So Hard” was shot on a Super 8 camera and features quick cuts between two contrasting filming locations: a nature preserve and a bedroom. I know you worked with a director, so what specific roles did the band play in developing the resulting aesthetic, and how do you think the final cut adds to the song?

I met up with the director, Jo Barajas (@aperfectdrowning on Instagram) and told her that I wanted to make something where I get to watch two guys fight over me. I had seen her work through Instagram and sent it to the band and we all loved it so we let her do her thing. I wanted to make the viewer feel like a voyeur and have them constantly struggling to decide between fantasy and reality.

If McKenzie is the main songwriter, what does the rest of the creative process typically look like for the band once a song has been written? In what ways does the group’s collaboration often inform what we hear on the final product?

I write the lyrics and chords of it alone and then I bring it to Michael and Christian to make it real. Christian likes to be there and react to what I'm doing, and Michael likes to listen to the demos and come up with parts that way. We have rehearsals with our friends Rowan Martin or Mena Lemos to come up with guitar parts, then we go to Ashlawn Farm to record. At its core, Trophy Wife is the 3 of us with all of our separate influences, but it's also very much a collaborative effort with all the people we've met through music.

The writeup for this single places the sound of Trophy Wife somewhere between the alt-country of Wednesday and Blondshell’s confessional lyricism. What about these contemporary comparisons do you think most accurately captures the band's current direction?

I always feel like I hear a lot of similar influences to mine when I listen to Wednesday and Blondshell. I grew up listening to a lot of country music and a lot of Lilith Fair era ladies, and the older I get the more I hear it in my own songwriting.

Trophy Wife recently performed on Audiotree Live, which can be a big milestone for a band. What was that experience like, and in what ways did you have to adapt your usual live performance into playing altogether in a studio?

Audiotree was honestly a huge milestone for us. We'd already been watching them for years before we were even in a band together so we were super excited to get that news. It was also good to finally get live recordings of Leech and Linoleum, since they've both evolved so much since we recorded “Voyeur.”

“So Hard” is Trophy Wife’s first release since last year’s debut album. What else can we expect from the band in the near future?

I can say there's definitely more music around the corner. I think when “Get Ugly” came out we were still trying to figure out how to be a band in a new city and how to make something that felt real and meaningful to us. I feel like we've all become more confident in ourselves as people and as a band, and I'd like to think you can hear that in the new songs.