Skilled at crafting pop songs under his own name, excellent at producing albums for others, and a good-enough guitarist to be in Echo & the Bunnymen's touring band, Kelley Stoltz carved out an interesting career for himself on the fringes of the indie rock scene beginning in the late 1990s. A series of homemade albums released on small labels led to him being signed to Sub Pop, where he delivered a trio of strong garage psych-meets-power pop albums in the mid-2000s that established him as both an artist and a producer. He spent the 2010s jumping from label to label, gradually softening and expanding his sound to include more psychedelic elements, while occasionally experimenting with it, as on 2017's synth-heavy Que Aura, 2020's mod punk Hard Feelings, or 2022's The Stylist, which was an updated take on the piano-heavy sound of his early records.