Tonight I Will Be Your Entertainment: The Ascendancy of saturdays at your place

/

Photo by Ty Benson

“If [saturdays at your place] is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.” That’s what Taylor Grimes concluded when he crowned always cloudy as one of the best releases of last year. The trio dropped their star-making EP at the onset of 2023 and have spent the following two years touring relentlessly, building a grassroots fandom on the back of a very small but promising body of work. From “tarot cards” hitting streaming highs to retrieving stolen gear from evidence lockers and selling out their first headlining tour, 2024 has been a banner year for saturdays at your place, and 2025 is looking even better as anticipation builds for their next move. We sat down with a few of the band’s recent tourmates to hear in their own words what makes saturdays special, but before that, a bit of a history lesson. 

The genre’s newest superstars are from Kalamazoo, Michigan, making them, yes, true Midwest Emo. The trio is comprised of Esden Stafne on bass, Gabe Wood on drums, and Mitch Gulish on guitar, with Stafne and Wood sharing vocals duties across their discography, lending the band a nice range as they bounce from one perspective to another. Their debut album, something worth celebrating, came out in 2021, and the group has seemingly been working nonstop ever since, touring everything from basement shows to Hot Mulligan concerts. Sonically, they lean more into the traditional side of second- and fourth-wave emo (if you believe in that sort of thing), taking cues from twinkly progenitors like Pictures of Vernon, Their/They’re/There, and Camping in Alaska while putting their own distinctly gaze-y tinge on the sound. Like all new emo bands at this point, they’ve received plenty of comparisons to groups like Modern Baseball and Remo Drive, but that just scratches the surface of s@ypdom. 


We're Getting Off to a Rough Start

saturdays at your place first hit my radar on some random winter weekday in 2023 the same way a lot of people found them—a joke about their pronunciation of the word “tarot.” The band’s breakthrough song is incredibly catchy, with an immediately recognizable intro, a thumping bassline, and play-by-play lyrics about a Classically Emo Scenario: having a weird time at a house party—great stuff with a very strong start. Around the one-minute mark, the gang vocals kick in and shout, “They’re pulling out the tarot cards!” like an announcement (or a warning) (or a threat) yelled over the music at the aforementioned party. 

The joke comes from the way “tarot” is said. While lots of people seem to say the word as if it rhymes with “arrow,” saturdays at your place hit the "ro" hard, kinda like how you would pronounce “throw.” My understanding is that it’s a regional accent, but emo music listeners are very online, so the song made pretty much immediate waves on TikTok, Discord, and Twitter (to this day) because that line stuck out in such a charming and memorable way. 

Author’s note: This is the part where I admit that there is nothing I hate more than when I’m at a party and everyone decides to start playing a game or doing a secondary activity. I like chatting with strangers over music and generally hanging out. I think starting a secondary thing usually kills the vibe. If any of my friends are reading this, I am not talking about you. I loved it when you pulled out a board game at your party and had a lot of fun learning the rules of Catan at 11 pm.

Two years and eight million Spotify streams later, it's easy to see “tarot cards” success in real-time at any show the band puts on. Even listening to the studio recording, you can almost feel the finger-pointing reaction of the crowd when Stafne reasons, “Well, your friends don’t like me / I don’t like me too.” It’s obvious that someone is going to crowdsurf over the bridge’s “and when the lights go down / I don’t want to leave this house.” In fact, former tourmates Riley! said it’s their favorite song to see saturdays perform live because it's a fan favorite, and the band can command the room with it. I really like the song, too; I think it’s perfectly shy and maybe even cute. I especially like the line at the end, “Well, will you stick around if I do? / I think I found a part of me beside you.” 

Okay, so it only makes sense here to try and describe why people care so much about always cloudy. I mean, the EP has only six songs, how much could the band realistically tear through in 18 minutes? I had the same question. Turns out the answer is it’s just really loud and cohesive and earnest.

Photo by Ty Benson

What’s good about “tarot cards” being a launchpad of sorts is that it's a song that really introduces the band. Even the notion of talking to some unnamed person makes the band name make more sense—is this stumbling partygoer the person whose place you’re at on Saturdays? It makes you double back to start the whole thing from the beginning. The rest of always cloudy follows this kind of crowded hallway feeling. It's sweaty, buzzing, frustrating, overwhelming, and a little overheated from trying to wear winter clothes in a packed house while half-buzzed off three warm Miller Lites.

“future” kicks the EP off on the miserable final thoughts of their first album (discussed later), with frustrated lyrics burying themselves under a particularly dancy beat that gives each member of the trio a chance to shine. The groove of “future” extends into “fetch,” which leads into “tarot cards.” To me, the following track, “hospital bed,” is the spiritual sequel of “tarot cards”—kind of like the next morning after a wrought party experience, all mixed with a vibe I can only describe as Carpoolian. After is “it’s always cloudy in kalamazoo,” a song that needs a crowd as much as the crowd needs it.

The EP ends with “eat me alive,” a four-minute closer that's constantly colliding into itself with two distinct halves: one slow and laced with self-inflicted cruelty and another that’s fast and turns the blame outwards. It’s also my favorite. The song starts with the fuzzy dirge before Wood’s drums come in, loud and miserable. The first two minutes feel almost like the waves in the album art are washing over you as Wood lets the more complicated parts of himself crash ashore. The song builds and builds before breaking entirely. Wood speeds up his drumming and spits out one of my favorite lyrics on the EP, a strangled accusation, “You prepare me for a meal / ‘cause your friends / eat me alive.” saturdays at your place is not a band about mending relationships or even necessarily apologizing, they look at a scene from all angles, and, as much as they critique themselves, they aren’t afraid to level blame at others as well. Amidst a pummeling build, Wood flips the cards and reveals, “Saturdays are the worst for me too / I'll do anything to get you out of my room.” Actually, this one contributor on Genius can probably explain it better than me:

 
 

The album concludes with the assurance that “In time, memories will fade / I promise everything in the future” before looping back into the first track and starting again. It is a perfect six-song collection about feeling bad, feeling good, going back to feeling evil, just hanging out, and trying to figure out what you mean to someone.


Well, Will You Stick Around If I Do?

It’s genuinely refreshing to see people so excited about something new again. It should be news to no one that emo has a real nostalgia problem. Whether it's as blatant as When We Were Young Fest or as underhanded as people insisting that whatever Foxing album they heard first is their best one, it’s an irritating bias. I think saturdays at your place managed to unintentionally fulfill a nostalgic niche and satisfy a craving the scene had for ultra-catchy Midwest Emo. I think about how when I first listened to always cloudy–the house show atmosphere of the songs immediately dragged me back to the days of Modern Baseball and their music videos for songs like “The Weekend” and “Your Graduation.” It was instantly familiar in a way that other contemporary emo songs can’t quite achieve. In other words, it’s clear that the members of saturdays came into their own during that particular era of music, but they aren’t stuck in nostalgia. In fact, they seem to be actively combating it by working with other new emo bands as they collaboratively construct a cohesive scene.

saturdays at your place just wrapped their third tour of the year, each outing sharing the stage with other rapidly growing emo acts. They started the year on the Wax Bodega Tour with a stacked lineup of Ben Quad, who is taking over the world; Carly Cosgrove, who is maybe one of the best live acts you can catch (I reviewed their latest album); and Arm’s Length, who is clearing a path for these upcoming legends. When we asked Ben Quad about this, they said, “That tour felt like we were doing something important for the genre.” We agree. A couple of months later, saturdays at your place headed back out on the road as support for Prince Daddy and the Hyena’s summer tour with tapping superstars Riley! and Carpool (I also reviewed their latest album). This fall, they toured with Carpool again, with the midwest emo-revivalists TRSH and Dudes Rock connoisseur Harrison Gordon in tow. It doesn’t even end there because Origami Angel announced they’re taking saturdays on tour with them to the UK in Winter 2025. Phew. That felt like constant name-dropping, but it’s their actual reality.

Photo by Emily Harrington


But If You Get to Know Me, I'll Get to Know You

Beyond their EP, saturdays at your place has released one album, something worth celebrating, and a three-way split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise called That’s What Friends Are For. 

Author’s note: While you may know that Mitch Gulish joined Summerbruise last year, did you know he’s in the music video for “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Empathy?” Thank you Mike for bringing this to our attention.

I guess this is the part where I speak very frankly. For a very long time, I didn’t care about saturdays at your place very much. I don’t know if y’all remember the state of DIY emo during the pandemic and directly after when touring started again, but it was really rough. I love a lot of the projects that came out during the time, but they were standouts in a total cesspool. Many previously exciting artists had serious accusations leveled against them, there were tensions between bands and band members, and several musicians just gave up and left music entirely during the nightmarish era. I found it hard to truly get excited about anything new, so I didn’t. As a result, when saturdays at your place released their first album in late 2021, I just ignored it. 

It wasn’t until I saw that random “tarot cards” joke a couple of years later that I gave them any time of day. This was after some of the misery of 2020-22 diy emo spaces had subsided, and notably, for one of the first times in a minute, I had seen people thoroughly geeked about something new. 

Photo by Ty Benson

One thing made very clear moments into “first of all” is that Gulish is a very good guitarist. In fact, a lot of the band’s debut album seems to be built on how good of a guitarist he is, with a couple of songs being guitar-led instrumental tracks or featuring extended guitar solos with his constant, complex, twinkly riffing. Elsewhere, songs like “existential shred” pad the release with lyric-less riffing, and I find it genuinely cool that they added these to their debut album. (Author’s note: as I was writing this, the band posted this Tweet encouraging listeners to “just skip all of the instrumentals,” so they seem to disagree, but I like ‘em.) At the time, especially after the popularity of particularly wordy emo artists like Origami Angel, many emo bands felt the need to fill in that same space with lots of lyrics. They don't. This album is proof.

Two years later, saturdays’ first contribution to That’s What Friends Are For is “pourover,” which has legitimately gotten stuck in my head at least once every week since its release in late 2023 (and you should check out their acoustic version with Counter Intuitive Records). Then there’s “forever,” which is easily one of the band’s most experimental songs as they break away from the fairly rigid rules of Midwest Emo and deploy a robotic vocal distortion on Wood’s voice. It makes the song more melancholy and distant. I consider saturdays at your place a fairly upbeat band, but this is the lowest they’ve ever dived in their discography. It acts as the symbolic ending of the split, the emotional endpoint. I look forward to hearing more of this grim experimentation on future projects. 


Can We Change the Conversation?
Can We Make It About Me?

Obviously, with only 19-ish songs to their name, this is a relatively small discography, but that means it’s more accessible to new fans. saturdays seem to have gamified the streaming algorithms that be; their songs have wound up on major editorial playlists on services like Spotify, spreading their music even further than imagined. This is at least partially responsible for their about 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify (for reference: heavy hitters in the scene like Prince Daddy and the Hyena or Oso Oso are tens of thousands of listeners under that). 

To get a sense of this whirlwind rise to emo fame saturdays is experiencing, we reached out to Ben Quad, an up-and-coming band from another niche music scene who blew up at a similar time and also sold out national tours. In one word, Ben Quad described the experience as “wild.” They referred to tangible things like busier inboxes and new management but focused specifically on the fandom side. “Our audience is definitely a lot broader now, too. There’s also a lot more die-hard fans at our shows, which is something foreign to us. We have multiple people a show flying across the country to see us, and that absolutely blows my mind.” This experience, going from small house gigs with friends to sold-out club shows with fans in just a couple of releases, seems to mirror the trajectory of saturdays at your place and leaves the future of emo music open and sprawling.

While I can’t speak from personal experience, from observation, gaining such a quick notoriety can either drive your project into super-popularity or doom your reputation, kind of like a false start. In the case of saturdays at your place, it seems to have done the first thing. From my perspective, the minuscule mispronunciation in a great song seems to have launched the band into emo stardom and resulted in an instant classic. The enthusiasm for this band is tangible. Don’t believe me? Let’s talk about their live shows.

Photo by Ty Benson

2024 started, as mentioned, with the Wax Bodega tour. My tour date was in a cramped new club, and for the first time ever in the venue, I was struggling to catch a glimpse of the stage – it was just so packed and rowdy. When we asked Ben Quad about that tour, they said, “There wasn’t ever really a sleepy show because saturdays were there to get the crowd riled up from the start.” While I had seen saturdays before, that was the first time I really experienced that frenetic energy in action, and all for the opener.

Over the summer, saturdays shared a stage with Riley! who has a similar rowdy fanbase. When we asked about that crowd, Riley! said, “If you could boil it down into one word, energetic doesn’t even begin to explain it.” Carpool was on that same tour, and Stoph Colasanto described the crowd as “ravenous” and detailed how the audience was climbing over itself to get closer and closer to the band, a sight I experienced myself.

Carpool just wrapped up the always cloudy tour with saturdays and witnessed firsthand the band’s shift from a support slot to a headliner. Colasanto said that as the headliner, saturdays went all out. “They brought out all the bells and whistles, and it was genuinely fun to watch every night.” Ultimately, the experience “was a literal party but the type of party that’s all-inclusive and for everyone. It was cathartic.”

Outside of the performances, the fervor around the band had started to change, which can be summed up in one of Colasanto’s observations – that every single day of the tour, fans were lined up outside the venues early to get front spots for the gig. As someone who has stuck around DIY emo corners for several years, I find it hard to picture this happening in such a small and, at times, insular genre, but it absolutely is. 

We interviewed a lot of bands for this article, and one thing became abundantly clear very quickly: this is all just so much fun. Mike Newman of Summerbruise recalled, “Their excitement about every single crunchy-ass aspect of touring really renewed my appreciation for what we get to do.” Riley! added to that sentiment and said that touring with saturdays this summer was a blast – “we truly could not have asked for better tourmates on that run.” Ben Quad continued that train of thought and said saturdays were “one of those bands we instantly connected with as soon as we met them.” From Colasanto’s perspective, “It’s really special to see something so real and organic continue to grow and to get bigger, and for it to happen to saturdays just makes my heart so happy because they deserve everything in this world and more.”

Photo by Ty Benson

So, it’s all gas, no brakes for saturdays at your place, both physically after this year spent as road dogs and emotionally as they connect with a bigger audience than ever before. When it comes to what’s next, saturdays at your place talked about working on their next album during their latest tour. This record will be one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year and the first since their split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise in 2023. Coming up even sooner is their holiday show with Ben Quad, Worry Club, Summerbruise, and Palette Knife. We asked Summerbruise about the show, and Newman’s excitement was tangible: “My favorite shit as a kid was watching the bands I loved who were legit friends goofing off together on stage, and this lineup is stacked with some of my all-time favorite goofers.” 

Like I said earlier, emo has a nostalgia problem, and I pity people who sit out just because they assume the stuff they grew up on is superior for whatever reason. I am so excited, genuinely, that this generation of listeners have a band like saturdays to be a fan of, a buzzing genre to enjoy, and an exciting scene to be part of.

The larger impact of saturdays will be reverberating around the Emo World for years. People will pick up the guitar because they want to play like Mitch, or they’ll start singing in a garage band because of Esden and Gabe, and when asked about their inspirations, saturdays will be first on their lists. I also think about Kalamazoo and how exciting it is for a band from a small scene to get this big. I think about how their attention will translate into people discovering new bands and how Kalamazoo will be intrinsically tied to the emo music of this era. Stoph Colasanto put it best:

“They’re a true testament to what it means to be DIY and care about your scene, community, and hometown. That’s something that really resonates with me — talk to Esden about Kalamazoo, he fucking loves it. It's his favorite city in the world. That shit gets me so hyped up. To see a DIY band from a smaller city or town get national attention and to use that to lift up their hometown and their community means a lot. Even as an outsider, I just get so stoked for Kalamazoo and for what saturdays is doing for it.”

“Anyone who has ever been in the proximity of that band knows that they are the future.” That’s what Ben Quad said while replying to our first question about saturdays at your place, and I think they’re absolutely right. Since 2023, I have seen saturdays at your place four times, and while this essay is not a concert review, I can’t emphasize enough how good they are live and how fun their performances are. Whether saturdays is headlining or supporting, the whole crowd knows the words to every song, thrashes around to every guitar solo, and the crowd surfs through their entire set. People are excited, and I am too. So, like we said, if saturdays at your place is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Bottom Bracket – I’m So Afraid of Where | Track-by-Track Review

/

Count Your Lucky Stars

To be in the realm of music and bands is a tumultuous one. It is a space where every person is pining to create something that might reach beyond the confines of a singular human experience and resonate with a complete stranger. At the same time, it is an exhausting and unforgiving space in what it asks of its participants. Every week is another announcement of a band throwing in the towel due to the strains and pressures of running this gauntlet; every week, another band decides to weather on despite it all.

I'm So Afraid of Where, the second LP from Chicago, IL’s Bottom Bracket, is an unflinching exploration of personal fallout, strained friendships, and the search for belonging in unfamiliar surroundings. Across its ten tracks, Mario Cannamela (guitar, lead vocals), Tim Recio (bass, vocals), and Rob Diaz (drums, percussion, vocals) channel three years of labor and love into a record unafraid to hold a mirror up to the most difficult parts of what it means to grow as a person and as a band.

As we dive into each track on this immensely special record, I had the privilege of getting Cannamela’s perspective to inform us on some of the nuances in the lyrics and stories that helped craft these songs. Grab your water bottles and strap on your bike helmets. This is I'm So Afraid of Where.

1. A Condemnation

“A Condemnation” opens the album with the beautiful guitar work that comes standard in any Bottom Bracket song. Once the track is in full swing, Cannamela delivers the haunting line, “I’m so afraid of where / We’ll end up after this,” introducing the album’s title and central theme of drifting apart from friends and bandmates, as well as struggling with a sense of belonging. “I always do this to myself / Leaving friendships to collect dust on the shelf,” laments Cannamela at the end of the track. This song wrestles with the pain of unresolved tension, regret, and the weight of holding others accountable. The urgency in the guitars mirrors the emotional tumult, setting a gripping precedent for what's to come. 

“Courtney and I moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago three years ago,” says Cannamela about the track. “It was a hard move to make, but I wanted more than what I was getting out of the Springfield scene, and Courtney, for a long time, struggled to find fulfillment there as well, despite both of us having grown up there.”

2. Great Lake Jumper

A dream of escape drives “Great Lake Jumper” and its anthemic hope and yearning. Inspired by Cannamela’s move to Chicago, the track opens with sprinting guitars that mimic the speed of biking through city streets. The tension between staying in the comfort of the known and leaping into the unknown finds itself soaring high as the entire band shouts, “I bet I could jump my bike over the lake / If I went fast enough.” Here is a song about the possibility the big city offers, as well as the anxiety of being swallowed into anonymity underneath the scope of Chicago and Lake Michigan.

“I often would stare at the lake in wonderment when I would come up here to visit before moving here,” says Cannamela. “I still do now that I’m here, to be honest.”

3. Spin Cycle

“Spin Cycle,” the final single released for the album, portrays a fracturing of friendship through the lens of awkward silences and simmering discontent. Growing detachment, fueled by miscommunication and unmet expectations — the metaphor of a relationship stuck in a “spin cycle” feels apt as Cannamela laments the repetitive patterns that erode connection. Punctuated by Diaz’s pinpoint work on the toms and Recio’s hypnotic bass lines, the instrumentation exemplifies how Bottom Bracket masterfully allows each member of the trio to take a central spot in the composition. One of the highest points of this track comes at the 1:30 mark when Cannamela says, “If your life’s a T-shirt,” the entire band emphatically answers with, “Then I must be the stain” before Recio and Diaz enter a couplet that will have everybody in the room grooving.

4. Rainbow in the Rear View

In the second single released for the album, Cannamela recalls his move to Chicago and the urging of his mother to stay behind due to unsavory weather. Sonically, the guitarwork jumps and patters around the fretboard, casting a twinkly rainscape of hammer-ons as Cannamela vacillates between the dream of making it out of his hometown and the laments of leaving home. “To me, this day was always coming,” sings Cannamela in the second verse, further compounding the predetermination of this journey against the anxieties of his mother, who worries of rain and hopes she can delay the inevitable by even just a day more.

To leave home, to be the one that’s left — both are heaving emotional battles to wage. Cannamela finds the perfect center of this axis in the chorus as he sings, “Rainbow in the rear view / I can see you.” And what a beautiful way to celebrate an exit, not by mulling on some rainbow in the future that may come when the clouds finally part, but to see all the colors and hues in the place you’re coming from. Whether it’s a mother, a hometown, or history, this song stands as a monument of how having the right things behind you serves as a means to push forward, even “when lightning cracks the sky.” (And for the record, if you’re not screaming that last line when they play this song live, I have questions for you.)

5. Camouflage

How do you balance the line between someone you count on versus the realization that you don’t see eye to eye with them on much of what they do? An ode to internalized frustration, the third single, “Camouflage,” opens with an uptempo rhythm to anchor us sonically in the tense landscape of bedroom conversation and close proximities. Exploring the discomfort of trying to appease another while sacrificing one’s boundaries, Cannamela reflects on the strain of such close confines in the lines:

But two steps into your bedroom
And I already want to leave
I don’t need another silly scheme
I need the end of this fucking lease

The song’s tight rhythms and layered guitars give way midway through to leave Cannamela and the guitars singularly exposed to deliver the tried and true “I hope you know it’s not you / No, it’s me” before the rest of the band crashes in with some of the heaviest moments ever seen in the Bottom Bracket catalog. For those wondering if Bottom Bracket can still surprise you even after the near perfection they have already delivered in this record, “Camouflage” dares you to take that bet.

6. Swivel

In “Swivel,” we find Cannamela and his guitar alone in the booth. The song, restrained and haunting, finds Cannamela asking, “Oh, how do I do better?” The repetition of the line echoes as a reminder that Cannamela and company are constantly aware of the necessity to grow and, furthermore, how their past has shaped their growth so far. As we move towards the end of the track, a chorus of voices sings, “My bottom bracket won’t stop me / From riding all the way to your house” as the track finds its close, a nod to the band's roots and song “Bottom Bracket” from their debut EP, Dreamland. 

7. Unsavory

“Unsavory” was the record’s first single and the introduction to this new era of Bottom Bracket. Listeners are instantly met with insanely bright guitars and drums and are then pushed right into one of the catchiest riffs in human history. The choice to have “Unsavory” as the lead single is a fitting one, given that it chronicles the inciting incident for many of the themes and lyrics found throughout the rest of the record.

“This song is about the day the final straw was reached,” recounts Cannamela. “I wish I had been more vocal when something seemed off, but the picture wasn’t always clear to me.” “Unsavory” is the perfect word to capture the feeling when someone close to you is revealed to be someone they are not. “How do we find a way past this?” Cannamela asks before lamenting, “All the warning signs, how could I ever have missed this? / How could I ever have missed this?” But the truth is, sometimes we’re so close to the people we love that we DO miss some of the darker moves they make. The question we are then faced with is, what do we do next? For Cannamela, he says, “That was the moment our friendship ended, at least from how things went down from that point on.”

8. IKYKWIM (I Know You Know What I Mean)

“IKYKWIM” leans into Bottom Bracket’s poppier sounds and bouncier chords, with Recio’s infectious bassline as the driving spine of the beat. Tongue-in-cheek, the track’s lighthearted energy serves as the perfect foil for Cannamela to hit the soft implications of “I know you know what I mean.” Filled with the tension of knowing something is wrong but being reassured otherwise, Cannamela calls out the absurdity of it all with levity in saying, “There’s a few holes forming / In your Swiss cheese of a story” to the track's subject. And again, the repeated line of the song’s namesake echoes the frustration of unspoken truths after Cannamela has already begun putting the pieces together. The track, punchy, quick, and packed with urgency, captures the unease of discovering cracks in the façade of a friendship, finding its standout two-thirds of the way through with one of the sauciest solos found on the record. 

9. Cellar Doors

“This whole song is a love letter to the house that we used to live in Springfield; we spent four years in this cruddy house, but we practiced in the basement, even ran a house venue out of it too,” says Cannamela about the penultimate track, “Cellar Door.” This love letter calls back to many moments in Bottom Bracket’s history, with references to “Phantom,” “Failures,” and “Sun Singer.” The line, "I spent so many nights alone," captures the juxtaposition between nostalgia and moving on, a recognition of isolation and growth. Our histories shape us in ways we cannot imagine sometimes and in ways we don’t always get to see while they happen. 

To be able to chronicle these moments is a privilege, but to keep them “delicate, preserved, like a memorial display” also comes at the price of immortalizing the pain that came with those times. “All of I Don’t Care Enough to Stay and A Figure In Armor were written in this house,” says Cannamela, as well as some of the songs on this record here. For a musician, the house they live in is often the epicenter of where so many stories are born. For Cannamela, this is no exception.

10. A Confrontation

Our final track is the result of “a bomb that just keeps ticking down time,” the guitars and drums frantically moving us through the song. As their finale, the trio brings this record to a gallop with “A Confrontation,” the oldest song on the record, according to Cannamela. “I don’t quite relate to the lyrics anymore, but it was [about] a particularly bad fight,” he says. “At the time, it weighed on me heavily… I’m sure I didn’t handle things well then, either.”

While plenty of external exploration occurs throughout this record, the band is unafraid to look internally. Throughout this track and all that came before, Cannamela displays apparent dissatisfaction and frustration with his place in these situations. Regardless, the only option is to lay it all out on paper like Bottom Bracket did throughout this album. With a sonic callback to “A Condemnation” in the form of the lead riff, Bottom Bracket ties the record to a close by saying that where we are is a snapshot of where we’ve been. 

Final Thoughts on I'm So Afraid of Where

I'm So Afraid of Where is Bottom Bracket at their most vulnerable, most raw, and most masterful. This is not just an album: it is a memorial of relationships we must let go of and a celebration of the community that keeps us whole. Recorded by Andrei Milosevic and Tyler Floyd, mixed and edited by Tyler Floyd, and mastered by Adam Cichocki, the love and care put into making this album is apparent. The result of all these efforts is a deeply affecting album that feels both personal and universal. The future, for anyone, is a terrifying unknown — for Bottom Bracket, I am not afraid of where they will be once this gift of an album is out in the world.

Nishat is a writer, Pokémon addict, Fortnite fiend, and lead singer of tenmonthsummer, a lakeshore emo band from Chicago. You can learn more about his writing and work at nishatahmed.com, catch him streaming on twitch.tv/thenishfish, and find him yapping on Twitter and IG for the band at twitter.com/tenmosummerband and instagram.com/tenmonthsummerband respectively.

The Many Shades of Fiji Blue: An Interview with Indie Pop’s Bittersweet Optimist 

/

Photo by David Williams

Trevor Dering wants you to cry while dancing in the club. The Los Angles-via-Phoenix singer-songwriter who performs under the name Fiji Blue has carved out quite the niche for himself with downtrodden lyrics over up-tempo, buttery-smooth production. Imagine if Bon Iver crooned over songs meant for Harry Styles. The mixture of melancholy and jovial emotions creates a moody-yet-pleasant ambiance. It’s the rare type you can listen to if you’re depressed, where you don’t feel like you’re slipping into an abyss.

This year, pop music has been rejuvenated with newer stars shining quicker and brighter than ever before. In a stream-heavy world, artists can be spun up through advantageous avenues online, specifically TikTok or Instagram, where you can go from obscurity to instantaneous fame in a matter of months. Dering experienced this firsthand when Jungkook of the mega global superpower boy band BTS gave him a co-sign on Instagram for the sunkissed synth-laden single “It Takes Two.” From that point, Fiji Blue was suddenly elevated from a bedroom pop artist to a known quantity worldwide. Dering has since been featured on Spotify’s New Music Friday and on the music publication Ones To Watch, amassing millions of streams without even releasing a debut album.

Now, Dering is ready for his debut this winter with Glide, which will be released on December 13th. The different hues coming from Fiji Blue sonically on Glide are a mixture of swirling pop, house, easy-listening, and R&B. Introductory single, the refreshingly warm “Peppermint,” has a familiar sound that is simultaneously both aromatic and subtly sweet. The track is dedicated to his wife; the two got married earlier this year, and now the song stands as a celebration of their love. This is music with a universal appeal for all occasions, whether that’s a car ride down the Malibu Beach freeway, walking around your local grocery store, or even doing chores around the house. The rich vibey production combined with the earwormy hooks from Dering gives off a feeling that it’s only a matter of time before another mainstream jump. 

I chatted with Dering this summer and photographed his Chicago show. Read our conversation below and check out the gallery of photos of Fiji Blue performing. 

SWIM: Who were some of your favorite musicians growing up? Did you try to emulate any of them?

DERING: I grew up listening to a ton of classic rock on long car rides with my dad, but I quickly fell in love with the blues once I heard a Stevie Ray Vaughn song. Soon after, I discovered John Mayer & fell in love with the art of songwriting. John has been a huge, huge inspiration for me since I first picked up the guitar.

SWIM: Is there a specific moment in your life that you can remember that convinced you to pursue music?

DERING: I remember very specifically, at the age of 15, my mother showed me the song “In Your Atmosphere” by John Mayer, and it changed my life. I felt something I couldn’t quite explain that drove me to want to pursue story-telling and music at that instant.

SWIM: You have a sizable following both online and monthly streaming numbers (over 1.2 million monthly on Spotify) without releasing a full-length album. What is it about your music that you think connects with so many people?

DERING: I’m beyond grateful my music has been able to connect with so many people, close and far. I’m not sure if I can pinpoint an exact reason, but I’d like to believe it’s because people can relate to the stories of love and heartbreak I’m trying to tell. Life and love has its ups and downs. I’ve had my share of both, and I find peace in knowing my music has broken through enough to help anyone going through it in life.

Photo by David Williams

SWIM: You announced your debut album will be called Glide. What do you want listeners to take away from your debut?

DERING: I hope listeners fall in love with the story of “Glide.” It’s filled with some of the happiest moments of my life and some of the lowest. I got married during the creation of this album while also going through moments of heartache in creative relationships. This album was written to give life to that moment of “Glide” where you’re moments from landing & there’s nothing you can do but hope everything is going to work out.

SWIM: You chose the song “Peppermint” as the first single from the album. What was your thought process when selecting this song as the first taste of the album?

DERING: To me, “Peppermint” felt like falling in love. I wanted to come back with a song that gave me the biggest smile, and to me, that was this song. It tells the story of the effortless love I feel for my partner, Natasha. The world also needs more happy songs, which I struggle to write, unfortunately!

SWIM: Congratulations on recently getting married! Your lyrics are mostly described as “melancholy yet optimistic.” Can we expect similar themes on the album, or will you include more topics about love and marriage?

DERING: Thank you so much. Marriage has definitely shifted my perspective on life in a very short time, but I feel like I’ve also been married to Natasha since the first day I met her. I feel like my “sad yet happy” viewpoint will always be a part of my writing style, yet I hope to branch deeper into both places individually as I venture further into life’s highs and lows.

SWIM: Any final words before we sign off?

DERING: I’m just really excited and ready for the world to hear about this project.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.

The Name of the Band Is Pop Music Fever Dream

/

Photo by Sydney Tate

I don’t know how to be alone with my thoughts. Even when I’m playing a video game or reading a book, things I love doing to relax, I need an endless queue of YouTube videos or music to keep my brain preoccupied. I used to think it was because my ADHD has been left untreated since I was diagnosed in the second grade, but now I think I just hate myself. 

I talk a big game about loving art that makes you feel bad. I call movies like Blue Velvet my favorites, saying I love films that make you confront the darkest parts of your psyche, but when the credits roll, I’m looking for something else to fill the air. I am afraid that if I’m left alone with my thoughts, I won’t like what I see. I’ve let my brain get hijacked by the algorithms that get off on serving content that makes me want to fight; I’ve become just “an extension of that glass and metal,” as Tim Seeberger sing-talks on “Another Screen,” the lead single for Pop Music Fever Dream's new EP, Songs for Emotion.

I have a setlist from Pop Music Fever Dream’s show on December 30th at Our Wicked Lady that says at the bottom, “ALL NOISE ALL THE TIME!” an apt description of the band's sound, but also how it feels to be alive. As Seeberger puts it, the “tailored presence of bad emotions / blue light cuts through my brain” helps drown out any negative thought I could have, leaving me with good feelings forever. 

I first saw PMFD (what the real heads call ‘em) at Bushwick’s premier cemetery-adjacent venue, Purgatory, in March 2023. That night was the release show of Frog Era by ok, cuddle, the brilliant fifth-wave emo project helmed by PMFD guitarist Nicole Harwayne. I hadn’t heard any of the bands on the bill at that point, except for my beloved Crush Fund, so I didn’t anticipate leaving with two new favorite bands. 

Watching PMFD that night was like falling in love. The band has the chaotic energy you read about the first wave of punk stars possessing. Their songs tap into the no-wave era Parquet Courts had on Content Nausea and have the confidence to drop in snippets of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ classic “Maps.” On any given night, you can find Seeberger climbing precariously placed speaker stacks, shimmying their way up a pole, or crawling under the stage. These aren’t just the antics of a band desperate to hold your attention; the shambolic mess of a PMFD set is required by the music. When Seeberger drops the mic and leaves the room at the bridge of “The Internet (And Other Modern Observations), Vol. 1,” it’s not just a consistent gimmick; I imagine they need the time away from the stage to regroup. 

PMFD are pure, perpetual motion machines; they have to keep going, pushing, grinding, hitting harder, faster. If they stop for even a second, the thoughts will come flooding back in. That energy extends into the audience. I once told Seeberger that PMFD pits are the only ones I’ve ever actually been afraid to be in, and not just because I’ve taken guitar headstocks to the skull but because the crowd is as reckless with their bodies as Seeberger and the band are with their music. 

The shows offer ecstatic release, but this is not fun music. Like how listening to Gilla Band brings you into Dara Kiely’s panic attacks, Songs for Emotion is like getting trapped in Seeberger’s head as they have a mental breakdown trying to break free from the Matrix. From the liminal music video for “Another Screen,” to the torn personality manifesto of “Split,” to the drowning sound of “Elegy for Memory,” to the pipe bomb in the mailbox of transphobic legislatures of “18 States,” Songs for Emotion is music to rip your head from the screen. 

Over three Zoom calls interrupted by spotty internet and free plan time limits, as well as a couple of text messages, Seeberger and I talked about the role the internet plays in our lives, the recording of Songs for Emotion, self-hatred, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Swim Into The Sound: I wanted to start by talking with you about your relationship with the internet because I think it’s pretty obvious you have a fraught one. Something you do a good job of on “Another Screen” is talking about seeking the internet for comfort, which often spirals into doomscrolling and other forms of despair. When I was young, what got me into the internet was Cartoon Network games, which has since spiraled into having YouTube on in the background all the time or scrolling on my phone to constantly stimulate my brain. So I was wondering what was the thing that brought you to the internet?

Tim Seeberger: Like, what made me say the internet is for me? I think around the same vibe. I was into Nick dot com, playing all the games up there, Disney channel dot com, and I still think of the Ed, Edd, and Eddy game. There was Postopia, which was all about Cereals. I remember getting shown YouTube pretty early on. My uncle and aunt showed me the numa numa video, and I said, “This is the best thing ever.” Or, like “muffins,” which I loved but was creeped out by. And then I got really into RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, and there were all these videos of people doing mods that I would watch. I had my own little YouTube channel, and I would post my Roller Coaster POV’s. I think the channel is long gone. 

I would say that put me on the internet. I had AIM as well and would talk to the same three people in my middle school class. Then I got Facebook in the sixth or seventh grade and was like, “This is pretty sick.” I lied to get on there, I think I was 11 and said I was 13. I was an early adopter of everything. I saw the dawn of a lot of things that are now ruining my life. Instagram, I was on there early. I got on Twitter when you had to type “RT” to quote tweet. I was early on Snapchat. I had an iPhone that didn’t have a front-facing camera, but I remember when Facetime came around. All that to say, I’ve seen it all. Being 27, I’m kinda some of the last people to live a pre-internet life. Like, I started out with a dumb phone, but now I work a remote job on my laptop all day writing emails.

SWIM: Do you know when the relationship switched when it became an “issue” in your life? 

TIM: I would say around the time that it became an issue for everybody. I was a senior in high school and a freshman in college around 2015/2016. I feel like that’s when the internet started taking a dark turn. It was always on a dark turn, but it seemed less creative and more mind-numbing as the first election cycle of Trump came around. I started getting into deep-fried memes and becoming friends with people who were, as we know now, internet-pilled. 

I was on Vine too, and that probably shortened my attention span a little bit. But I would say that it was a noticeable issue around the pandemic. We had so much time to be on our phones, so I downloaded TikTok, and the rest is history. There’s one thing to be involved in memes and be brain rotted that way, but when you get into niche political content online, that’s when I was fucked. With everything that’s happening in the world, there is a whole new level of doomerism on the internet because you have niche political content that makes you wanna die, and then you jump to memes that make you wanna die, then you jump to memes that are brain rotted, then you somehow sink down into what the kids are looking at these days, and it’s like that’s a whole other level of dark. 

Photo by Sydney Tate

SWIM: That issue with switching tones feels like whiplash is constantly happening in your brain. Do you think it’s possible to manage having a brain that can take in this much information?

TIM: There’s way too much information available to us at this moment in time and in the wrong way. With the internet, all of this information was technically available to us, but it was less accessible. 

It’s been tough watching what is happening in Palestine because it is just an onslaught of terrors every day. As it should be to get the word out of how terrible this is, and there’s no internet access, and we’re purposely cut off from this. But it can get tough. I come from a journalism background, so it’s always just an onslaught of news and online stuff. But way back when you had to go searching for stuff, it wasn’t always this way. 

On the whole, without getting into nuances that obviously change this answer, there is just too much information all at once coming at you. And it’s done on purpose to keep you on there, to numb your head. I wanted to capture that feeling a little bit in “Another Screen.” That’s why there is that dissonance between the verses and the sound of the chorus and the end of the song. I felt like it had movements to it, like I wanted to write a very normal post-punk song, and then I wanted to really fuck it up. And I guess in some way, it kinda is an allegory for how the internet feels sometimes, like very normal and then at its core very intense and all-consuming. 

SWIM: That bit where you scream at the very end is the last vocal we hear, and it gets drowned out in the mix by the rest of the band. It feels like screaming into the void. Because that’s all you do when you tweet or post anything.

TIM: There is definitely intention to having it be just all of the same lyrics in that section. “At some point, it’s all too much / it never ends / it never ends.” That’s what I wanted to nail into people’s heads. It never ends, that’s it. 

That is what it feels, like you’re screaming into this void, but in my head, the void isn’t this dark and black; it’s like TV static and scrolling on your phone super fast until your eyes bleed.

SWIM: It’s like shoving your head into the TV in I Saw the TV Glow. 

TIM: Yeah, 1000%. With “I stick my head into the phone, to not explain the unexplainable,” I had this idea of my head falling back into my phone. My phone was like water, and I was drowning in it. 

SWIM: “Split” has been stuck with me for weeks.

TIM: That’s a hard one.

SWIM: Every time I listen to it, I am forced to reflect on being in the closet. Obviously, there’s the line, “and just shove myself back into the closet.” That was how I felt when I realized I was trans. Every time I listen to it, I think about how terrible of a partner or friend I was because I was just shoving myself into a corner. It’s a terrifying song. 

TIM: It was a very difficult song to write. That instrumental had kicked around in my head for close to two years, and I knew it had to be something intense. It was coming down to the wire; I was writing the lyrics on the way to record the vocals simply because I didn’t know what I wanted it to be about. 

The only lines I had that stuck from day one were “the rites of spring aren’t right anymore” and “the lights are off and no one's home,” which really summarized my existence for a while, whether when I was coming out, or be it just figuring myself out these days: “The lights are off and no one’s home.”

I was having a conversation with Nicole and Carmen in the car on the way to practice and asked, “Hey, should I put this in the song? Is this too heavy? Is this too much?” Nicole said, “You should write about whatever you’re feeling. I think the best stuff is about what you’re feeling.” In ok, cuddle, Nicole is certainly someone who puts her heart on her sleeve in her lyrics, and I admire that. I think I was very scared because it was me being open and painfully brutal about many things in my life that were going on at the time, and it applies to things that are still happening. Now that I’m in a better place, it is a little sad to look back on the line “In the name of all that is good in thee, get the fuck away from me” because it is like “I am a terrible person, do not love me. I’m gonna fuck you over.” Not the case, not true; that’s just my mental health talking. But it was basically like, ‘I don’t deserve love, run.’ 

The thing I’m most proud of is “You don’t know what you’re running from / but it scares you anyway / and you don’t know what scares you / but you run anyway.” That was something I wrote, and I was like, “I need to figure out what this means,” and I still am. It just came to me. Sometimes things sound good, and I put them in a song and I have to figure out later on what it is. I think I’m in the process of figuring that out. 

SWIM: That whole bridge where layers of your voice are echoing on top of each other is so painful because what you’re saying is so true about reckoning with yourself. You mentioned that it’s hard to look back on those lyrics of “get the fuck away from me,” but it’s so refreshing to hear someone admit that they aren’t always a good person or reckon with how they see themselves.

TIM: I’m not a person who is going to push anyone away; I’m not gonna be shitty on purpose.

SWIM: No, you’re one of the most lovely people I know.

TIM: Thanks, that was me fishing for compliments. I’m kidding.

SWIM: That’s staying in the article. 

TIM: Of course it is.

That [lyric] spoke to my perception of myself and the love that I thought I deserved for a long, long time, and honestly, it’s not even because I knew… That line came from me doing that to myself so many times. In the end, I realized that it was just not true. It was an intense and painful song. 

Sonically, this is one of the best songs I’ve ever written because it’s so weird. It was such a big, overwhelming idea in my head because I had a grandiose vision of what I wanted it to be, and I could make it happen now. 

SWIM: It’s interesting to me that the instrumental came so early and the lyrics came so late because it does feel of a piece. There are moments in the song where I’m like, this is a Black Flag song with how the guitars are like scrambling. Listening, I feel like I’m having a panic attack and literally punching a mirror. It captures what the lyrics are saying, so it’s incredible that it wasn’t a cohesive piece from the start.

TIM: We had to record it in four parts because we were still learning the song. We were very down to the wire on that one.

Thankfully, I wrote the song with four distinct movements with a stop and a start to everything. But it was an undertaking for sure. I remember Dominico sitting there for 30 minutes getting that drum fill in at the end. To his credit, he got it. There’s this video Violette (Grim, production/engineer) got of me orchestrating in the recording room, and when he did it, I remember making this fun face. 

SWIM: Because you said you had a vision for this song, and now you could execute it, I was curious how bringing in Carmen, Nicole, and Dominico changed your approach to crafting these songs.

TIM: It’s an ever-evolving process. Whereas “Another Screen” came as a fully formed idea, what you hear, save for Nicole because she writes all her own parts, is essentially the same thing. “Elegy for Memory,” Carmen wrote the bassline for that. I wrote it, and then she pushed it over the edge. That’s the dynamic of the band. I’ll come to them with these songs, and then immediately they’ll take it and be like, “What about this?” 

One of my favorite bass parts on “Spilt,” or dare I say the entire EP, is that part where Carmen goes Don Bum Bom Bum Bon Um at the end of that freakout section. That is all her. She was saving that for something, and when she did it, I was like, “You get the vision!” 

It’s a push-and-pull that feels really good. I still have creative control in some aspects, but the ideas flow very freely between us.

SWIM: I know you’re a big film buff because you and I have talked a lot about movies. Is there a film you would emotionally compare to Songs for Emotion?

TIM: Although I connect emotionally way more to the aesthetics of a film, I have to say that Neon Genesis Evangelion deeply moved me on an emotional level. First, it’s 14-year-olds in robot suits battling aliens, and then next thing you know, it’s about God and the existence of suffering. It’s incredible. I watched it at a really dark time in my life years ago, and both the last two episodes of the series, End of Evangelion, and the last Rebuild movie wrecked me and put me back together. It changed my viewpoint on life. At my lowest, I think about the scenes of Shinji crying at the thought of causing others pain when he doesn’t even realize getting hung up on that in the first place is causing the suffering. It comforts me to know you can still cry about your life and then eventually do something about it, knowing that the journey was necessary. Wrestling with suffering and trying to get out of my own way to be a better person is something I connected with in the series, which I hope is evident in the EP. 

SWIM: What’s next for PMFD? You’re going on tour with A Place to Bury Strangers later in the year, but what else?

TIM: We’re opening for Sunflower Bean. I’m super excited; they were a major inspiration for me to start PMFD in the first place. Then, take some downtime to write and record and see what happens. The beauty of naming my band Pop Music Fever Dream is that I describe it as listening to pop music in a fever dream. Who knows what is going to come out the other side? 

Stream “Another Screen” today. Songs for Emotion is out September 18th,
you can pre-save it here.

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her burner account on Twitter @Lilymweber.

The Power of a Name: An Interview with Seth Graham of ---__--____

/

INDIANAPOLIS – Some people see music as pleasant background noise. It’s a form of entertainment, trying to get through the workday or running errands in the car. In the case of Night of Fire, the new album from ---__--____ on Orange Milk Records, it is an album that forces the listener to engage within the first 30 seconds as the project unveils a new style of music that brings several different worlds together. 

Night of Fire, the newest LP from the experimental group ---__--____, which includes Seth Graham, as well as More Eaze and Recovery Girl, combines midwestern DIY hardcore with abstract classical and ambient tropes. 

In its brief 27 minutes, Night of Fire takes the listener on an emotional journey, seldom leaving time for respite. It features discordant strings, screams, and growls, as well as beautiful clean melodies, all of which come at different points within the album’s first 30 seconds. By the fifth track of the album, the listener is exhausted, only as the album once again builds up its intensity to an apex. 

The new album is the group’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed 2021 release The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid. Originally inspired by slowcore bands like Codeine and Bedhead, the new album morphed into a mix of slowcore and ambient, featuring Zao-style vocals. While there are some similarities between the group’s first two albums, Graham’s goal is to have a “clear distinction” between each release.

“I think it’s genuinely compelling. You can hate it, and you can shit on it, and that’s fine. But I don’t think you can say it sounds like something else,” Graham said. “That’s my goal. I feel like if I just pursue what I love and it lands there, then in my mind, I’m successful.” 

Swim Into The Sound spoke with Graham about the newest release from ---__--____, what inspired the sound of this album, what fans should expect out of the act’s live show, and where the project’s name came from. 

Follow-up to The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid

Graham said that the process of following up on the act’s 2021 debut started with a metal show near Dayton, Ohio. 

“I really like metal, and I’ve been really influenced by hardcore since I was a teenager,” Graham recounts. “I went to a lot of Christian hardcore shows because my parents were super religious… It was just a part of that culture in northern Ohio in the mid-to-late 90s when I was a teenager, and that stuck with me for a long time.” 

Even though metal inspires him, Graham wanted to create his own version of it when playing live, so he called upon Galen Tipton, aka Recovery Girl, to help. Ideally, Graham wanted his version to sound like early 2000s Christian hardcore, specifically like “Where Blood And Fire Bring Rest” by Zao. 

After the project’s Dayton show was over, Graham sent the music to Mari Maurice, the Brooklyn-based artist who goes by More Eaze, to see if this was something she could work with. 

“I’m not relying on Mari to… make the song fire,” Graham explained. “I don’t want to put that weight on her, so I try to make it so that even if it’s released as it is, I would be pretty happy with it and then hope that she can enhance it, which she does wonderfully. She does enhance it quite a bit.” 

Sound and inspiration for Night of Fire

Even as Graham was preparing for the one-off show, he said the idea of a full-length album was already on his mind.

“I liked the juxtaposition I was making between classical and hardcore,” he said. “I love, like you probably know, all kinds of music. But I love classical/avant-garde stuff. I always felt like people during the late 50s, 60s, and 70s, maybe into the 80s, avant-garde classical was such a hotbed of interesting stuff because it feels like poetry a little bit. You don’t meet a poet who wants to be famous. They just kind of make stuff, and they present stuff. I feel I just love that, you know?”

“I was sort of mixing hardcore and some classical and some kind of tropes of ambient music… Noise and hardcore equals it being kind of heavy, and I wanted it to be unbearably emotional and unbearable. [I wanted it to be] a bit unlistenable, if that makes sense. It’s listenable, I think, but I feel it really rides a line where I’m not sure if I want to listen to this anymore, but also, ‘I kind of love this.’”

Through his music, Graham said that he likes to draw from where he lives, taking inspiration from his experience growing up in the Midwest and approaching the album like a film.

“People sort of coming in and out of Christianity is really interesting to me because I was part of that growing up,” he said. “I’m not religious at all, but there’s just something really interesting about Midwestern America. A lot of people grow up really religious in various ways, and then they kind of depart from it when they’re younger, and then they kind of return to it. There are very different forms that it takes with people, and then (to see) how that affects art, I think, is really interesting.”

But while he was recording the songs that developed into Night of Fire, Graham said he takes an “emotion-only” approach, not trying to analyze it as he goes. If the songs make him feel something, he believes it will make others feel something as well. The album’s closer, “When God Released Me,” showcases that emotion-based approach perfectly, serving as the climax to the album as a whole.

“That song came together really really fast, and I was crying when I was working on it because I was so moved by it,” he said. “I was literally editing while I was crying and re-listening to it, and I was like, ‘This is it. This is good. I like this. I love this.’ It was just invoking that feeling, but why, I didn’t really know or care. I just try to abandon all analytics when I’m doing it.” 

Now that the album is recorded, Graham said he learned things about himself while he was making it. 

“Personally, it made me feel that all the therapy I’ve been through for depression and trauma throughout my life was just being crammed into a record,” he said. “That’s one thing I didn’t aim to do, but I think it happened. 

“Even though it was flushed out when I was making it. I just abandoned any kind of worry about it, about how it was going to go. I just kind of let go when I was making it.” 

Live sets for ---__--____

Through the various ---__--____ projects, Graham said he aims to make something that brings the question forward of whether or not they would be able to pull it off in a live setting. 

“I want to create something like Night of Fire where it’s like, what the fuck is this?” Graham said. “Can you even do this live? I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a fuck. What I want is just to make music like this.” 

Graham said he doesn’t relate to having a spiritual-like experience at shows but realized that people want an experience when they come to a show. Because of this, ---__--____ performances consist of a film being shown in the background while Maurice plays violin and strings. During the show, Graham lies down on the floor. It’s a similar approach to what Graham did at the initial concert in Ohio before he created Night of Fire.

“People want to be like, what just happened? I can present that, and I don’t have to play a damn fucking thing,” he said. “We’re all just going to lay there while this bizarre film plays with this hardcore classical music. We did this at a local bar in front of three metal bands and a crowd, and it felt deeply satisfying to me. This is what I wanted to present. This is what I wanted to do, and I didn’t really care. I don’t care at all about how anyone felt about it. This [was] liberation for me. I felt liberated from the burden of showing off my chops. I don’t have chops. It was not in the cards for me, but I shouldn’t be banned from playing music. I play music. I make art, and this is what I do.”

“I love it because I feel like when people come to see it, they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen this. I’ve never heard this. What the fuck is this?’” 

Origin of the ---__--____ project name 

When Graham and Maurice created the group, Graham said he didn’t initially want to name the project, stressing that it did not feel right to just use the two of their names as the project's name. At one point, Graham typed characters into a chat box, which ended up becoming the band’s name.

“I hate names,” he said. “I feel like names are all signifiers of what clan you belong to or what it’s all signaling. Words themselves are signals and the combination of words or how the word is just presented. I didn’t want to signal anything. I wanted there to be (a feeling of) ‘I’m not sure what I’m getting into.’ I wanted that, so it almost opens you up a little bit.” 

Graham sees the name ---__--____ as a rebuke of sorts, stressing that it’s okay to be recognized, but the capitalist-driven narrative of fame has an “awful side to it.” 

“If we have this name, we can’t go far. No one’s going to give a shit. No one’s going to go through the name, if that makes sense. A lot of people are like, what band is it? I don’t know,” he said. “I also like the idea of the album name becoming the band name - so then our name kind of changes.”

“I’m trying to force you to engage… I feel like if I saw it, my curiosity would be peaked. But maybe my curiosity is too easily peaked.” 

---__--____ is performing as part of a free Orange Milk Records showcase in Yellow Springs, Ohio in mid-September. Click here for more information about the free show at Antioch College. 

David Gay got into journalism to write about music but is now writing news and political articles for a living in Indiana. However, when he got the chance to jump back into the music world, he took it. David can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @DavidGayNews. (Just expect a lot of posts about jam bands.)