The Name of the Band Is Pop Music Fever Dream

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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 ---__--____

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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.)

Embracing The Collective: An Interview with Jess Hall of Oldsoul

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Photo by Hannah Kuhn

When I think about bands that are defining true community and excitement for the DIY scene right now, Oldsoul is high on the list. Their most recent album was hands down one of my favorites from 2023, but not only are they incredibly talented artists, they are committed to fostering an engaging, welcoming vibe wherever they go. It’s a common occurrence to see their lead singer, Jess Hall, operating with an unrelenting positive energy anytime I log onto social media, constantly uplifting bands and sharing good vibes. I myself resonate so deeply with this mentality, so when Jess mentioned on Twitter that Oldsoul was open to interviews, I jumped at the chance to pick her brain. We dug into Oldsoul’s approach to their social media presence and checked in on how the band has been since their most recent LP, Education On Earth, released last year through Counter Intuitive Records.

SWIM: Hello, Oldsoul the band! How have y’all been lately? 

JESS: Hi, loves. We're doing fantastic, thank you so much for asking.

SWIM: Y’all are very publicly adamant about there being no space between “Old” and “soul.” For readers who may not know, where did the band name come from, and why so much passion for the spacing? 

JESS: Oldsoul was my “cellar door” as a kid. I always liked the way the word sounded when you said it out loud. Also, it's extremely unsearchable, and I was definitely not considering that as a young person coming up with a band name. My logic was that it would help make it more searchable...? Maybe...?

SWIM: Congratulations on the release of your third LP Education on Earth last year! Now that y’all have that record a good year or so behind you, what is next for the band? 

JESS: Thank you so much for all the love and support you've shown us over at Swim Into The Sound. We are so happy ya'll received it well. Since the release in August, we've been jumping around our favorite northeastern hubs to hang with our friends / make new ones / promote our banger of a record. We were even lucky enough to play Fauxchella VI in October (shout out Summit Shack). We're also hanging in Scranton, PA, for Good Things Are Happening Fest in August. Oh! And we're writing new music. Very exciting.

SWIM: Education on Earth has been described as “fighting your own inner demons and the pull of nostalgia.” In an era of seemingly endless attempts to harvest people’s nostalgia, what are the dangers of this to you as a band? 

JESS: Personally, I don't really find it too dangerous because, at the end of the day, Oldsoul writes music we like that other people can connect to, and that's what really matters to us. What I find "dangerous" is how fast the world moves and how hard it is for everyone to keep up with all the content being blasted at us. We consume too quickly, in my opinion. 

SWIM: There are so many layers to the music in Education on Earth that reward listeners for revisiting the album. Is that something you are thinking about as you write the music, or is it just the product of having so many musical ideas you want to fit into a project? 

JESS: Tom and I are big texture people. We love adding layers and theatrics to our music because A) it's sick, and B) it keeps our music interesting. We also have a lot of fun adding final on-the-fly touches with our good friend and audio engineer Zach Weeks. He is the Master of Tone and always brings out the best in our songwriting. We're very lucky to have had God City as our playground.

SWIM: What does “post”-pandemic songwriting look like for you as a band? You’ve described Oldsoul as “collaborative” and “a collective.” How does this translate to future creation within the band?  

JESS: Typically, Tom [Stevens] and I formulate initial ideas on our own and then build the songs together. Sometimes one of us will have a heavier influence over the other, but we like to make it a collaborative effort. I've been using the words "collective" and "collaborative" more to describe how it feels to be a part of Oldsoul Nation. We wouldn't be where we are today without the support and love from the people around us. A band is a team effort.

SWIM: You’ve seen a personnel shift in the band in recent years as well. How did y’all come to this current iteration? 

JESS: Dan [Sweeney], Cam [Chapdelaine], and Justin [Sterchele] have been some of our best friends and biggest supporters over the years. We've all known each other for a long time. Super talented and driven people who help bring out the best in our live performance. 

SWIM: I’ve noticed that you're pretty active online and interested in building out those online community spaces, which I’m always a huge fan of myself! Why do y’all feel it’s so important to have a more high-energy approach to your online presence?

JESS: We want people to feel the energy wherever and however they choose to interact with us. I also get extremely excited when it comes to anything music-related.

SWIM: Jess, I loved your contributions to the latest Jimmy Montague album! Is there a collaboration y’all would love to see in this current DIY scene, either for the band or in general? 

JESS: I really appreciate that. James is a genius, and it was an honor to work with him. I would do it again in a heartbeat. I could think of a million insane collabs that could happen, but I find it really cool when bands explore alter-egos / different versions of themselves, whether they revamp an older song of theirs or experiment with an entirely different sound.

SWIM: Genres and music styles are so fluid these days, with so many bands venturing into completely different genres than they’re used to. If y’all made a record in a completely uncharted genre for the band, what do you think that would look like?

JESS: Oldsoul goes metalcore or Oldsoul goes twangcore.

SWIM: As a born and bred Pacific Northwesterner, I’ve noticed y’all have made it around the US quite a bit but somehow missed us up here. Are there any plans to make it up to the PNW any time soon?

JESS: A dream to play the West Coast/PNW for real. With touring being so expensive and our band being the size we are, I’m not entirely sure when we'll make it there. Hopefully we can spread the good word and change that, though.

SWIM: Are there specific cities y’all love playing in when you’re on tour? Favorite venues?

JESS: Not sure how much of an answer this is, but it's hard for me to pick a favorite place. We've had so many cool experiences all over – each city and crowd of people bringing their own energy. Chicago and Austin are really cool. Good food.

SWIM: Y’all have released all of your LPs through Counter Intuitive Records and are label mates with so many other incredible bands. What are your favorite things about working with CI that have kept you coming back to release with them?

JESS: It's been great working with CI and watching them build their empire from the ground up. They are extremely kind and hard-working people who have fostered an incredible community around music. We love our fam.

SWIM: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview! Did y’all have any closing thoughts to leave us with? What should the online people know about Oldsoul right now?

JESS: Thank you for asking us!!! We appreciate people like you spreading the good word about what's happening in the DIY world of music and giving bands like us a chance to share about ourselves!!!!

Stay locked in, excited to show y'all what's next. Love you. Thanks again. 

Xoxo Jess.

Ciara Rhiannon (she/her) is a pathological music lover writing out of a nebulous location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest within close proximity of her two cats. She consistently appears on most socials as @rhiannon_comma, and you can read more of her musical musings over at rhiannoncomma.substack.com.

Getting into the Lore with Nate Amos from This is Lorelei

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Nate Amos is the multi-talented multi-instrumentalist known for his involvement in Water From Your Eyes and This is Lorelei (projects he refers to as “Water” and “Lorelei”). I have followed his projects for years, with the most recent Water From Your Eyes record, Everyone’s Crushed, topping my personal album of the year list. This is Lorelei is Amos’ solo project, and his transcendent new record, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is out June 14th and deals with themes of loneliness, recovery, and aching longing, adorned with innovative and beautiful music. 

During my first listen of the album, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, innovation, and vulnerability of the music, and felt I had to speak with the person who made it. In anticipation of the record, I spoke with Amos over Zoom about the process of writing and performing this music. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

SWIM INTO THE SOUND: You’ve had a whirlwind year.

Nate Amos: Yeah.

SWIM: Last year, you released one of the year’s most acclaimed records with Everyone’s Crushed. You’ve been touring back to back, dropping new songs from both projects along the way, and you’re set to release yet another best record of the year. How are you feeling?

AMOS: I’m feeling good! It’s funny how with [This Is] Lorelei as a project, everything used to come out immediately as soon as it was done, so this is a pretty weird experience, waiting while it slowly rolls out. I’m used to that with Water From Your Eyes at this point, but not with Lorelei. The first year I finished the album without it coming out, it was something I thought about every day, and now it’s something I keep forgetting is happening.

SWIM: You’ve referred to the This is Lorelei project as a sort of diary, did that play into the creation of this album?

AMOS: Yeah, I mean it’s always kind of been equally diary and song study stuff. I write the lyrics by myself, so it inevitably tends to be a little more personal, but also, as a project, it’s just a lower-pressure arena to try different things out, at least for now. So there’s a little bit of the diary thing, but in the past, Lorelei has been very informal in terms of how I’ve worked on it. And this was all still in my bedroom, with no real plan. I feel like this album has set a higher bar for stuff that would end up on it. Normally an album would be all of the sixteen songs that I was able to make in ten days or something, whereas this album was ten of sixty or seventy songs that I wrote.

SWIM: Really?!

AMOS: Yeah, and some of it should never come out. Some of it has already come out because this was made in May to late July or August of 2022, so anything that came out on the Lorelei Spotify or whatever starting in summer 2022 is actually stuff that was written for and cut from this album.

SWIM: Okay, so “Bring Back My Dog” was originally gonna be on it? That’s one of my favorites. It’s so crazy that you decided to cut that!

AMOS: I mean, it’s more like once all the songs were done, part of it was figuring out what songs I thought were good enough for it, and the other one was figuring out what kind of character the album was trying to be. And the “Bring Back My Dog” song, I just kind of couldn’t–it had kind of a different vibe to it. 

There were two songs on that EP… well, let me think, there were like two days when four songs got made. Two of them ended up on that EP, and two of them ended up on the album. I was also like, “Why shouldn’t this be on the album?” It just didn’t feel right. At one point, the album was like… I had to let go of a lot because it was 32 tracks at one point, and it was so, so long. And I was trying to figure out how to make it work, and at one point, had a voice memo phone recording explaining why the album’s so long and apologizing for it, and I was like, “This is ridiculous, I should just chill out and choose a group of songs that works,” and make an album.

SWIM: So it was a very intentional winnowing down.

AMOS: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SWIM: You’re a multi-instrumentalist, and on this album and for previous EPs you’ve released, you use a lot of instruments that aren’t typically in the rock suite. On this one, I caught string samples, piano, chiptune synths, and I thought I heard a child’s xylophone in there, too. Is that right?

AMOS: Let me think. Okay, so the thing that sounds kind of like a xylophone? That’s a toy piano that goes on throughout the song “Where’s Your Love Now.” So that’s just a phone recording of me playing around on one that I looped. I’m trying to think of chiptune stuff.

SWIM: Maybe it was just sped up.

AMOS: I’m trying to remember. There’s a lot of sampling stuff. Even though the album is way more straightforward than Water From Your Eyes, there’s still kind of a way I put things together. There are a lot of samples, loops, and instruments that I can’t play by myself, like orchestral string instruments and wind instruments.

SWIM: Makes sense. Do you have a favorite instrumental moment on this album that might be hard to catch on the first listen?

AMOS: I got a lot. It’s funny because I’ve listened to this album again recently, and now it feels different. I like the second-to-last song, “Two Legs,” a lot. There’s a song called “My Boy Limbo” that has an almost messed-up-sounding instrumental thing that I like. 

That was kind of one of the challenges with this project because I was trying not to go nuts with cool sounds and Easter eggs; the whole idea was to really hone it in to be more about the song than the production, which I felt [was] something that had gotten–not lost in things I’ve done in the past, but because I enjoy music production and am a nerd, I would end up just thinking about that more than the writing itself. This album was definitely an attempt to A) worry about the content more than the sound, and B) focus on the individual songs rather than the overall concept, and have it be a cohesive album but very much a set of ten individual songs that don’t really rely on each other, but make each other stronger.

SWIM: That makes a lot of sense. I was listening to “Two Legs” again this morning, it’s so, so beautiful, and the lyrics are so vulnerable. It’s a little bit reminiscent of Elliott Smith in terms of the melody and also just the abject sadness. Is it hard being frank about heartache?

AMOS: Yes. But again, with this album, it was funny because there is a lot of earnestness to the lyrical content of the album, but part of the idea–or almost part of the bit, dare I say, was to zone in on these classic singer-songwriter archetypes in a way where the subject can relate to something I feel. But it’s more of like an exercise in writing that particular kind of song because that particular kind of song is this almost a standardized thing that has been attempted by all sorts of people over the evolution of pop music. Maybe it’s a combination of different things too, because it’s got some weird, almost Disney-like lullaby stuff going on. 

So it’s weird sometimes… it feels like a little exposed, but also I feel like maybe even if no one else knows, to me, there’s like a character that I’m playing on this album, so there are elements of me in it, but it also doesn’t feel entirely connected to me. Not that that song–every word in that song is true in one way or another, but something about participating in a tradition that belongs to so many people, you can reframe it in a way that feels a little less personal. I don’t know if that makes sense.

SWIM: Sure, absolutely. It has a core of truth, as Greta Gerwig would say. But the growth is maybe something embellished or imaginary. Speaking of operating in a tradition, the first song, “Angel’s Eye”… a country song. You write a magnificent country song, I was really surprised by that.

AMOS: Oh, thank you.

SWIM: Why did you choose to start the record off with that one?

AMOS: It just kind of made sense. So, that song was later on in the recording process. By the time it was written, there had already been a couple of versions of the album that I had thought were finished, but then I took it apart, and honestly, I really liked that one. It didn’t feel like it would work anywhere other than the beginning, and I didn’t have a first track that I was really attached to at that point. Then I tried it as the opener, and it was kind of like, “Yeah, okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

SWIM: You sing it in two registers, almost as two voices, in two separate worlds.

AMOS: Yeah, it’s a duet.

SWIM: So why did you choose to sing it alone?

AMOS: Because I was alone. 

[laughter]

AMOS: I like the idea… that’s something that shows up in at least two places on this album, where I am playing two different vocalists, essentially. And also I thought it would be funny. That is a very earnest song, and I do like it a lot, but it’s about an alien abducting a cowboy, and the alien and the cowboy falling in love, and then the alien has to drop the cowboy back off, and they’re both kind of like “what the fuck is this?”

SWIM: Wow, I thought it was about a ghost or an angel, actually, so the angel’s eye is a tractor beam?

AMOS: Kind of, essentially. I don’t know, I don’t have all the lore. [laughter] When the song’s actually being sung, the higher-pitched voice is the angel and the lower-pitched one is the cowboy, and the cowboy’s just kinda yelling at the sky.

SWIM: Yeah. Do you think aliens are real?

AMOS: I don’t know if I’m qualified to argue that anything is real. I think that the fact that we’re so sure about what’s going on to ourselves just means there’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand. I don’t know if I believe in aliens, necessarily, but I do believe we have no clue what’s going on.

SWIM: That’s a balanced take, I think.

AMOS: It’s more fun to think that way, I don’t know. I love conspiracy theories and alien content, and I don’t know how seriously I take it. And I don’t know how much it matters; it makes more sense to me than a lot of things people spend their time doing.

SWIM: I think my grandmother saw a UFO in Wisconsin in the ‘60s.

AMOS: Really?

SWIM: I think the government is hiding stuff from us.

AMOS: I’m about it. I’m here for it. I want to know.

SWIM: Same! Back to music…

AMOS: Okay, if we have to.

SWIM: Have you considered forming a country band or a country project?

AMOS: I grew up playing bluegrass music. My father is a bluegrass musician. So that music is very deeply ingrained in me, and I really do love country music, but no, I’ve never thought of starting a country band. There’s never been any long-term, consistent band for Lorelei just because, stylistically, it’s kind of all over the place. So it’s just been easier for me to figure it out show by show. But I’ve been playing with Al [Nardo] and Bailey [Wollowitz], who also play Water From Your Eyes live.

SWIM: The drummer?

AMOS: Yeah, Bailey plays drums, and Al plays bass in Lorelei and guitar in Water.

SWIM: A lot of your songs mention airports and foreign countries, are those taken from your experiences touring? You talked about this album as being from the perspective of a character.

AMOS: I mean yes and no; again, it’s like I was definitely in an airport not long before I wrote one of these songs, and I might not have written it if I hadn’t been in the airport, but I wasn’t like “I gotta write about this airport!” It was more like… going back to using archetypal song elements where you have name-dropping cities, methods of travel, talking about money, stuff like that. All these things have been beaten to death in songwriting to the point where they’re just tools you can use to do anything. And then there’s trying to develop your own little ideas that you treat as normal and use them in the same way, but they’re unique to the album. That’s something that can blur everything into a lyrical texture that I really like. Use stuff people are used to hearing, then aggressively use things they might not have heard, but smash it all together. So it’s like half and half. Sometimes if a place is name-dropped or a vehicle is mentioned, it’s a real thing. And half the time it’s just not.

SWIM: So what is it like being from Water From Your Eyes, which is a band where you don’t sing, and another project where your voice is on pretty much every song? Is that a strange asymmetry to navigate?

AMOS: I mean, it’s strange. I don’t know how difficult it is. They’re both projects that, at this point, I know very well, and I have a sort of particular mindset for each of them. And it’s kind of like playing two different sports. They’re just separate enough that they don’t really get in the way of each other. I definitely, as of now, have clocked more hours just playing guitar in front of people than singing. I don’t really like singing in front of people, but I guess if I’m trying to do this, then I have to. We did a back-to-back tour where it just flipped from one thing to the other halfway through, and it didn’t feel all that weird. It’s a different kind of fun.

SWIM: That’s great, I caught a lyric on “An Extra Beat For You And Me,” the little “water from my eyes” line. Is that a nod to your other project?

AMOS: Yeah.

SWIM: I was also wondering, do you know the “Buffalo Stance” song by Neneh Cherry? 

AMOS: No, I don’t think so.

SWIM: She has a little interlude where she goes “water from my eyes,” and I was like crossover moment!

AMOS: Oh, whoa, I did not know that. That’s cool.

SWIM: Anyways, I was curious why you included the little nod.

AMOS: I don’t know what the initial idea was. I just kind of wrote it, and then I was like, “Is that too silly?” Because it is kind of funny to nod at it, but I realized there’s this recurring theme where once every couple of years, I’ll write a song and just kind of sneak that phrase into it. The last one is a song that Water ended up doing called “When You’re Around.”

SWIM: Yeah! Yeah.

AMOS: Someone originally asked me to write a song for a movie.

SWIM: A karaoke scene, right?

AMOS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That song is the same thing. It doesn’t really mean anything that it’s in there. It just kind of happened that way.

SWIM: Is it crying? Is it sad crying or happy crying?

AMOS: It could be either. In that song, it’s more of an overwhelmed cry throughout it, rather than a sad thing.

SWIM: Yeah. Beautiful. I have another question about country music for you. We’re almost out of time. Growing up in a bluegrass environment where people were playing country music and country-adjacent music constantly… do you have favorite country musicians?

AMOS: Oh, yeah. I mean, in terms of traditional bluegrass, it’s not something I listen to all the time, but there are certain standard things in that genre that blew my mind, like the early stuff like Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and The Stanley Brothers. A lot of what I grew to love later in life was stuff that’s kind of like rock-country hybrid because I viewed those as such separate things, and at a certain point, was kind of like the purist mindset, where there’s like the old-time bluegrass music, and I didn’t like it when that was taken and applied to other things. But I got really into [it]. 

Discovering Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers was an interesting thing at one point because I missed them until later in life. Favorite country musicians… Townes Van Zandt. As I got older, I became more into country as a songwriting style in a way that I didn’t really think about as a kid, where it was more about the music itself rather than as a medium for writing that I might use.

SWIM: Do you think there will be more country music in your future?

AMOS: Probably! I don’t know, I have no idea. I never really know until the album is off and running. And this album certainly didn’t–the intention was not to open with a country song. But it was how I was studying Shane McGowan a lot, and I feel like that bled through pretty obviously in some of the tracks. But I don’t know; it depends on when I have time to make a Lorelei album again and what I’m into at that point.

SWIM: Yeah, it seems like you’ll be pretty busy for the foreseeable future.

AMOS: Yeah, I mean, ideally, I’d like to get on a schedule where I’m alternating and have some sort of album coming out every year alternating between projects. But we’ll see if that happens. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. [laughter] Probably more country songs, yeah. Not exclusively country songs.

SWIM: Well, I’m excited to see more country songs and non-country songs. Thank you again for taking the time.

AMOS: No problem, thank you for having me.

SWIM: Good luck with the rest of your tour and album rollout. I think it’s going to be historic.

AMOS: Thank you. I’m glad you like it.

Elizabeth is a writer and researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice—and makes electronic music in her spare time. She is from Northern Nevada.

Documenting The Void: An Interview with Heavenly Blue

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Started in the aftermath of Michigan band Youth Novel, Heavenly Blue is a seven-piece screamo/post-hardcore outfit that just issued their first release, We Have The Answer. Taking inspiration from a range of sounds in the genres of punk and hardcore, Heavenly Blue delivers an impressive collection of songs with their record. Swim Into The Sound guest writer Nick Miller recently sat down with guitarist Maya Chun and bassist Jon Riley to discuss the album, their musical influences, the band’s upcoming plans, and their love of Texas gas station food.

Heavenly Blue just got off a tour with Frail Body last month. How did that go?

Maya: It went super fucking well. I don’t think it really could’ve gone any better.

Jon: Yeah, the shows were well attended. We played with some great locals, which is always a plus. We met a bunch of pals that we hadn’t met before in person. It was cool.

In your Bandcamp bio, it says, “Screamo with dignity and integrity.” I feel like the screamo label can be sort of divisive. Some people get a little embarrassed, but Heavenly Blue seems to embrace it. What are your thoughts on “screamo?” 

Maya: Like the word and label?

The use of it. Some people are like, “I don’t know. I don’t really consider us a screamo band.” That’s kind of a standard thing you hear.

Jon: I would say it’s divisive, even internally. I personally don’t enjoy music labeled as “skramz,” but I do like bands that refer to themselves as screamo now, and I’m also into bands that referred to themselves that way in 2008. So I think it’s come full circle for me, where it’s like – okay, I like post-hardcore, metalcore, and screamo, that’s fine. I like “real screamo” screamo, that’s fine. I’m really not a big fan of “skramz,” both as a label and as a genre classifier that has a sound. I just don’t really like it. I guess some of our songs are screamo songs, some of our songs are decidedly not screamo songs. They’re way more post-hardcore. There’s some noise rock-y bits. The label screamo is kind of tongue-in-cheek, when we say, “With dignity and integrity.” It’s like a little inside joke.

How do you feel about genre labels in general? It feels like everything is a mix of different genres, so it’s kind of hard to place bands into genres today.

Maya: Especially these days, I would say a lot of music is just everything.

Jon: Yeah.

Maya: I think it’s helpful to have genre labels to understand today’s music specifically, but at the end of the day, if you don’t understand genre labels and you just listen to cool music, you’ll probably make cool music.

Jon: I think I’m similar to Maya in that I have a hard time with labels. We had this discussion on tour. What actually is “mathcore?” … I don’t think I like mathcore, and Maya says she likes mathcore. But I do like white-belt grind and Maya’s like, “Those are mathcore bands.” Now I’m thinking about the Venn diagram of mathcore. I don’t understand mathcore, and I’m not even going to pretend to understand mathcore. But then we have some songs that are kind of math-y. Like – what is that song even called?

Maya: “Looming?”

Jon: “Looming” is like seven-eight-nine-five-five-seven-eight. The counting is so messed up. I’m like, ‘Is that a mathcore song? Do I like our music? I don’t know.’

Maya: That’s just a Drew [Coughlin] song.

Jon: Yeah, it’s drummer music, and maybe that’s what we should describe it as. We have drummer music, and then we have guitarist music.

Maya: Yeah, that’s honestly more accurate, because you can tell bands like Ulcerate or Origin in the metal genre specifically – it’s all about the drummer in those fucking bands. And then you have other bands like, I don’t know – Necrophagus or fucking Brain Drill is obviously all about the guitars.

Jon: I think maybe we start the Venn diagram at guitarist music [versus] drummer music and then go from there. But I actually do think genres are helpful in just understanding where people see their allegiances. I think when a band tells me what genre they are, it’s more interesting for me not because I’m trying to be like, “You’re not a real screamo band.” But it’s like, “Oh, but you listen to that stuff, and those are the things you’re influenced by, and now when I’m listening to your music, I’m listening for the things you like.” I think that’s kind of how I think about it – genre’s just like your influences now because everything is everything.

When you’re writing music, are you conscious of what your influences are, or do you let it sit subconsciously and figure it out later?

Jon: I personally only write music after I’ve been listening to other music. I never just wake up in the morning and have a riff in my head. I’m always listening to an Unwound song, and I’m like, “Oh, the way that song builds and everything is chaos and catharsis – I would want to do that for a Heavenly Blue song,” and I kind of use that motif as a starting point… I’m not taking notes or even riffs or whatever, I’m mostly just taking musical concepts and motifs, and seeing how I can interpret them in our musical lexicon.

Maya: It’s sort of a mix for me. Obviously, we were just on tour for Frail Body for two weeks, and a couple of days ago – it was just a regular afternoon after I came home from work. I’m just playing guitar, and I’m like, “I have an idea.” And I write, for the first time in months, a song that’s like two-thirds Frail Body and one-third Nuvolascura, because I just love Nuvolascura. I think I get exposed to stuff and it influences me subconsciously, but then I’ll just randomly have an idea.

Talking about We Have The Answer, what do you feel like your influences were?

Maya: I think we all had a lot of pretty different influences coming into that record. … A fair amount of the guitar parts on that record are –

Jon: They’re holdovers from Youth Novel. Some John Dickinson riffs.

Maya: Yeah, John Dickinson wrote some riffs with us and sent them over following the release of the Youth Novel record, and I built songs around them, along with some older riffs. But for other parts of the record, I regularly take a lot of guitar influence, at least, from At The Drive-In and The Fall Of Troy, I guess as a quote-unquote lead guitarist or whatever.

Jon: Our drummer writes songs on drums, which is pretty different from most bands. There’s a few songs [like that] on the record. If you listen to the record, you’ll know which ones they are, because it’s very apparent. The drummer will write a drum song, and then we come in later. Maya writes guitars and we kind of workshop it and change the structure a little bit to make it more musical “song structure” sense. Because drummers have Drummer Brain and just want to drum, so you have to help them write songs. And then Kris, me, and Drew kind of jammed together, and we sort of talk about stuff as like – “Okay, so this song is ‘Screamo Banger.’” And that’s the way we think about that collection of riffs and parts. It’s all part of this song that’s loosely defined as “Screamo Banger.”

Maya: I barely remember what the actual name of it is. I just know it as “Screamo Banger.”

Jon: We have codes for all of our songs.

Can you tell me which one “Screamo Banger” is?

Jon and Maya: “...And Like That, A Year Had Passed.”

Photo by Kyle Caraher

Let’s talk about the Metal Frat at the University of Michigan. Is that where you two met?

Jon: We met on a Facebook group, but yeah.

Maya: Because of Metal Frat.

What did you learn from your time living there or just being around there?

Jon: I know all the different types of mold. The types of mold that can hurt you and the types of mold that you can cohabitate with.

Maya: I know how to shotgun a beer in less than a second.

Jon: I know how to book a show. I think I learned how to do that there.

Maya: The pedal board that I built there is still the one I have.

Jon: Learned how to live in difficult situations. One of the things living in an environment like that teaches you – it’s actually good training for being in a band. You might not always get along with your close cohabitants, and you often have to learn how to make it work in creative ways. I think that has made being in a band with so many people easier for me and Maya specifically, because we’re used to living with 24 people, sometimes more.

Maya: Sometimes I forget that. It’s just like – yeah, I used to live with 20 fucking people.

Maya, you recorded and mixed much of the album. What were your goals going in? Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to sound like specifically?

Maya: The drums for seven of the songs were recorded in Baltimore when Drew was still living there. The remaining three or four songs we recorded here in different capacities. Due to the nature of how we recorded it, because it’s hard to get seven people in a room together, I think I just wanted it to sound as good as I could. And I think I also have a pretty distinct idea of what sounds good at the end of the day, and I think that’s born from listening to a lot of metal and maybe idolizing Devin Townsend in my early years, and loving “Wall of Sound” production. I just like things to sound big; I like things to sound live. I guess my ideal mix is the perfect live show experience. I can be both very forgiving and very picky about how I do that, which I why I spent like three months agonizing over the mix every day, for many hours every day. I really like mid-2000s Kurt Ballou. I really like fucking Adam from Killswitch [Engage]’s mixes of all those early metalcore records, like Norma Jean’s, Bless The Martyr and shit. I just like those dirty-ass, hard-hitting, stupid records. And I also played djent in the 2010s, so I can’t escape that either, I suppose.

What is your background in audio engineering?

Maya: I was self-taught from middle and high school. I was just on the internet, I didn’t have friends in real life, and I liked progressive metal. So I really didn’t have anything else to do other than just make music in my room alone.

Jon: I’m gonna interject and say Maya made quite possibly the best post-rock metal record of the 2010s when she was in early high school.

Maya: I did no such thing.

Jon: She lies to you.

Maya: It’s a prog record.

Jon: It’s a prog record but it’s actually great. It was one of the things where I was like, “This person has to join Metal Frat because one – you can record Youth Novel. Two – the record, it was better than anything I’ve ever done to this day. 

Maya: That’s not true.

Jon: It’s true.

What’s it called?

Jon: The project was called Goodthink, and the record is called Ascend. Is that right?

Maya: That’s correct. I released that in the summer of my senior year, just about to go into college.

Jon: That’s in writing, Maya. Everyone who reads this is gonna go listen to that record, and they’re gonna be like, “Wow.”

Maya: No, they’re not. They’re gonna listen to the first record and be like, ‘What is this Dream Theater bullshit?’

Jon: Maya’s magnum opus.

Maya: It was definitely my magnum opus at the time, in high school. Yeah. And that was 11 years ago.

Jon: Sorry to derail your question. Maya sells herself short. She’s been very good at audio engineering for a long time.

Maya: Then I went to U of M and did the Performing Arts Technology program, which is essentially their audio engineering program, for a few years. Now I’m here.

Do you think you’re going to keep recording the band?

Maya: Unless a lot of money is handed to us, with the condition being Maya doesn’t record the band, then sure, yeah. I’d like to, because I just like to. 

Let’s talk about the album art. Where did that come from?

Jon: So that was me. … It’s an interesting story. We kind of went back and forth on a lot of concepts for the album, just in terms of how the songs made us feel, or what are the types of imagery that kind of encapsulate both the lyrical and sonic content. God, I sound like I’m being a dick. I kind of feel like an asshole. You can tell I went to art school. So anyway, I kind of bounced a bunch of ideas off people. The things that kind of stood out were [that] it feels brutal and dense and kind of obstructive. It feels like it’s just in the way of something, but you don’t know what. It’s just like a rock in the middle of the road. It feels impactful. But then other people were like, “It makes me feel de-personified and absent, like the void.” So I kind of looked for a bunch of themes, and one of the things that stood out to me was the desert. And Maya’s like, “This is not a desert album.” And I was like, “It’s not a desert album.” Still think it was a great concept.

Maya: It’s not a desert album.

Jon: It’s not a desert album. 

Maya: We ain’t Kyuss.

Jon: We could be, though.

Maya: We’re not Kyuss. 

Jon: I’m telling you, Maya. The stoner rock arc is the next record, for sure.

Maya: I don’t think so.

Jon: Anyway… I kind of started to do some digging into the archives on those themes, and I found this photograph from 1960s San Francisco political organizing. I’m not gonna mention who the person in the photo is. That’s part of the purpose of obscuring their face – so you don’t know. It is a person from the San Francisco Bay Area who was integral in moving forward progressive politics in that time period. We obscured all the faces from that image in hopes that you understood that de-personification that we were feeling when we listened to it or when we wrote it… There are some other elements to the art, specifically the layout. The physical record has one of the alternative covers that I looked at, which is a person performing a ballet dance on a stage from the exact same event that you’re looking at in the first image. Part of it has to do with – you don’t know who these people are, you don’t know what the event is, but they’re obviously doing an evocative act. This is a performance of some sort. And that’s kind of how I view the record. I don’t know how people are going to describe it, but I know that they’ll kind of have a hard time. But you’ll listen to it. You have to kind of engage with it. You have to work through the songs to hopefully get what we were trying to do. … Oh, and the cross. This is the last thing I’ll say.

Maya: Oh, yeah.

Jon: Part of it was like, “What if we name the record We Have The Answer and put a cross on the cover? Are we a Christian band?” That was one of the things we kind of joked about. … But also, I’m personally interested in text-based design, and I like when people break conventions with text in a design. So I was trying to go for something that kind of mimicked the image. So if you look at the cover, you’ll see the person on the stage with this hand pose, and the text is supposed to kind of be a mirror image of that just in the shape of everything. It’s purely aesthetic, is what I’m saying. It’s not Christianity.

Are you going to put out lyrics with the album?

Maya: I think we are, yeah.

Jon: I know that they are in the liner knows. I don’t know if they’re going to make it [online]. … They are in the liner notes with the exception of some lyrics that we have withheld from the song “Certain Distance,” because some of those lyrics were written by the first vocalist of Heavenly Blue. We’ve already gone through one vocalist. That’s our friend Nathan. Nathan didn’t want to be in a band anymore. Nathan’s a spiritual member. 

I’m fascinated with sequencing and how people come up with that. Can you talk about how you decided on the order of the tracks? Was that carefully thought through?

Maya: I think usually I’m generally the one who does it. I’ll bring a certain tracklist to the band and be like, “What do you guys think of this?” And everyone will give their input and we’ll change it. We’ll have another tracklist and if we like that, we’ll go with it, or if we don’t like it, we’ll make some more changes.

Jon: With this record, I think Maya was intimately familiar with the songs.

Maya: That’s every record!

Jon: But this one specifically because you mixed it for three months straight.

Maya: How long – we worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years.

Jon: You worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years. I worked on the Youth Novel record for a total of three weeks. Anyway… I think there is an arc to the sequencing. The way that it sort of goes, which is kind of funny, is it goes in chronological order of how the songs were written.

Maya: Pretty closely, yeah.

Jon: So you kind of see the creative process of this band forming in this record. The first couple songs are all Youth Novel holdovers.

Maya: That plus riffs that John Dickinson wrote after the Youth Novel LP.

Jon: And then there’s the drummer songs, which are the middle of the record, and … kind of like a junction. Drew actually recorded drums for those songs before the songs were completed. Just recorded drums at the studio because we paid for studio time.

Maya: I had written the songs around it by that time, but they weren’t done.

Jon: The last three or four songs me, Kris, and Drew wrote together in a collaborative way, the skeleton of, and Maya took it into a DAW [digital audio workstation] and finished. That’s kind of how the sequencing came to be. I do think there’s kind of an arc of more melodic content at the beginning, and then it goes into more math-y, abrasive content in the middle, and then this build-up and fall-off for the last two tracks. I think there is a sequence. I don’t know if it was as intentional as most people because we didn’t sit down and write this record in a month. This record took two years, so it was a long process.

How do you see the writing process changing going forward, now that you sort of have a base?

Maya: We’re out of Youth Novel riffs. No more.

Jon: I’m ready for our new stuff because I do think it sounds a lot more like us, like the people in the room who are making the music. We got together and went to a cabin in Port Hope, Michigan [in] the thumb of Michigan. … [We] got together for a weekend, hung out, and wrote five or six songs. Parts for songs. They’re not done, but –

Maya: That, plus everything else we have – we have like 47 minutes of raw material for the next record.

Jon: We have a lot that we are toying with. I’m excited to start the next record.

Heavenly Blue is playing a couple of festivals this summer. Will you be touring on the way there?

Maya: Four shows, including PUG Fest.

Jon: Yeah, we’re doing a slew of shows with Dreamwell. … That’s gonna be fun. Good band. They put out a good record last year. And then we’re playing some shows before New Friends Fest with an unannounced band that I’m not gonna name yet. We’re gonna wait a little bit longer. We are gonna be playing with Flooding again, I think. We love Flooding. Best band ever. We got to play with Flooding for three dates on this last Frail Body tour. We’re hoping to play some shows with them because they’re also playing New Friends and we love their music. And they’re also sweet people. And we might have some other stuff coming at the end of the year.

What do you like to eat on the road?

Maya: Buc-ee’s

Jon: We fell in love with Buc-ee’s on the road.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of Buc-ee’s. Is it a Texas thing?

Jon: It’s a Texas thing.

Maya: Yeah, it’s like a big, old truck stop, except there’s no trucks allowed.

Jon: It’s a truck stop without the trucks. It’s amazing.

Maya: They have a whole deli bar kind of thing for just jerky. They have fresh-made BBQ sandwiches. They have burritos. It’s basically like gas station food but cranked up to the absolute max, and also in Texas. 

Jon: Everything’s bigger. I know they say everything’s bigger in Texas, but the sandwiches are enormous.

Maya: They were fucking good.

Jon: The cost-to-weight value of food there is unreal.

Maya: You can’t get a BBQ sandwich [in Michigan] that good.

Jon: Buc-ee’s is the best Texas gas station. I would say the other things we do for food – I don’t know, we try not to eat like absolute garbage. The band tries to buy people good food once a day because you gotta eat well to live a quality life, and we try to take that seriously. On this [last] tour, the band paid for everyone’s meals and we tried to buy ourselves good food. We love Taco Bell, too, especially for the vegetarians. 

Maya: We’ve got some vegetarian/vegan people, so we usually have to take that into account. Most of us will eat whatever.

Nick Miller is a freelance writer from Ypsilanti, Michigan, primarily writing about the world of professional wrestling. He also enjoys playing music, reading, tabletop RPGs, and logging Letterboxd entries (AKA watching movies). You can find him on X at @nickmiller4321 or on Instagram at @nickmiller5678.