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.
