Home

Category: Interview

  • How Yoko Ono and Vintage Sounds Influenced Memorials on All Clouds Bring Not Rain

    Memorials Press Photo David Masters
    Photo: David Masters

    There’s a well-known photo of Yoko Ono from 1967 where the artist is holding a glass hammer. If you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably seen the image recently in connection with the Music of the Mind exhibition that’s currently at The Broad. English duo Memorials caught sight of that photo when the Yoko Ono retrospective showed at London’s Tate Modern and it ended up inspiring their song, “Cut Glass Hammer,” from the recently-released album All Clouds Bring Not Rain. 

    “We went to that exhibition and on the posters they have the picture of her with the glass hammer,” Verity Susman recalls on a recent video call. “They don’t have it in the actual exhibition, but that concept really stuck out in our minds.” In fact, Susman says, there was a lot about the Yoko Ono exhibition that seeped into the subconscious as she and Matthew Simms worked on the album- like the artist’s instructions and her references to nature- and may have manifested as subtle influences that they didn’t realize until looking back at photos from the Tate Modern after finishing the album. 

    (more…)

  • Mekons Reveal “Dark Underbelly” of Horror on New Dub Album, Horroble

    Photo courtesy of Mekons
    Photo courtesy of Mekons

    “War Economy,” from Mekons’ 2025 album Horror, is a quintessential post-punk jam with a funky pogo beat, urgent guitars and snarling vocals that rip through lyrics as relevant to the Thatcher/Reagan era as they are to today. When Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu) reconfigured the song for the newly released companion album Horroble (Mekons vs. Tony Maimone In Dub Conference) he teased out an even more ominous quality, with vocals echoing as if the past and present were joined in chorus to sing the same song. In a way, that’s what “War Economy” is about.

    “This excursion into Iran doesn’t make any sense, logically. They can’t even explain it,” Jon Langford says on a video call. It’s the first week of April and the Chicago-based Mekons co-founder is on vacation in Georgia. “Apparently, now we’re fighting to open the Straight of Hormuz, which was open before we started fighting the war.” 

    (more…)

  • Devlin and the Harm on the Sopranos Needle Drop That Inspired Debut Album

    Devlin and the Harm press photo by Natali Hopkins
    Photo: Natali Hopkins

    Devlin McCluskey had been on a Sopranos kick that sent him down a music rabbit hole. Remember the episode where Christopher relapses, with carnival lights twinkling and Fred Neil’s song “The Dolphins” playing in the background? “That set off me obsessively listening to that song and then trying to find more songs that sounded like that,” McCluskey says on a recent video call from Cathedral City, where the formerly L.A.-based musician now lives. 

    That Sopranos needle drop prompted McCluskey, previously of The Dead Ships and now of Devlin and the Harm, to dig into more sounds of the 1960s and 1970s that were unfamiliar to him. There was “Something on Your Mind” from the bluesy singer Karen Dalton and Scott Walker’s “The Old Man Is Back Again” and playlists loaded with Donovan tunes. “I’m the kind of person who will listen to one song over and over and over or start my morning listening to one song every morning for months and months,” says McCluskey. That was the case here.

    (more…)

  • Holy Sun Opera House Turned Recurrent Dreams Into a Gothic Tale

    The Holy Sun Opera House press photo by Andres Herrera
    The Holy Sun Opera House (Photo: Andres Herrera)

    For years, Krissy Barker has been dreaming about houses. Some of the dreams are frightening. Others are not. All feature very specific dwellings that only exist in her dreams. “I’ll visit the same ones over and over and over again, sometimes multiple times in the same night,” the L.A.-based singer and drummer says on a video call. After so many somnial visits, Barker started turning those mysterious spaces into songs and, after forming Holy Sun Opera House with composer dl Salo, they became the basis for the project’s self-titled debut album, out now via Hologram Opera. 

    Holy Sun Opera House is gothic music in a way you wouldn’t expect for 2026. Barker and Salo- both classically trained musicians who met playing pinball and share a wide variety of non-classical influences- have made the kind of music you want to hear while you’re reading Rebecca or marathoning episodes of Dark Shadows. The album The Holy Sun Opera House is gothic in the sense that it gives you the impression of wandering through an old mansion on a stormy night, guided only by candlelight and unsure of what lies behind the doors you find. 

    (more…)

  • How Making a Documentary on Scottish Girl Bands Influenced Carla J. Easton on Her New Album

    Press photo of Carla J. Easton by Craig McIntosh
    Carla J. Easton’s new album, I Think That I Might Love You, is out now. (Photo: Craig McIntosh)

    Throughout her career, Carla J. Easton wrote and played with piano and synthesizers. That changed, though, after spending eight years working on the documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands. “I would just interview and spend time with these incredible, powerful, independent women,” says Glasgow-based Easton on a recent video call. “None of them ever waited for an invitation. A lot of them are just like, I’ll pick up a guitar, fuck it.”

    So Easton, too, picked up a guitar too. The result is her latest solo album, I Think That I Might Love You, out on May 8.

    (more…)

  • Mignon Looks Towards Utopias in Dystopian Times

    Mignon Fist in a Honeypot video selfie
    (Photo courtesy of Mignon)

    In her video for “Fist in a Honeypot,” Mignon cuts a regal figure, decked out like a Marie Antoinette for late stage capitalism. With Benjamins dripping from her cage skirt, and more bills doubling as a fan, she sips tea and spits out lines like, “money to cheat for/they rob you.” Both the costume, made by the singer herself, and the song are a commentary on today’s “let them eat cake” elite. 

    “It’s about people having too much money,” Mignon says with a laugh about what she describes as the most anti-capitalist of her new batch of songs. 

    (more…)

  • Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker Explains Who the Wormslayer Is

    Kula Shaker Press Photo by Sandrita Cardenas
    Kula Shaker (Photo: Sandrita Cardenas)

    There are few albums in my recent memory that have the transportive power of Wormslayer, the latest from English rock band Kula Shaker. Throughout its eleven songs, the album takes listeners into tales of devil’s bargains, bloodsucking villains and unassuming heroes. And, like all good fairytales, Wormslayer has its roots in the here and now, with songs like “Good Money” and “Charge of the Light Brigade” riding a lyrical line between social commentary and fantasy. 

    For their eighth album, Kula Shaker’s classic lineup (Vocalist and guitarist Crispian Mills, Hammond organist Jay Darlington, bassist Alonza Bevan and drummer Paul Winter-Hart) primarily recorded live and with analog equipment, the end result being an album that captures a similar urgency that’s steeped in the songs’ lyrics. Meanwhile, Mills’ brought together elements of “The Winged Boy,” a story that he had previously been developing as a film, and manifest in the song of the same name, as well as “Good Money” and “Shaunie,” with references to WB Yeats and dragon lore for the lyrical content. While Wormslayer may not be a concept album in the strictest sense, it does flow like a battle between good and evil, particularly when the tension mounts on the eight-minute title track. In an email interview, Mills shared some insight into the making of Wormslayer and explained who the worm and wormslayer(s) are. 

    (more…)

  • Voxtrot Returns With New Album and Tour

    Voxtrot press photo Annie Gunn
    (Photo: Annie Gunn)

    For singer/guitarist Ramesh Srivastava, there are distinct eras of Voxtrot, the band he fronts. The first he references centers around the band’s 2005 EP, Raised by Wolves, where he sings about his first major love and heartbreak. “To me, those songs are very clearly that and don’t really have much poetic diffusion,” he says on a recent video call. With the band’s self-titled album, released nearly 20 years ago now, Srivastava sang about the pressure he says he felt being in a group with a record deal and big opportunities before them. “It was a very challenging time, so I feel like that album is lyrically mostly about my psychology. It’s not really about other people,” he explains. 

    Emerging from Austin, Voxtrot’s first run coincided with the rise of music blogs, file-sharing and early social networks like Friendster and MySpace, what people now might fondly refer to as “the good internet.” The band gained a buzz online, as well as in traditional media, with the EPs leading towards their 2007 album. While a couple singles followed the debut full-length, Voxtrot split in 2010. 

    A 2022 reunion and successful tour led to recording Voxtrot’s recently-released full-length, Dreamers in Exile. In the 12 years that passed between the band’s first and second lives, plenty changed, including Srivastava’s lyrical approach. “Now, I feel that I try to talk a lot about my own experience, to talk about my experience, being gay and of mixed race and how weird it is to be that and be from Texas and how hard it is to be that anyway,” he says. “I try to talk about my unique human experience, but also constantly bringing in stories and references of people and works of art that inspire me.”

    He adds, “I’m really into creating a world that is both deep and meaningful, but is also aesthetically enjoyable.”

    (more…)

  • Boiled in Lead Embraces the Darkness of Folk Music

    Boiled in Lead press photo Darrell Eager
    Boiled in Lead (Pic: Darrell Eager)

    For Drew Miller, one word sums up the themes that attract Boiled in Lead to traditional tunes: Darkness. 

    Darkness extends to the Celtic punk band’s name too. Boiled in Lead is derived from an Irish song, “The Two Sisters,” specifically a version associated with Clannad and is a reference to the punishment that befell a murderous sibling. “In 1983, that seemed like a really good name for a punk rock band doing folk music,” the bassist explains.

    (more…)

  • Grrrl Gang: Online 24/7 and IRL This Weekend

    Grrrl Gang press photo by Elizabeth Kezia
    Grrrl Gang photo credit: Elizabeth Kezia

    Grrrl Gang spends a lot of time online. “It’s just too much sometimes, to be honest,” says bassist Akbar Rumandung. But, the inspiration for the band’s latest release, Online 24/7, hit IRL via a photoshoot at a friend’s gallery. One shot of the Indonesian punk band, taken through a window with a sticker that read, “Online 24/7” on it, stood out. It looked as though people were watching the band through their phones. 

    “That photo it reflects what we actually feel as a band nowadays,” says Rumandung on a recent video call from Jakarta, “where people try to categorize us through social media through what they see about us through social media, where they don’t actually know us, they don’t actually understand what this band is actually about.” It also, coincidentally, fit the music that Rumandung’s bandmates, Angeeta Sentana and Edo Alventa, had been writing, which reflected what they were seeing online. “Before that, we didn’t know what we should name the maxi-single. There are so many options, but we didn’t feel it yet,” Rumandung adds. “After the photos… we knew that this was our title for the maxi-single.”

    (more…)