Tag: Interviews

Delicate Steve is merely an illusion. The moniker of instrumental guitarist Steve Marion has been mythologized much in the past decade. Having worked with Paul Simon, the Black Keys, Dirty Projectors, and been a staple for some time now in contemporary music as a studio musician, it’s a miracle he hasn’t yet become a household name. And if his music was a little more in the tradition of “singer/songwriter,” you’d might even hear it on the radio.

And yet, despite the band being himself, Marion remains detached from Delicate Steve. Keeping himself at a distance, he chooses it to be a project that’s more of an extension of himself, something of bottomless intrigue, something he could rely on to constantly further discover himself.

“I couldn’t tell you how anything works,” Marion confesses. “I don’t pay much attention to ‘why’ or ‘why not.’ If one other person cares about what you do, you go from zero to one, and you kind of observe that. And that might be a hundred people who care about you, or a thousand… if you do it long enough, not everyone cares about everything you do. And that’s totally okay. That’s natural. I think, if you’re lucky, you learn to kind of detach from it a little bit.

“In particular with just making music and making a song… It’s not like if you just try harder you’re going to make a greater song. So I do think there’s some part of it that is inverse to how much you actually ‘try.’ It can be sort of counter-productive the more you’re ‘trying.’ So I think it’s helpful to try to relinquish control and just let the creativity do its thing. That’s all you can do, is do the work and show up and put the shows on the calendar.”

Coming up in the early 2010s amongst the bustling Brooklyn scene at the time, Delicate Steve would often find himself playing to his contemporaries: Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radio… but it wasn’t until after he signed to David Byrne’s label, Luaka Bop, where a press release from none other than journalist Chuck Klosterman of Spin Magazine shot Delicate Steve into the stratosphere. The release described the band as “a hydro-electric Mothra rising from the ashes of an African village burned to the ground by post-rock minotaurs,” with music that would “make you the happiest person who has never lived,” and other such hyperboles.

“Do you think more people listened to you [because of the press release] than would have otherwise?” we ask.

“Definitely,” he affirms. “And I learned a lot from the experience. It was actually my label’s idea. But I reluctantly said yes [to the press release] because it just sounded a little out of my comfort zone and weird and next thing you know it really made a difference. So, having an experience like that kind of early on where you’re able to see outside of yourself and just kind of see something like that take off in the world, it was eye opening.”

This enigmatic approach to marketing yourself, however, has become somewhat non-existent today. Or yet, maybe it’s totally abundant. In the days where Spotify bios weren’t a conscious thought, it was strategies like these that got outlets’ and labels’ attentions. Today, anyone can describe or portray themselves in whatever esoteric manner they please. But when everyone’s trying to be more enigmatic than the next, it’s almost like screaming into a void.

“Do you think an instrumental band can take the same route you took today and still be successful?” we follow up.

Marion ponders, “Umm… I don’t know. I mean there are kind of these instrumental bands that sort of came about after whatever my time was… But I doubt anyone’s even thinking of [those bands] as instrumental bands. It’s maybe just a vibe for people. And it’s almost less about the fact that there’s no singing, to me, and more about the fact that they have such a strong aesthetic – visually, sonically – so I think that’s really what people are gravitating towards.

“Take a band like Khruangbin, who are super successful, and it’s not just one person. I would say they have a ‘friendly’ sound and a ‘friendly’ look collectively. So whatever I’m calling that, that’s kind of like the future. Do they happen to not have a singer and be ‘instrumental?’ Yeah. Do I also not have a singer and happen to be instrumental? Yeah… But I don’t identify as an instrumental band myself either. When I think ‘instrumental band,’ to me, that reminds me of finding out about Booker T. & the M.G.’s… or even more modern instrumental bands that I grew up listening to like Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Instrumental is a weird sort of categorization.”

An experience outweighs what we think is lacking in what a traditional band would be. However, when it comes to Delicate Steve, Marion’s guitar is his voice. Unlike following every other teenage guitar player in the U.S. in idolizing guitar virtuosos like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, Marion takes his inspiration from vocalists such as Nina Simone and Otis Redding – vocalists who use their voice as an extension of themselves.

“I mean… before this band I was a guitar player to my core, which I have identified less with since kind of figuring out this band… which feels more like a songwriter without using my human voice – that’s how I describe my band. I’m a huge Duane Allman fan. He’s like my number one. And even though that band is very bluesy, blues-rock and jam-y, he sort of transcends all that. And I just like how he represented that as well – somebody that kind of transcends the genre that they’re mostly operating in.”

“What would you say to someone who claims no one’s done anything original with the guitar in the past 20 years?” we ask.

“Somebody said this to me a few years ago,” Marion goes in: “‘[the guitar] is still an extremely futuristic instrument, that is made out of wood, steel strings, with the help of magnets, which vibrate to create a sound that gets amplified through a speaker…’ and I’m playing one from 1966. Everyone’s so interested in things being organic, and not being processed, and being all natural. A guitar, compared to a computer or your little electronic keyboard, is sort of as organic as it comes. So I think there’s still a lot of potential there. Especially now with the heightened focus on ‘vibes’ of things, and how people sort of look and how things sound. You could just be a singer-less guitar player and change the world I think.”

But with the emergence of contemporary guitar virtuosos such as Mk.gee and Sam Fender, who have introduced their own radical approaches to the instrument, perhaps today the guitar is being assigned a new definition in how it’s used.

“Do you think the ‘guitar virtuoso’ phase is coming back?” we inquire.

Marion muses, “I don’t know. I would be the last person to know about any of this. But I can see why people gravitate to that now. Like for me, I know I’m good in my own unique way, but I’m never really thinking about that. And I’m sure Mk.gee, even though I can tell he is virtuosic in this way, he’s probably never thinking about it himself either. Again, relinquishing control. You really can’t tell, especially nowadays, what’s going to become popular or not. So yeah, when the day comes when there’s more instrumental bands then there are singers, then I’ll really be blown away. If that ever happens.”

Marion has found himself in an extremely convenient and fortunate position to be able to distance himself from his signature project; an attitude so blasé, that his mindset almost carries him through his career. With minimal promotion, minimal social media engagement, it’s rare for an artist to gain such traction from being so detached, especially for an instrumental guitar player.

“It feels healthier to just… stay in your little universe, and do you what you do. And if you’re lucky, you’re not paying attention to as much as possible, really.”

Delicate Steve can currently be heard on Joe Cappa’s Haha You Clowns, airing now on Adult Swim, and will embark on a Spring tour beginning in Portland, Oregon on March 27^th. His latest album, Luke’s Garage, is out now via Have Fun Thinking.

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Photos courtesy of Sheva Kafai

One look at Chinese American Bear, and it would be difficult to peg them down as what one would call a “traditional” band. The musical brainchild of Anne Tong and Bryce Barsten have modest origins: growing up in suburban Seattle as school orchestra students with nothing to little in common – but that’s precisely what makes their music so organic. Now a married couple, Tong brings her Chinese roots infused with Barsten’s llama farmland upbringing to create a sound that not only has a pastoral ruralness to it, but brings about an innocent sunshine-filled tinge evoked through Tong’s Mandarin lyrics.

But as I approach the Wiltern Theatre to meet them at their show, I’m taken aback by the clientele that line the sidewalks leading up to the doors: face-paint, fake blood, and black leather stand around idly. As I look up to the marquee, I’m surprised to see who they’re opening for tonight: heavy metal princess Poppy.

If you’ve never been inside the green room at the Wiltern, you could mistake its concrete, cavernous-like tunnels for a bunker. As Poppy’s chest-vibrating, death from above bass from just upstairs rattles every bit of the green room, one could assume a war rages outside.

But there isn’t. In this moment, I’m in the happiness-assured heartland presence of Chinese American Bear, whose synth-laden soothe-ness is the exact antithesis of what’s blaring through the walls.

“We got invited,” Tong admits unashamedly, whose private school girl outfit she now dons has become a signature look of Chinese American Bear’s live show. “[Poppy’s] booking agent reached out to our booking agent and was like, ‘Poppy’s a fan of you guys, are you guys free on these four dates?’ And we were like, ‘Uhhh…’

“Also, just getting to play the Fillmore and the Wiltern… these are bucket-list venues for us. So we were a little nervous… well, not nervous. Nervous is the wrong word, just, ‘how would her fans react to us?’ And the first night at the Filmore, people show up with blood on their faces and face paint… and they’ve been so welcoming. Metal fans are the nicest people.”  

“I mean Poppy… she’s not really a metal artist, she’s an experimental artist,” Barsten chimes in, much more relaxed in a casual button down. “I just think she’s all about… maybe not genre-bending, but genre hopping. So I think it makes sense that she was okay with us opening for her.

Having been signed to Modern Sky (the largest indie label in China) prior to releasing their latest album Wah!!!, they caught the attention of UK’s Moshi Moshi label, bringing them into a sphere of further international touring and exposure, a far cry for a band who made their first record’s masters free.

“I don’t know if you know King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard…” Barsten inquires.

Very much so.

“They did this with a couple albums… where they just released the masters for free, and just said ‘y’know if any small label or any individual person wants to press some vinyl or sell it at their shows,’ they can. And to me, I just love this idea of community and it just feels like their kind of breaking the mold, y’know? We made the entire album ourselves, we spent no money on it because we did everything ourselves. We didn’t even mean to really start this band.”

“It was very unintentional, our first album,” Tong finishes Barsten’s thought. “It was just for fun.”

Now, however, the rules have changed.

“I wish [we did that] for the second album,” Barsten responds. “But now that there’s…” he tries to find the right words, “…people involved, it would be a hard pitch. ‘Hey, can we amend this contract so that we can give people the masters for free?’” he mimics with a laugh.

Having just played San Antonio and Tempe, with San Francisco to follow (as well as a dozen dates before this one), living life on the road is challenging enough as it is, but handling a marriage is a world away in and of itself. But to handle them concurrently?

“Rex keeps us stabilized,” Barsten jokes. To the left of them joins Rex Liu, their drummer for the tour, and the only one in Chinese American Bear properly raised in China.

“Y’know… we just work really well together,” Tong clarifies. “I never have those feelings of ‘oh I need time away from him.’”

“When we get space from each other, it’s nice,” Barsten follows up. “But we’re never like, ‘oh we need space now,’ y’know? When you’re touring and stuff, it’s a lot of work. So you’re kind of just in a different mindset. You’re almost a little more in that professional brain. You’re just operating to try and make everything work and work as a team and make the show successful and make sure everything’s happening. So the relationship part is kind of put to the side.”

Which, despite being an unconventional couple, they fit Barsten’s description to a tee: the two finish each other’s sentences, anticipate each other’s responses, and communicate in a way that feels almost telepathic.

But there’s another strategic advantage in having a band as a couple. Aside from knowing each other on an intimate level, the length of knowing and working with someone develops a fluent musical prowess and workflow between the two: a solid foundation for trust and stability.

“I feel like you used to put rules on yourself,” Tong confides in Barsten. “Because I feel like you used to write music based on what you’d think it should sound like, versus what was authentic [to you].”

Barsten shifts in his seat: “Yeah, I feel like a lot of artists, or a lot of writers, go through this. You try and sound like people. You’re like ‘oh I love that,’ and then you write a song just like that. Maybe you take inspiration from two or three bands. But I feel like you’re always trying to emulate, and I feel like this was the first band I both stopped doing that but also took some of the parameters off of what’s conventional.

“I just feel like I was always thinking ‘how will people like this?’ It’s an interesting aspect of psychology of writing music and being an artist. I think finding your authentic writing voice is really hard. You’re battling fear, because maybe you feel inadequate. And I feel like this is the first band I’ve been very fearless in. And it’s been the first band that’s ever started to work out a little bit.”

In Barsten’s other words: “the harder you try to make something work, the less well it will work.” But is that detached mindset essential for making something that lasts?

“I don’t know if essential, because there’s so many artists that are part of a big machine where it’s much more curated and it works if people still like it, but I don’t know… It’s hard to say if it’s that black and white, y’know? It might be really grey.”

The result? Both subjects releasing their inhibitions – two individuals bringing out the best in each other and encouraging one another to dig deep into their roots. The C-pop lullabies strewn atop mosaic sound palettes make for an unexpected, yet vibrant contrast and dissonance – a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

C-pop in the United States, however, is still unfamiliar territory.

“So we toured China for the first time this past December,” Tong goes in. “And what we learned is China still feels in many ways like a closed society. Simply because they use all of their own social media platforms. You can’t find Instagram there, Spotify doesn’t exist there, they have their own music streaming platforms, so it’s really hard for emerging bands to promote themselves overseas. Even the labels we met, the labels would ask us questions on how to get on Spotify, promote oversees. And also, because of the closed system there… a lot of the music that comes out of mainland China sounds a little dated, because they don’t have much exposure to overseas music either. So it doesn’t sound quite as edgy.”

“It’s like stuck in some time period,” Barsten adds.

“Taiwan is different. Taiwan has all of the platforms that the west does. And so Taiwan has amazing emerging cool bands and we know a lot of Taiwanese bands who have toured overseas. But if we’re talking about C-pop from mainland China, I think it’ll be really hard for that to come over. So we almost have to make pop music here with Chinese influences.”

But that shouldn’t deter anyone from discovering the different kinds of artists coming out of China and Taiwan today, a scene that’s still active and present as ours.

“I’ll start with my favorites,” Rex exclaims. “Deca Joins, Sunset Roller Coaster… Elephant Gym, because that’s a math rock band. I love it.”

“We also like the Chairs,” Tong adds. “Again, we started this band without any intention, but what we’re realizing, y’know, K-pop is so big oversees, and Japanese culture has always been exported oversees since the 90s, like anime, Pokémon, etc. And there hasn’t really been edgy art with Mandarin, so we were really trying to lean into that, making the Chinese language, the mandarin language, cool and edgy.”

Language as a vessel for change.

“The first time I heard [Chinese American Bear] was years before I joined this band,” Rex adds. “I was like ‘wow this is new, this is something not heard before.’ All the Chinese pop music, they’re trying to make deep, philosophical… lyric first [music]. Or more about love and emotions. And I had never heard somebody use this easy to understand, very simple Mandarin to actually write such cool music.”

“For the non-mandarin speakers, our Chinese lyrics are very basic, very simple,” Tong explains. “They almost have a child-like quality to a native Mandarin speaker. And because I grew up [in the U.S], my vocabulary is very limited, I don’t have the vocabulary to write about deep, philosophical, nuanced things. And that’s why we sing about food, and fun, dancing things. So part of it is just my own language constraint, but I think that’s what makes us stand out.”

In addition to a tour with Poppy, a spring UK tour, and a summer North American tour, Chinese American Bear also landed a sync spot in the Bowen Yang-led Dinner Banquet, a remake of the 90s Ang Lee film which had its premiere at Sundance earlier this year.

“The music supervisor for the Wedding Banquet, her name is Tiffany [Su], found our music from our sync licensing agent and really liked it,” Tong resumes. “And we were so honored. And this was especially really sentimental for me personally, because I grew up watching the original Wedding Banquet. I remember tearing up, like ‘wait, what? They want to use our music?’ But [writer/director] Andrew [Ahn] was telling me what he loved about our music is the spirit that he tried to impart in the movie: the spirit of The Wedding Banquet is really playful, fun, quirky, but also has heart. And that’s the same kind of description we’ve heard about our music: people love how quirky, silly, and fun we are, but there’s a depth to the music itself.”

But the most surreal thing isn’t necessarily their integration with Hollywood, but the entire trajectory Chinese American Bear has taken over the last year. From being featured on Lauren Laverne’s show on BBC Radio to playing sold out A-tier venues, their rise isn’t contributed from L.A. or music industry insiders, but in how they make their audiences feel.

“For our live shows, one thing that I always want to make sure is I never want my audience to feel bored,” Tong confesses. “Because I have myself been to shows where I’m kind of a little bored, or I’m feeling not too into the music and I’m just kind of waiting for the set to be over. And so, I really want all my shows to be really interactive, I’m always thinking about the audience, how to keep them engaged. And so I teach them dance moves, I bring up a dumpling dancer, and I throw plushees into the audience too.

“Also if we weren’t really silly on stage, I feel like we give permission to the audience almost for them to be really silly. Because I think sometimes when you go to a show you might feel a little self-conscious about dancing. And I just want people to have a fun time and loosen up, so they can see that we’re being really silly and dancing.”

To the rest of the world, it would be hard to construe Chinese American Bear as just “another band.” But to them, it’s another day as a married couple on the road of life. The next night they’ll play to a sold out crowd in San Francisco, converting yet another legion of fans. They’ll go onto a UK tour and return with international acclaim. Their music will have been heard on thousands of movie screens across the country, and by year’s end, they might even become a household name.

“I just want people to have a fun time… audience first,” Tong finalizes.

Chinese American Bear’s latest EP, Waaaaaaaah!!! is available now via Moshi Moshi Records. They’ll be playing at Timber! Festival and THING in Carnation, Washington on July 25^th and August 9^th, respectively.

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Featured images courtesy of Sheva Kafai

“Can we talk about whether or not we want to say on the record how we got our name?” lead guitarist Cormac Brown asks his four-piece band, the noise-punk outfit Molly Horses. “It’s important to note that I have never had a more difficult time doing anything in my entire life than the difficulty we’ve had at reaching a band name,” he confesses.

It’s a fall Tuesday afternoon as we’re gathered around a table in bassist Malcom Watts’ Highland Park backyard, which also serves as their rehearsal space. The four members reach into their pockets as Brown, Watts, Harry James (guitar/vocals), and Tim Wright (drums) pull out their phones to a shared Notes document and start rattling off potential band names.

“I still like ‘industry plant,’” confesses Watts.

“I hate ‘industry plant.’ Won’t do it,” Brown retorts.

“I like ‘Very Good Computer,” admits James.

Brown agrees. “My favorites were ‘Special Movements’ and ‘Clang Clang Clang.’”

“I put ‘Surgery Socks’ after my dad’s surgery,’” recommends Tim. “Because they give you these funny socks with little bumps on the bottom so you don’t slip and fall… it’s fun.”

“But I don’t want too funny,” Brown admits.

Watts continues scrolling, “There’s ‘H.J.’”

Deciding (and agreeing) on a band name is without a doubt the toughest task any band will undergo. It requires a tight balance between contradicting efforts. A name will determine whether you’re given the time of day from someone who’s never heard of you, but at the same time, there’s a strong desire to catch the eye of a potential new fan.

But that especially goes for noise rock bands. Whereas many band names are chosen out of a vacuum, noise rock band names take up a certain kind of history and responsibility that promotes inclusivity.

“I think inclusivity is important in any public facing thing that you’re doing,” Brown declares. “It is weird at that stage of being a band to assume that we have such a platform that it would matter at all. But it’s little microcosms like that that are really important.”

Particularly true in today’s current climate, which makes it hard for any band to make a living from making and playing music.

“It’s not like we practice all the time thinking how we’re going to make money when we make new songs,” Watts professes. “I don’t think we think about that at all.”

“I don’t think anyone in this band feels that way,” Wright proclaims.

“The new success that I’m seeing in L.A.,” Brown continues, “…is you go on tour for a couple months, you play some festivals, and then in your off time you got your three or four bartending shifts a week. And… that’s a fucking dream to me. Everybody talks about ‘making it’ as a musician in this way that they’re talking about something so fucking antiquated, and so not real anymore, especially if you’re a grassroots band and not an industry plant, or an industry project or a pop artist or something like that.”

“Or an influencer,” Wright throws in.

“My favorite hot take that I will not elaborate any further on, is that nobody should ever make money for making art. Ever. Nobody should get paid to make art.”

“Yeah. If you’re doing art for money you shouldn’t do music like we do,” James jokes, and is met with more chuckles from around the table.

“I mean there’s a very visible line in the sand of bands that were at the right time,” Wright enlightens. “I lived in New York from ’99 to ’05, so I saw the birth of everything that we hold in such high regard, like your ‘LCD Soundsystems’ and your ‘Strokes’ and ‘Interpols’ and that stuff… in my opinion, that was the window. If you weren’t elevating yourself and you didn’t get to a certain level by 2005 or 2006, that to me was the cutoff. That sounds like a really long time ago, but even by 2010, it was so fucking hard to get on the road and make any money.”

“What do you think was that divide?” I ask.

“Labels had more money. Advertising budgets were a lot bigger.”

“Was it Napster?” Brown gripes.

“Sure, sure, but also magazines used to be huge. Everyone was going and buying magazines, that’s how people found out about [bands]. And that was a nationwide thing. Like, Wichita would have Uncut, or some cool British magazine that was available, y’know?”

But while being a genre that promotes inclusivity, “noise rock” is also notoriously difficult to pin down as a sound. I run down a quote I had recently stumbled upon somewhere: “[noise rock is] more punk than punk rock, more progressive than progressive rock, more alt than alt rock. Would you agree?”

Wright throws their hands up: “Sure, that’s the empty pot, right? Whatever you want to put in it.”

“Yeah so it’s just music anyway, right?” James concludes. “It’s so hard for me to tell people what we sound like. Because people will ask, ‘what kind of music do you play?’ and I’m like ‘oh, y’know, loud, talky stuff….we’re a four-piece, kind of loud… rock n’ roll… noisy stuff.’”

“But it’s not Tom Petty,” Brown quips.

“It is Tom Petty.”

“…There are elements of Tom Petty,” Brown surrenders. “When we first had a sit down meeting [for Molly Horses], I said, ‘I want every single element of this project to be thought out.’ The intention is to be recorded… there’s not a single note, a single beat that should just be a shrug. It’s like an energy thing for me: this is tapping into an energy and trying to give back to an energy that’s super important to me, and boils down the essence of human-hood and being alive and doing something for the fuck of it.”

All qualities which pretty much embody the noise rock ethos: a genre orchestrated by hard-working, middle-class people who don’t think of their work as anything other than what it is, who get up to do a hard day’s work and check out for the evening.

Bobby Womack plays out their monitor speakers as they set up for a run through of their next show’s set – an unexpected but rather loose choice to get in a headspace – followed by the Carpenters and the Beach Boys.

“Would you like a butthole chair?” James asks me.

“A what?”

“A butthole chair.”

I stare at James blankly when they point to the aluminum stool next to them, the kind that has a hole in the middle of the seat. And as I look around the room, I notice several other stools serving as Molly Horses’ go-to multipurpose tool: one butthole chair holds up the hi-hats, while another holds up a mic stand, another holding their tempo click.

I choose to stand as they assemble the gear: Brown plugs his Jazzmaster into a Fender Hot Rod Deville, James on an identical setup. Wright sets up their 1961 Slingerland drums with an SPD-SX for pads, with Watts on a Fender Jazz bass accompanied by an Erebus modular synthesizer, and enough effects pedals with an LED light show that can rival any synth punk’s eurorack setup.

After a brief brush up of the song’s structure, they break into their single, “King Dudalk.” With compressed guitars, and a 4×10 amp configuration that gives just the right amount of low end, the song sounds as if it was already mixed and mastered, a telling sign of audiophile enthusiasts that put live sound first. Guitar tones get even more chopped and distorted one song after the next as I realize what makes their sound so cinematic: different personalities coming together to create.

“Who do you believe your contemporaries are?” I ask. Molly Horses looks to each other blankly.

“I don’t think we sound like anyone in L.A.,” Wright confesses. “I know that sounds pompous. But my girlfriend nailed it, she said: ‘you are a band that musicians like.”

“And that’s something that people tell us all the time, ‘You guys don’t sound like anybody else,’” James follows.

“We play with Ughh a lot,” Brown mentions. “They’re contemporaries in that they are our peers. And we play a lot with them, we’re pals with them. They’re great. The closest we’ve played with who I thought, ‘Oh this feels in our little pocket’ was Guck.”

“I was talking with my dad about it on the phone,” James clarifies. “And I said, ‘well the problem is everybody in L.A. sounds like the Osees,’ and the Osees live here. So I don’t want to be the ‘budget band’ of the band that lives in the state you live in.”

“I will say that the thing that’s given me the most joy,” Wright contributes, “is getting compliments from other bands we play with who don’t sound anything like us and who you’d think wouldn’t even take the time to listen. We’ve gotten a lot of compliments from bands that I could be like, ‘woah, really? You dug it?’ Someone was reciting lyrics [back to us]. It’s really flattering.”

After a short while, they continue the run down of their upcoming set. They rip into their single ‘Beatty,’ a bass heavy song that leans strong on the upbeat and alternates between a four/four and five/four time signature, all tied together by James’s snarky but howling vocals. As one song bleeds into another, I can’t help but notice a single thread that ties them altogether: “What’s your greatest take away from Steve Albini?”

“Oh God,” Brown trifles, dazes off briefly in thought. “There’s a clarity, and a sort of ego-less, spiritual approach to the way he wanted to create and capture sound, that I think was really beautiful.”

“I think that’s a lot of the way we communicate as a band as well,” Wright adds. “We’re all just allowed to bring to the table what we’re good at. We’re very lucky that these four elements became something really kind of magical. There’s no ego in [Molly Horses]. There’s no bullying of ‘you do it this way, you do it that way.’”

“Just jabs,” Brown prides.

“It’s like little kids squirting guns at each other. We’re very fortunate that the ideas that have happened, a lot of them were spontaneous.”

“Especially the way we’re moving into songwriting now.” James adds, “Someone will play something cool at band practice… then we record whatever and can demo it from there. It’s just a really nice, cathartic way for everyone to write their own parts. No one’s going to go ‘that sucks, don’t do that.’ You can be like ‘we should do this instead.’

“Solutions based stuff,” Brown assures. “But the thing that I loved about Albini [on recording other bands]… is he said, ‘in my later years, I realized it’s unfair to the band, it’s unfair to myself, it’s unfair to the listener of the record to even form an opinion about the band.’ Which I thought was so fucking enlightened, and so transcendent… and so I’m trying to, y’know, approach [music] with a little bit more of that.”

Molly Horses will be playing at Gold Diggers and Zebulon on February 8th and March 11th, respectively. Their debut EP, Clang Clang Clang, will be out this spring. 

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Featured image by Devin DeRose

High up on the historic intersection of Hollywood and Vine sits the Bardot Hollywood – a one time VIP section attached to the Avalon that hosted the likes of Jerry Lewis, the Ramones, and Frank Sinatra. But not tonight. As I approach the venue, I hear a swath of synths emulating from inside, leading me to just who I’m looking for.

Porij has been on the upswing for the past year now. Just within the past six weeks, the 4-piece Manchester outift has played the BBC6 Music Festival with the Smile, multiple shows at SXSW, and New York’s Baby’s Alright. Just this morning they were featured on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, and have even opened for the likes of Coldplay, Wet Leg, and Metronomy. But tonight they play to a crowd of L.A. music enthusiasts, ones that are always on the hunt for bragging rights to be able to say “I was there.”

As I enter soundcheck, I hear them playing their latest single, “Unpredictable,” the first off their debut album, Teething, out now on PIAS Recordings. Co-produced with David Wrench (Frank Ocean, Jamie XX), expertly mixed, precisely arranged, it sounds as if I’d been transported to the Haçienda for a brief moment. And had Porij been around during the days of the infamous club, without a doubt they would’ve been on the bill.

Given they’re a band that’s been touring extensively, Porij shows no signs of lethargy as they meet me in the back bar area. Jacob (guitar), James (bass), Nathan (drums) and the vocalist simply known as Egg, appear as if they have nothing in common from the outside in. As James approaches with a rolled cigarette, I find it evident they’re craving some sun, and suggest we step outside.

As they look down upon Hollywood and Vine, there’s a stark contrast between the view and the Northern English four-piece seeing the United States for the first time. Considering their rising status, and coming hot off of SXSW and their first U.S. tour, my first instinct is to ask how they find our grassroots venues compared to theirs.

“Grassroots venues are equally as important over in the U.K.” Egg takes the lead. “You know Glastonbury festival?” Of course. “They just announced the lineup, and they took out all of the performers who came up through grassroots venues. I think there’s only a handful of names still on that poster. Everyone is coming up through these grassroots venues.”

Along with the U.S., the U.K. also faces a grassroots venue crisis, one that saw about 125 venues shut down in 2023, which has led to fewer grassroots bands forming in the first place.

“If you don’t have them, then you can’t let artists get their legs and figure out how to do the thing before they blow up,” Egg continues. “Also, it’s just a different vibe of performance. It’s so wonderful, I don’t think there’s anything like it. Those intimate, sweaty, small gigs. It’s the most fun.”

“We’re all massive fans of grassroot music venues,” Nathan preaches. “And so it’s a big time. I think we all spent so much time in there. We’ve done a lot of shows in those venues as well. So it’s nice to be able to represent that.”

Whereas most bands start out by casting each other in roles, writing songs, and rehearsing to “hopefully” play a live show, Porij started as the opposite. Instead of having worked together for months or even years, Porij was haphazardly thrown together as a request by a friend of the band who needed their set time filled after dropping out of a lineup. Seeing the opportunity as a tailwind, Egg grabbed three of their schoolmates at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, threw together some songs, and delivered at the show.

Soon enough, they kept being asked back. But whereas many young bands cater to TikTok or Spotify algorithms, Porij tailors their music for performance.

“I think Porij makes sense live,” Egg hypes. “I think it definitely can be enjoyed recorded, that’s a wonderful time. But I think, because we play such an eclectic, kind of blended music, I think we really make sense when you come to a show. And you see it in its whole thing, and you feel it in the moment. I think that’s what people have said a lot… ‘oh yeah I listened to your tunes… and then we came to see the show… wow, okay, we get the vision.’ So definitely always, [we’re] first and foremost a live band.”

This, inevitably, led to radical approaches in recording music.

“It’s kind of like, ‘what can you get away with writing and playing dance music as a band?” Egg proclaims. “When we first started out… we would write a song, and then we’d play it in a rehearsal room, and then we’d record what we could then play in a rehearsal room, and that would be what was on the track. We’ve since got a little bit more…” Egg trails, “…maximalist. Just in terms of layers. I think we’ve got more… Optimistic. I think we’ve allowed ourselves to be a bit more experimental.”

“We were all split across the country,” they continue. “We were living in different places, and so we would send ideas across… like on soundcloud, would add bits – it was like musical ‘pass the parcel.’”

Since their inception, they’ve been labeled the inescapable title of “indie,” shamefully by default, because they have so much more to offer than just that status. Birthed from Manchester, their DNA is inarguably made up of the dance genre, the same thing that’s been in the blood of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses.

However, “indie” has always been a varied term in flux. Yes, it may be short for “independent,” but its definition has now transcended what it literally means. It wasn’t until another Mancunian band, The Smiths, were called indie that the term was really assigned a sound. But hailing from their DIY beginnings, and given their support for and from grassroots venues now across two continents, is the term “indie” currently being redefined? And are they an example?

“I mean I don’t really know what our music is when people ask us,” Egg confesses. “Because I think we take so much inspiration from so many different genres of music. I don’t know if our music is ‘indie,’ but it wouldn’t bad if it was. I don’t know if ‘indie’ is taking on a new meaning, but we’ll have a bit of it! We’ll take it.”

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“But does the overwhelming feeling of coming out in debt at the end of this tour ever intimidate you? As it has with so many other bands starting out and backed by a label?” I ask.

“Being a musician in this current climate is really hard,” Egg reflects. “I don’t know if you saw James Blake talking about recently that people have been led to believe music is free now. And it’s super hard as a touring musician. It costs SO much money to tour. I don’t think people realize quite how much. We did a run in January of these incredible grassroots venues in the U.K. when we were road testing our album. We sold out every venue and we still made a loss.”

“There was a time when touring was the only way to make money,” Jacob chimes in. “And now that seems to have gone, so it’s like, what are we left with to actually be sustainable?”

Egg follows up, “I mean… it’s our favorite thing to do in the world. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t doing music. None of us are in it for the money, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it!”

“And the opportunity to be in America, it’s wild,” Jacob added.

“I mean we’re incredibly grateful for where we are,” Egg remarks as they raise their arms in a gesture to the Hollywood hills behind them. “This past week and a half has been utterly mind blowing, like life changing stuff. We were sitting in a dive bar last night and our music was on the jukebox! And it’s like, ‘what the hell is happening!’”

But with all the surmounting obstacles young bands face, I dare ask: “Is a life in music still possible?”

“As long as people keep creating music, then a life in music is still possible,” Egg declares. “It’s a tricky environment, but I think music is always going to survive through whatever comes because I think it’s innate. I think humans want to make music. I think that’s never going to change.”

Porij will be playing Get Together 2024 in Sheffield, England on May 18^th. Their debut LP, Teething, is out now via PIAS Recordings.

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Featured image courtesy of PIAS Recordings