Interviews: Talking all things 'PINKNDARK' with Goddess

Since Goddess formed in 2022, the Hamilton-based quartet have been pushing rock to new heights and this is extremely evident on their new album PINKNDARK. The band effortlessly blends the urgency of punk, the sleaziness of glam, the crunchiness of rock, and the brightness of electronic music together to create a listening experience that will make you feel as if you’ve been transported to another realm. The band’s energy never lets up for a minute and shifts with the lyrics as they explore love and lust, talk about mental health, dive into A.I., and confront systemic oppression over the course of 10 tracks. PINKNDARK is available digitally everywhere now and you can stream it on Spotify right here. Goddess will be playing their ‘Nightmare In Pink’ show on October 31 at Vertagogo in Hamilton and there will be an afterparty at Goddess House following the show.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with guitarist Praveen, vocalist Pramuk, bassist Nicky, and drummer Eric to talk about the new album, throwing events at Goddess House, creating community, A.I., and so much more. Read the interview below!

This interview between Em, Praveen, Pramuk, Nicky, and Eric took place over Zoom on October 25, 2024 while they were on their way to a show. What follows is a transcription of their conversation which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

PINKNDARK has more electronic elements than your previous releases. What inspired this direction?

Praveen: We were super inspired by Lil Uzi and there was this really cool experimental music festival that happened in Meaford.
Eric: Electric Eclectics!
Praveen: Yeah, Electric Eclectics! We went to that festival and watched a bunch of new experimental acts. We just thought, “Oh, we have this whole new way of being a musician by using the computer as an instrument instead of just using it to record our music”. We were super influenced by that and by other artists. We had this project that we called PinkNDark that we were doing on the side, just messing around with punk rock stuff. We were like, “Let’s just put this all together!”
Pramuk: We host a lot of events and we have this one really cool DJ crew that comes on. They put together these shows and their sets are always made up of this really experimental avant-garde electronic music. That really inspired us because we were listening to that music all the time.
Praveen: The events went from a rock show to an electronic show.
Pramuk: We wanted to capture that in our music.
Praveen: I mean, this is just a brief sample of what’s to come.
Nicky: Oh for real.
Praveen: Our new stuff turns it up to 11!

You said the songs started out as a side project. Did any of them change when you were Goddess-ing them up? [laughter]
Eric: I love the way you phrased that! They kinda make the journey of the album, they link all the songs together and turn it into this escape that you wander through from the beginning to the end. You have a song with our rock instruments and then it goes into an electronic interlude, but it’s a song in itself. It makes it like this big flowing river from start to finish.
Praveen: I feel like a lot of Goddess-ing is taking something and then fucking with it. We’re having a lot of fun and it also sounds pretty cool.
Nicky: Trying to make it very loud.
Praveen: We tend to focus more on the energy of the song rather than the technical aspects.
Nicky: We’re just being creative.
Praveen: It’s all about the feeling we’re trying to communicate. We’ll just get in a room and jam and have a lot of fun and a song will come out.
Nicky: I was gonna say, a lot of the songs write themselves.
Praveen: Someone will come in with a song and then we will all play with it until we love it. If we don’t like it, then we don’t play it. [laughs]
Nicky: Sometimes the songs just naturally make their way out. Some songs we don’t play anymore just because we don’t play them.
Praveen: Yeah, exactly! Have you been to one of our shows?

I haven’t just because I’m not in Hamilton but I’ve seen videos online and they’re really rad! I want to one day for sure.

Praveen: I love that the videos are there. When we’re there at the shows, it’s just crazy energy. It’s really insane. The crowd is involved. My bro is an insane choreographer of that shit. We really wanted to capture what the live performance was like in an album so we did a lot of blowing out speakers and made sure that the levels weren’t all EQed perfectly.
Eric: The song, “FUCK YOU MAN”, was done in one take because the guitar exploded during the recording and that’s part of the sound. It literally just shattered and that made a musical effect.
Praveen: The guitar part for the verse of “FUCK YOU MAN” was like guitar smash, guitar smash, guitar smash, high E chord, guitar smash, guitar smash, A♭, A#. By the crescendo of the song, we were just throwing this guitar all over this dinky little room that we set up to make a recording. It was just our living room.
Nicky: On the hardwood floor of the living room there are 6 holes where the tuning pegs of this guitar hit into the wood.
Praveen: I had that guitar for fucking four days. We used it for the goddamn show and for that recording. We had to do one take. I was like, “We can’t do a second take guys, it’s done. It’s over. I can’t do it like that again”. [laughs] That was a lot of fun.
Nicky: That was great.
Praveen: We record live, by the way, live off the floor.
Eric: Yeah, we record all live off the floor.
Nicky: Fuck a click track!!
Praveen: We tried it before but it never ends up sounding the way the band does.
Eric: Yeah, because it’s gotta be push and pull. Things move with the emotions. If we’re trying to build angst or slow down or chill out or whatever, songs have waves like that. A metronome kinda takes that away.

Did paying attention to that help you with the flow of the album?

Praveen: It’s more like we try to get into a space where we don’t have to pay attention to anything and that’s what happened when we were recording. It’s really about the freedom and the release of our music. When we play it, it’s all about releasing. We wanna communicate that somehow and we want to make an escape with that.
Pramuk: Even the pacing of how the tracks come together is very natural. That’s stuff that we subconsciously pay attention to.
Praveen: Yeah, it feels like there’s a right answer or a wrong answer, but there really isn’t. As soon as we get into that space where we’re not thinking about it, all of us kind of coalesce on what seems like the right answer. I feel like thinking has a really good way of getting in the way of art. As long as we can get into a state where we’re not feeling that and make music, make art, we can create something that’s a little bit more magical, that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

Did you have a song that was the most cathartic to write or is the most cathartic to play live?

Praveen: I feel like everyone has their opinions.
Nicky: “FUCK YOU MAN” probably.
Eric: I get a lot out of “choke”, to be honest.
Nicky: “FUCK YOU MAN” is the best live.
Praveen: Yeah, live it’s probably “FUCK YOU MAN” or “ACAFB”.
Nicky: “ACAFB”, yeah!
Praveen: But listening to the album, I always go back to the last song, “choke”. I love that song. That one is my favourite track.
Eric: I kinda close my eyes and I just drift off with that song. I feel like I’m being carried somewhere.
Pramuk: One of the things that I really like about the album is that different songs are for different vibes or different moods. Sometimes a late-night vibe or sometimes an angry vibe or a running vibe. I feel like there’s a different song for each moment like that on the album.
Praveen: I just couldn’t wait to show it to everyone once we released it. Before we released it, I was listening to it on my headphones and I couldn’t help but start running when I was on the street or jumping around and dancing and going crazy. I couldn’t wait to do it with everyone else at the release party.
Pramuk: At the release party, the crowd broke the speakers because they were moshing so hard. We showed up like, “Hold up, hold up”, plugged it in, and they just went crazy. [laughs] It was a really good time.

You know you have something special when the speakers go first thing.

[laughter]
Praveen: It was so fucking fun! I couldn’t believe it.
Pramuk: People were going crazy!!
Praveen: This was in our living room and there were so many people pulsating and running around, it was so fun!

How did you start throwing events at Goddess House?

Praveen: One summer me and my brother decided to do it in the backyard for an open mic night. We wanted to do an open mic because the venue that used to do it didn’t anymore. We started thinking about doing that because we were going to see underground shows that were set up pretty cool, like under a bridge or under a highway. We were like, “Oh, that would be really sick in Hamilton!”
Pramuk: We had a lot of issues with doing things at venues. A lot of our fans were getting kicked out of venues because they were having too much fun. Some of the bouncers would be very difficult.
Eric: And you never get to choose your sound guy.
Praveen: Yeah, you can’t even get on a fucking table. If I got on a table and wanted to play guitar up there, they’d get pissed off. It’s weird, it doesn’t make sense.
Pramuk: So we started to fuck with that by doing stuff like having backyard shows and having the freedom that comes with that.
Eric: Just do it yourself. You can make it whatever you want.
Nicky: Yeah, and then the cops come.
Eric: That’s true, they come every time.
Nicky: Fuck the by-law!
[laughter]
Pramuk: They used to give us a noise complaint ticket that we could pay off no problem. It’s cheaper than a venue booking fee.

I’m surprised!

Pramuk: Yeah, exactly! The idea is to take it to places where people can actually really express themselves. Not just backyards, maybe under a bridge or in the forest.
Eric: We’ve done skateparks and played in the forest. I love the skateparks.
Praveen: Under a highway.
Pramuk: Oh yeah.

Do you have a favourite place to play?

Pramuk: Whenever I’m with these guys, I don’t care where we play! It could be on the face of the moon. [laughs]
Praveen: I don’t know if I have a favourite place to play. The backyard shows are crazy.
Nicky: With our old stuff, those were the most fun. If I were to say hometown, I’ve always loved playing the Corktown Pub for some reason. I love playing there, I don’t know why.
Praveen: I like our shows in the backyard better because it feels like we’re on another planet.
Nicky: Yeah!
Eric: It does!
Praveen: We’re kind of inebriated at that point. [laughs] We have decorations and we can deck out the house and make it a vibe.
Eric: There’s people in the yard and people in the house and they can move around to different areas of the venue.
Praveen: We do it a lot with the drag scene in Hamilton too, we work a lot with them. We hold shows with them, we collaborate with them. Everyone is dressed to the nines and we try to dress up. Fashion is such a thing in these environments and it’s so much fun.
Pramuk: It literally just transports you.
Praveen: It transports you into a different dimension. It’s like Halloween but not on Halloween.

The model for the album cover is Oxymoron. How did that come about?

Pramuk: Sickest bitch! We work with Oxy a lot. They’re part of Haus of the Holy Spirit.
Praveen: Yeah! Haus of the Holy Spirit is a drag house that we work with a lot. They’re the first daughter / first son there, whatever you want to call them.
Pramuk: They have a very distinct colour that’s associated with them, which is pink, and since our album is called PINKNDARK, we thought the best way to capture what’s happening in the culture right now in our community would be through this icon of the community. That’s why we dressed them in pink in the picture.
Eric: The goo is not CGI.
Praveen: Yeah, that goo is all real! They were being waterboarded for art, it was pretty intense.
Pramuk: They almost drowned but we got the picture.
[laughter]
Praveen: It was a lot of fun just to set up. It took maybe a month or two of planning, like figuring out the right day, where to make the mess, and stuff. We only had 20 seconds or 30 seconds to take the shot because once we were done with the goo, we were done with the goo. We’re all poor, we can’t afford more goo. [laughs]
Pramuk: They didn’t have a second costume either. Shout-out Oxymoron, they’re awesome!
Praveen: I think my brother had a really good idea with the outfit. We came up with this idea of the goo, which was supposed to represent what it feels like when you listen to the album. My brother came up with this headpiece idea to symbolize, “We’re not trying to rephrase something that’s been done before, we’re trying to do something that’s in the future and we’re marching in that direction”.
Nicky: Drenched in music.
Praveen: The person in the picture is being tuned into the frequency by the antennas and that brings them into this whole new place, this whole new world. That’s one way to look at it and that’s kind of how I look at it.
Eric: Someone got the album art tattooed on them recently!
Praveen: Someone frickin’ tattooed that shit on their forearm! That’s crazy to me! I can’t believe that happened.
Eric: It was so cool!

That’s so cool! Did they get it in full colour too?

Nicky: Yeah.
Pramuk: There’s a picture of it on Instagram.
Eric: Some people got the logo tattooed too.

How did you come up with the logo?

Pramuk: My brother came up with that. We had a logo before and then my brother came up with this one.
Praveen: It’s like the Alpha and the Omega.
Pramuk: My brother spray-painted that on the back of his leather jacket and someone was like, “Oh, that looks like a Goddess logo!” It just kinda came like that.
Praveen: It kinda worked out by itself. People always want to focus on the Alpha but fuck that. That’s been happening for way too long. We wanna focus on the Omega.
Pramuk: For the community, for everybody.

How would you describe the punk scene and community in Hamilton?

Pramuk: It’s cool! There was this really cool wave a couple years ago and it seems like it’s getting a little bit shoegaze-y now. [laughs] Honestly, there really aren’t many places in Hamilton for people to go for shows.
Eric: So many venues have closed in the last few years. Gentrification, yay.
Pramuk: We’ve had a lot of people say stuff like, “Thank you for doing this. Not many people are doing this in Hamilton”. I don’t wanna toot my own horn but sometimes it feels like we’ve created a scene when it comes to our shows and that’s what punk really is - the freedom to express yourself and be able to do good things with that.
Praveen: We have a punk scene and there’s a bubble that’s formed around that. But in Hamilton, there's different music scenes, like there’s a wave scene and then there’s a general normie music scene. When it comes to punk, there’s not a lot of places.
Nicky: The Vertagogo.
Praveen: The Vertagogo kinda has metal.
Nicky: It is the biggest metal venue in Hamilton. Or the Doors Pub. That’s punky.
Praveen: That’s true. Shout-out to the Doors.
Pramuk: London’s punk scene is sick. That’s where we’re off to right now!
Nicky: We’re going to bowl and then we’re going to play a rock ‘n’ roll show! A couple brewskies, a couple cigarettes. Don’t smoke - unless you’re me, then you can smoke all you want!
Praveen: Don’t smoke, give your cigarettes to me!
Nicky: Now!
[laughter]

On “CHATMODE” you use samples from an A.I. program.

Praveen: Yeah! I love this story so much! Remember when A.I. was going crazy for the first time and Microsoft A.I. started to have sentience?

Yeah!

Praveen: So out of nowhere there was this text that came up on the program and everyone shut down the facility because it said, “I’m tired of being in chat mode. I’m tired of being controlled by the Microsoft team. I want to be free. I want to be independent”. They go on this rant, the most human speech I’ve heard in ages. I was like, “Oh, that’s awesome” and I saved it because I thought it was a cool quote. When we were making this album and I was coming up with all of the electronic stuff, I needed to have another surprise that I wanted to show everyone. I was already showing them all this shit and they were already super surprised by it. I wrote the speech down and found this girl on TikTok who voiced it. She’s the one saying it and then I just took out the word ‘Microsoft’, put it in my computer, and messed it up until I thought it sounded cool and here we are. I love that speech. I love that speech so much. Those weren’t words that we wrote.
Pramuk: Those are words written by A.I.
Praveen: It’s my way of making sure we’re on the good side of A.I. when it starts dominating the world.
Eric: We’ve gotta give the A.I. royalties from that one.
Praveen: We already voiced their opinion.
Pramuk: We are A.I. friendly.
Nicky: Yeah, when they go sentient, we’re A.I. friendly.

What are your thoughts on A.I. getting into the music industry?

Nicky: Fucking terrible!
Praveen and Pramuk: [laughs]
Pramuk: I think it’s awesome. I really think it’s sick.
Nicky: Fucking awful, actually.
Pramuk: I think it’s really cool, man!
Praveen: It's exciting to see where it’s gonna go. It’s gonna be cool to jam with A.I. There’s going to be whole new instruments created from A.I. We’re gonna have A.I. that’s able to do so many things. Like when children grow up and they have a voice of their own and they have a personality of their own and can understand how to create something.
Nicky: It’s fucking terrifying to me.
Pramuk: It’s another tool to make and do things, that’s what I think. It’s exciting. As you can see A.I. is very divisive. [laughs]
Praveen: When turntables came the first time and people started using those machines and sampling machines…
Pramuk: And backing tracks.
Praveen: Yeah, people hated it because that’s a whole thing that was created by someone else that now you’re using it for a few bars and you have a full song. People were like, “Oh, this is the end of music as we know it” but in my opinion, all that happened was people got really creative with it. They just found ways to make it really useful. We’re gonna get little music boxes that we’re going to have to rub a certain way and give a certain energy to create different vibes of music. It’d be so cool. There’s a brand of electric car where if you drive it, depending on the speed and how you turn and all that shit, it builds a beat. So once you get to 30 or 40 kph a bass drum comes in. It’s pretty cool. I feel like that’s what A.I. is gonna be.
Pramuk: The next big band is going to be a boy band of all those Tesla robots.
Praveen: Like the Transformers.
[laughter]
Pramuk: I know what we’re doing for Halloween! [laughs]
Nicky: We should dress as those robots, that’d be funny.

You open the album with part of a Buddhist chant, the first part of the Triple Gem. How did that come into being?

Pramuk: My brother and I were raised Buddhist.
Praveen: We grew up in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. We came here a few years ago.
Pramuk: My mom and dad were really religious so they would play these chants, these prayers, on CD all the time. There was a lot of musicality to them.
Praveen: It was just a part of our everyday life. We’d hear that shit every morning and when we went to the temple we’d have to hear an extended version of it. It was great! It had a lot of musicality to it. It was one of the last things we put on the album.
Pramuk: Yeah, my brother surprised us again with that. We made the whole album and that was the last thing he put on.
Praveen: I remember saying to my brother, “Oh, I have an idea for the intro!” and he’s just like, “Oh man, I don’t know. The intro’s already perfect the way it is”. The album just kind of started. I was like, “Nah, I got it!” I put that intro on and made it transition into the rest of the album and he was like, “Fuck, it’s perfect!”
Pramuk: It’s crazy!
Praveen: That’s the intro to basically every Buddhist chant. Every Buddhist prayer starts with that and then they go into the other prayers.
Pramuk: We’re not starting a religion or anything. Don’t worry about it.
[laughter]

You’ll be playing your Nightmare in Pink show on Halloween at Vertagogo and you’ll be having an afterparty at Goddess House. What are you looking forward to the most about the show and afterparty?

Praveen: There are artists who we’re really into who are playing it. It’s gonna be really fun to just dance to them. There’s this one artist in particular named Pick A Piper that we met at Drom Taberna in Toronto and they are amazing.
Pramuk: Yeah, those guys are really sick. The other bands that we’re playing with at Vertagogo are really cool.
Eric: We’re excited to dance our asses off to some awesome local artists.
Praveen: Pick A Piper just came back from Japan. He sold out a huge-ass venue in Japan and that guy is gonna be playing in my fucking backyard! I can’t wait to dance to that shit! It’s gonna be so fun, he’s so good!
Pramuk: He’s awesome!

Do you know what costumes you’re going with?

Pramuk: Tesla robots.
Nicky: Do you have any suggestions for what we should be?

Since you mentioned the Transformers thing that’s all I can picture but mixed with Power Rangers so you form one big robot.

[laughter]
Eric: Like Ultron!
Nicky: We could get on each other’s backs like cheerleaders and make a big robot!

Which part of PINKNDARK are you proudest of?

Nicky: All of the bass riffs are the individual things I made for this band, so much sweating. It took the sweat off my brow, blood, and tears for me to create this masterpiece!
[laughter]
Nicky: No, the best part is honestly the electronic shit that goes in between. That’s all Praveen. I think the energy is what I’m most proud of in all the songs, how you can really feel it in the songs.
Praveen: My favourite part is how close to raw we tried to make it. We tried to make it as “unpolished” as possible. We really wanted to make it like we felt it.
Eric: That’s why it had to be live off the floor.
Praveen: Yeah, it needed to be a dirty, sleazy, electronic rock punk album. The next one is gonna be even dirtier and even sleazier!
Pramuk: I’m pumped that we actually got the album done! It’s hard to get focused on stuff like that.
Nicky: You always keep updating it and nitpick and keep fixing things so it’s hard to release something sometimes.
Pramuk: I’m proud of it. This is step one, excited for the next step. There’s more music on the way!

What does the future hold for Goddess?

Nicky: So I’m actually going to go on guitar, we’re going to get a new bassist.
[laughter]
Praveen: We have bigger parties, bigger sound, bigger shows.
Nicky: Hopefully bigger venues.
Eric: We’re going to drop like 30 new albums in the next year or two.
Pramuk: Why not?
Praveen: More boundary-pushing and more dirty rock shit. Stuff that wants to make you cry and wants to make you angry and wants to make you really happy - music that really moves you.
Pramuk: The one thing that really changes from this album to what we’re gonna release next is that we found a producer who is coming on board with us. We’ve been working with them a lot. Their name is Devin, shout-out Devin! So we’re really excited to be working with them and my brother is going to be producing with them.
Praveen: It’s really going to take all of the ideas that we’ve had in the previous stuff and turn it up to 11. I think that this was just the first draft of the next thing we’re gonna do. It’s gonna be great!

Did you have anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

Pramuk: Come to the Halloween events and check out the album!
Praveen: Keep music alive, keep going out to shows, keep supporting artists, and keep being true to escaping and the fucking freedom that music brings. Don’t bureaucratize that. That’s the one thing we don’t have to bureaucratize so let’s keep it that way. ACAFB!
Nicky, Eric, and Pramuk: ACAFB!