Interviews: Talking all things 'Under a Plastic Bag' with Ben Disaster of Real Sickies

Edmonton’s Real Sickies have been kicking out incredibly high-energy pop-punk for 10 years and their fifth album Under a Plastic Bag is no exception. The fourteen tracks find the band continuing to expand their sound as they incorporate elements from new wave, power pop, and indie rock to create infectious songs that are chock full of moshable moments. Lyrically, the band explores life and death, environmental destruction, love, and wild shows. Under a Plastic Bag is available everywhere now via Stomp Records and you can order a copy here or here. Real Sickies will be playing their album release show on March 16 at Plaza Bowling Co. in Edmonton and will be playing in Saskatoon in April.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with lead vocalist Ben Disaster (AKA Ben Crossman) to talk about the new album, dealing with burnout, recording samples in the field, the punk scene in Edmonton, and so much more. Read the interview below!

This interview between Em Moore and Ben Disaster took place over Zoom on March 5, 2024. This is a transcription of their conversation and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You recorded Under a Plastic Bag at Riverdale Recorders with Joshua Wells and you co-produced the album together. How did you decide who to work with? What was the recording and co-producing process like?

We had a really difficult time trying to figure out who we were gonna work with. Somebody had mentioned Josh so his name was floating in the hat. We had reached out to a couple other people as well and were just trying to get the best vibe of, "Who wants to do this?" We wanted somebody who was gonna be stoked to do it and whose skills we believed in. Josh was playing in another band, that I wasn’t aware he was in, called Lightning Dust. They were playing in Edmonton and I was flipping through a brochure for this festival and I saw Josh’s face and was like, “Hey, that’s Josh! I didn’t know he was playing Edmonton, I guess I’ll go hang out and talk”. I went and mentioned it to him briefly and he was like, “Get in touch with me next week once I finish up tour”. So I sent him a message and he was really excited. From what I knew, he hadn’t really worked on as much of a punk band as us before but he’s worked in a lot of different styles and genres. He’s very competent and I really liked the sounds that he was capturing.
Then it was just figuring out if we were going to fly to Chicago or fly him to Edmonton. It made more sense to get the one ticket to Edmonton and he was down. He stayed with my wife and I and our dog. We woke up really early in the mornings, had coffee, went to the studio, and had more coffee. The days started off as being 8-10 hour days and then it turned into 12-14 hours and I think there was an 18 hour day at one point. We were just trying to capture as much as we could. We only had eight days with him here. Leading up to it we made a playlist so we all knew certain sounds or styles that we were listening to so we could all be on the same page when we got to the studio.
We also left a lot of room for exploring the studio because it was new to us. We hadn’t recorded there before and it was obviously new to Josh. We were figuring out the equipment and what was available to us and what kinds of sounds we could potentially capture there. The first few days were the learning experience of getting into it. When it came down to producing it we started sending mixes back and forth. He would send it to us and we would send him notes. He was on tour for a little bit so that gave us time to absorb the mixes a little bit more and take our time with it. In that sense, we ended up finding more hooks and little things. Josh added a lot of really great texture. Any idea that we had he was able to get it instantly. Anything that he had really made sense. There wasn’t really too much going back and forth like, “I don’t think this works”. Everything just felt right because we were all just stoked on the project.
Recording an album can be super stressful and definitely in the past it’s caused a lot of heads to butt because everyone’s just really passionate about what they’re trying to do. You’re creating art and you want it to be memorable. This way around we really wanted everyone’s voice to be heard. If something didn’t necessarily work, then we would talk about it with good communication and explain why something maybe sounded weird and then listen to why it sounded good to somebody else. We found the best of both worlds that way. It took a kind of openness to talk.

Having those clear channels of communication is so important.

Yeah! It made everything feel a lot smoother and very nice. By the end of it, whether or not people like the album - it’d be great if people liked it, I’d love it if people loved it - ultimately, I’m just really happy about the experience of getting to do this album with everyone involved. That means more to me than whatever reviews there will be. It’s our fifth album so it’s gonna sound a little different. We really didn’t wanna make the exact same album. Also with a huge lineup change, we weren’t gonna have the exact same sound. We had been touring quite a bit, things just evolved, and we learned songs differently. The energy is still in the same wheelhouse and mental capacity as before but it's a little bit more drilled in from the amount of work we put into it.

How did the lineup change come about?

There was a lot. We were at rehearsal the other day and we were talking about the album release like, “Hey, everyone who played on the album is gonna be performing at the album release show”. That dawned on two of the members who have been in it the longest at this point like, “Hey, that hasn’t happened”. I think it maybe happened once at a space we played when the original lineup was recording. A lot of it came from being burnt out and people being very passionate. In the past a lot of heads were butting and on one of the tours, there was a broken nose beforehand. A lot of things happened that were really tough. It makes sense because it’s a family and families fight. It takes a lot to negotiate and make things work.
It was kinda touch and go for a lot of different reasons and each case was kind of different. Rob, the co-founder of the band, was definitely getting pretty burnt out. He recorded and mixed and did so much stuff with the previous albums and I think he got burnt out. Maybe there wasn’t enough appreciation on all ends, we all didn’t necessarily see what each other was doing behind the scenes. So it was unfortunate. I was in a position where I had to either quit the band; just stop it because the person who co-founded it was leaving or keep it going. When we first started, I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to do the band or not. [laughs] Some of the songs I really liked and some of them I just wasn’t sure about but I wanted to try something. It turned into putting a lot of energy into it and sinking a lot of money into it, touring a lot, and working really hard. I didn’t feel like it was right to just take that away from the people who had recently joined and had been working and touring as well. They obviously work just as hard and sacrifice their life and time. I kinda battled with if it was worth it to keep it going and fulfill the commitments of touring the album Love Is For Lovers for a long time.
Rob left and Chrispy joined. I was in another band with him called Screaming Targets and I had to quit that band because Real Sickies was touring a lot more. When Rob was leaving I was super bummed, it was really devastating, but I saw it as a chance to be like, “I really enjoyed making music with Chrispy so maybe this is an opportunity to still make music with Chrispy”. I think Alex has been in it since Out Of Space, so he’s only not on one album. Right before recording our bass player was pretty burnt out. We had been touring quite a bit and we were out of town every weekend or every other weekend and then we were trying to figure out when we were going to be able to record. Being away from home and not working as much just got too stressful. There were lots of different situations.
Even though I wasn’t 100% all-in at the beginning, I knew that if we wanted to do this band it couldn’t just break up. I thought you have a little bit of success with a band and then after you release an album it just breaks up and you start again, but I really wanted to have a longevity band so here we are. It’s been five albums and however many singles and tons of music videos and lots of touring. As hard as a lot of the changes were to navigate and work through, I’m very happy that we kept it going. I think there was definitely some bitterness but over time, things heal and we’re all pretty much in a better position to see it through a different lens.

How do you cope with burnout? How do you prevent that personally?

I don’t know, it’s tricky. You play a big festival or something and leading up to it you’re like, “Is this gonna happen?” You get kinda excited but it doesn’t really hit you until it’s happening and right after you’re like, “Ok, what’s next?” You have this moment of depression whether it’s touring or recording because you’re so busy and then all of a sudden you’ve got free time and you don’t know how to handle it. For me, the burnout is more of the depressing downtime. Otherwise, I really enjoy it. There were a few times when we would be on the road every weekend and during the week we’d be at home working or with our families. To me, that was super exhausting because you never had a moment to really rest.
But I think looking forward to the recording, to making music videos, to creating the art based around it, and to see that future side of everything kinda helps with the burnout because there’s a constant goal. Maybe I’ll really feel the burnout later on in life but I do find that it’s about finding ways to cope with the depression of the downtime even though one should appreciate what they’ve just done. I find that’s hard to do - to appreciate what you’ve done instead of being like, “Ok, what’s next? Why aren’t we doing anything?”

Finding a way to build in those little celebrations like, “Oh my god, we did this thing!”

Totally. I took a little while to just listen to the album, which I haven’t done really in the past. I wanna absorb this. I was working on an interview when we got the albums in. It took me a couple days to finish the interview because I wanted to appreciate the album and absorb that before getting lost in the “business” side of it. We’d listen to the mixes but I never got to listen to them in order or it would be a distracted listen so it was nice to actually sit down and listen to it even though one of the speakers was cutting out. But I fixed the speaker so once I get time I’ll listen to it again.
There's a lot of stuff I really noticed hearing the physical vinyl of the album. We approached it differently. This was the first time that we got it mastered and had the lacquer cut by the person who mastered it. I’m really happy that we did that. You can hear a lot of deeper detail stuff in the actual vinyl. It’s there digitally but there’s little things that I knew we had recorded that I’m like, “Oh yeah, it’s there. I can hear it a lot more clear!” Audiophiles would understand that a lot better than I do. I like records and I like collecting them but I don’t have amazing gear to listen to it on. I’m not listening to it through a Crosley or anything like that. [laughs]

What was a little detail you noticed on the vinyl that you didn’t necessarily notice digitally?

I knew there were a couple of these little xylophone things and I could hear them very faintly in the digital version but I could really hear them pop out on the vinyl. Those things that are kinda in the background I could pick up a lot more. Josh had a hell of a time, especially with “Lost by a Landslide”. There’s tons of news quotes going on, there’s a choir in the background, there’s five backup vocals going on, and tons of guitars - to mix that whole thing would have been a nightmare. The song’s kinda about natural disasters and global warming and there’s one clip where it says, “Everything, everywhere, all at once” and it just really fits with the amount of chaos that is going on; especially for somebody producing and mixing because everything is everywhere all at once. [laughs] It had a double meaning and I think he appreciated that even though when I sent the sound clips he was like, “There’s so much stuff going on!” I’m like, “I know, but we’re going to have more”. [laughs]

You start and end the album with the sounds of someone digging. How did that idea come about?

The album title, Under a Plastic Bag, is tied to death in a lot of ways but also with death things end and new things begin which is a common belief, but I don’t know if I fully believe that. I like to go hunting for fossils quite often and there’s a nice river here. Someone was panning for gold there but they were digging holes and leaving them and that’s definitely a no-no. You gotta fill your holes because it’s super dangerous if you’re walking in the river and all of a sudden you take a step and you’re three feet deeper than what you thought you were. I was shoveling the rocks back in these holes because I was also looking for fossils. The sound of it just captured my ears right away so I grabbed a bag, put my phone inside the bag, and buried my phone. That’s how we captured that sound. We had the idea of something digging but we wanted something where you could hear it getting deeper. On each dig, you hear you’re getting further and further in and it creates this odd, ghostly claustrophobic sound. I think that was kinda perfect.

It sounds so cool, it’s like the shovel’s right above you!

It was! The shovel was right beside the phone and all the rocks were getting tossed on the phone. Using your phone to record isn’t the best audio style but I didn’t really wanna bring good audio equipment. A cracked phone screen was a lot cheaper to deal with.
A lot of it was DIY. The train was the same thing where I was just getting field recordings. There’s a really good bridge that goes over the river and you can hear the train whistle echoing so I took a long time trying to figure out when the train was actually coming. Over a week I wrote down all the times that I heard it and when it came up to that time I went over to the bridge and then I realized that the train goes non-stop back and forth blowing its whistle for a couple hours. [laughs] So I could’ve gone and recorded it whenever. I went there on a nice evening and it was a super good experience.

You mentioned the choir on “Lost by a Landslide” and on “Paulie” you have Mark from Bootlicker, Zac from Proclaimers, and Pela from Victimas Club. How did you decide who to collaborate with?

We’ve been friends with Mark from Bootlicker for a long time and he was coming into Edmonton so we decided to ask him and he was super down. We had done a European tour with Marky Ramone and Pela was singing. He was the front person for Marky’s group and he’s in another band called Victimas Club. We had a really nice time touring with them and we wanted to collaborate with him. Personally, watching him perform every night I wished that I got to see that kind of characteristic performance growing up more. He was very inspiring. I’m really happy to work with him on that.
When I was young, I loved “500 Miles” by Proclaimers. That was one of the first songs where I was like, “Holy shit this is great!” I remember hearing it on the radio as a very young kid and bobbing my head. They were playing in Edmonton at a casino and I had brought my guitar because I wanted to show the band some songs. I ended up walking around the hotel room and I saw this little post-it note saying, “Load-in changed to 3pm” so I was knocking on Charlie’s door trying to meet these guys. I heard a couple Scottish voices getting into the elevator so I ran down the hallway and got on the same elevator as them. We started talking about punk for whatever reason because I’m punk, I guess. We were talking about Undertones and Wreckless Eric and we just hit it off. Then anytime they came through they wanted to hang out so I was able to just go backstage and hang out with them.
I kept in close contact with all of them and Zac and I had talked about collaborating on music for a while. When they were touring Canada, we were touring Canada and we were crossing paths in Regina so they came out to our show and we went out to theirs. I sent the song to Zac and he was down. He did some really wild voices that I wasn’t expecting but it was perfect because it created more of an atmosphere. With that song, it felt like a very gang-vocal mentality. It’s oddly very sport anthemic so we wanted to capture that hooliganism. [laughs]
I’m really happy with that one. That one and “Wild Imagination” were some of the top spun mixes that we got. “Wild Imagination” was recorded shorter than we had written it and I think the idea was if we made it really short you would instantly kick it back and start it again because there’s so many earworms. I mean, it worked for me.

You did production design and created a bunch of the figures and backgrounds for the “Triage” video. What was that like? How did the storyline for the video come about?

There’s a place called the Reuse Centre in Edmonton and it’s a great spot. Everything is free. They weigh what goes out so that way they can show Edmonton how much stuff was saved from the landfill. A lot of it is arts and crafts. There’s a lot of board games and really odd stuff that just shows up. I go there quite often looking for music video props or artistic inspiration. I started finding a few models and they sat in my basement for a while.
I made one of the main characters first, his name was Alvin. Alvin was the rocket man and Snobs was the bonehead. It started off with Alvin, this weird army figure with a jet as a head. I don’t why, it just made sense. So then I had this character just kinda staring at me in my garage for a while. I found a model plane so I made that. I stuffed it full of match-heads and that was just hanging in my garage for a long time. I knew that I was gonna blow it up, I just didn’t know fully when or how. Then the Titanic came into my hands. It takes a long time to follow the proper instructions on those models, I realized, and as a person with ADHD I just wanna get it done so a lot of it was put on backwards. I created my own stuff out of it and then found ways to either take sparkler dust or matches or fireworks and shove those inside, whatever would fit for pyrotechnics. I had all this stuff hanging in my garage and I was realizing that this was a major fire hazard. [laughs] Like, “If this stuff goes up, this house is done”. It felt really good to finally film it.
We work with Jesse Nash quite often on a lot of our music videos. With this video, we could’ve easily just done it very lo-fi on our phones but I wanted to capture all the little details. I wanted his professional eye on it. He’s very knowledgeable about cameras and capturing images. He was very understanding of what I wanted to capture. We set up a green screen and filmed a lot of it in my garage. I kept explaining this visual that I had but he needed a real scene to it and I was like, “This is chaos, this is mental chaos” and tried to explain it the best that I could. It’s two identities out to screw each other over subconsciously; like you feel like you don’t deserve something good so you go out and destroy it before you can capture it. I think that mentality was put into the video. It does seem like they’re just out there fighting like a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner scenario and it is that as well.
I like creating music video props and other props. There was a lot of room that this one took up and once the video was done we burned everything - which I did feel bad about environmentally, but we did it and now we don’t have to do it again. [laughs] It was very freeing of space because I had had these visuals running in my mind for months on end.

Get it out, release it.

Yeah! [laughs] We got it on a Sunday morning. It was just the perfect Sunday morning to eat cereal and watch this video with this crazy cartoon atmosphere. It was a very fun one.

You’ll be playing your album release show on March 16 at Plaza Bowling Co. What are you looking forward to the most about this show?

I think just the experience of playing the venue. They’ve had a few shows but it’s been very sparse, it’s not a typical music venue whatsoever. It’s a proper bowling alley and it’s a multi-generation family-owned business so it’s very grassroots, very community-oriented. I think that’ll be a good experience on its own. It’s not a huge venue but I think it’ll be a nice intimate experience for a proper release party. We do have some other things coming up that we’ll announce shortly afterward and then we head out to Saskatoon in April. After that, things are in the works for June and September.
In typical Sickies fashion, things will get thrown at us. We’re a little bit more picky and choosy at the moment just with family obligations and trying to make the best of what we can do with our time and not create too much burnout, but we’ll definitely be touring this album. I think before it was like, “Here’s an offer. Let’s do it! It doesn’t matter, cancel everything”. Any chance to work obviously we wanna take it but we just gotta be a little bit smarter about it for the next little bit. I can see touring a bit more in 2026 after the album’s settled and people have had a chance to hear it a bit more. There are some Canadian tours in progress at the moment.

How would you describe the punk scene in Edmonton?

I think it’s always been pretty great. When I was 16 there would be all-ages shows and there would be almost 300 kids there. It was insane for quite a while and I think it was because there were a lot of young bands bringing in their friends and the older crowd was bringing in those high school bands. There was something really good going on. It was a huge community. Seeing a lot of those people still stick around is awesome. There’s more pockets of subgenres of punk that I’m finding that are not as unified as it once was. Everyone used to just go to the one show and now there’s so much stuff going on. There’s so many venues that will have shows on the same night so there’s a lot of competition and people are stretched thin financially and with time.
But I think there’s still a really strong community of punk, goth, metal, and indie rock. There’s still a really strong music scene here and there’s certain moments where it all connects as one and you get that feeling of 300 kids stage diving again.I like seeing that there’s new bands and younger bands popping up. It’s always been a very welcoming community and very supportive of one another. Even though you might not see each other for sometimes close to a year, once you see each other it’s like nothing’s changed. You’re right back there and you’re all there for the same reason - to support art and punk and each other.
For Sickies we’ll do DIY shows and punk shows and we’ll also perform at these larger festivals where you’ll see a lot of people that you wouldn’t normally see at those community shows. I would like to see that gap get bridged a little bit but I think some people like the big bands and they want to support that and maybe they’re not aware of the community and cheaper ticket shows. It’s interesting to see both worlds. It always leaves me confused as to where we stand. I have no idea what kind of fan base we have. I know that we have our community, I know that we have our friends, I know there’s been people who have been coming to our shows since day one, and then there’s the people that you’ll see at these larger venues who are like, “I’ve seen you so many times!” I don’t know what our draw is like and I don’t really care. [laughs] Just as long as people are coming out and enjoying themselves and they feel comfortable and safe, that’s the most important thing.
I think there’s a lot of really great bands here. Anytime something new starts there’s excitement around it. I think with it being such a dark, cold place for so much of the year, there’s just a lot of energy pent-up and that really comes out at punk shows where people can let loose and feel good. I think it helps in a weird way. [laughs] You go from performing and you’re all sweaty then you go outside and your body is steaming because it’s so cold.

Which part of Under a Plastic Bag are you proudest of?

I think everything as a collective for sure. It’s a hard one to say. I definitely have a few favourites. “Wild Imagination” is definitely up there, “Paulie” is up there, but then I’ll hear the other songs and I’ll be like, “Oh, this is great!” I think just the overall experience of accomplishing what we did in the time that we had and we kept it very enjoyable. The experience is what I’m most proud of and what I’m most happy with.