Dan Buksa, who did the art for your 2022 album Where We've Always Been and your 2021 EP Pride Was Somewhere Else, also did the art for I’ll Always Be This. There are four posters on the cover; three are drawn and one is a black and white photo. What is the photo of?

I think it’s a recreation of a photograph that we found of a New York City subway train coming into the station. I can’t remember if it was a photograph or if it was a World’s Fair type of poster. Each of those posters are references, in one way or another, to a track on the EP. That’s the stand-in for “One Bad Day” because of that song’s lyrical content. Jordan Neely was an unhoused street performer who got choked to death on a New York City subway by an ex-Marine. It was one of those things where the whole day was a discourse basically trying to rationalize it or justify it or lionize it. I found it to be very gross. That’s where that song comes from. That poster has this classical, artistic expression of the subway that contrasts with what the subway actually is in modern life - it’s this place where people are hanging by a thread or living paycheque to paycheque or are living in the subway. When we were trying to figure out things that would stand in, it was hard to place a thing that felt like it touched on the song exactly. It felt like the best fit was an irony of the classical subway representation to now.

Everything’s cool and fine!

Modernization! This will surely improve our lives!

Another one of the posters has the date August 27 featured prominently on it. What song is that referring to?

The date to us has no meaning. The poster is a play on old-school wrestling posters. If I remember correctly, that one is the stand-in for “Team Player” because it’s a play on the fight that it is to get through the week and through the month when you're living paycheque to paycheque with a job that continues to pay you less and less as the social safety net gets worse and worse and you’re only made to feel more scared of it. That was generally the vibe or feeling that I got from it. I remember working that out a couple months ago with Dan and that’s where we settled with the play on the office place wars.

It fits so well with the line in that song about receiving the bare minimum and returning it.

“Bare minimum with no regrets”! It’s the only way to find any agency in this world where you are just barely getting by - not even to pay the bills but just to not get too far behind that things get taken from you. That’s where we’re at. It feels like if all I can do is not let myself feel the shame that you try to impress upon me for not wanting to climb this ladder, I’ll try as best as I can to be as unapologetically shameless in my lack of career ambition as far as it pertains to any sort of cubicle existence.

What helps you do that? What helps you take the shame and throw it away?

Frankly you get to a certain point of feeling beaten down by your job and the cycle, like you pay the rent and you’re completely depleted and then you start the machine again to only end up back there four weeks later. It can be hard. On a very functional level, they need you more than you need them because chances are if you are overworked, - and you probably are if you relate to the song - the worst thing they could do is fire you but they would have to pay you if they did that so they’re not gonna do that. I’m actually putting my notice in tomorrow at my job. I feel excited about it. It’s going to be a lot of doing PA work and temp jobs around the city between tours.

The line in that song about the therapist literally comes from something that happened to me. In the year leading up to the wedding - which took place back in May -, there were moments when I had a lot to think about. You’re making the biggest, longest commitment you’ll ever make and as a result, you inherently are thinking so much about your life; the past, the present, and the future all at once. It’s very emotional. There were some weeks when my time with my therapist was getting eaten up by how frustrated I was with my office HR job. It got to a point where he looked at me and was like, “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” and I was like, “They fire me”. He goes, “Ok, but do you wanna be there forever? Can you even functionally be there forever with the stuff you’re trying to do?” I was like, “No”. He was like, “Have you tried everything? Have you tried working it out internally within the company?” I was like, “Yeah, it didn’t take” so he was like, “Alright, so don’t overextend yourself. You’re overextending yourself and it’s not working so just don’t”.

You can’t be simultaneously disrespected and undercompensated yet relied upon. It can’t be both of those things. If you don’t want to play into or dignify that transactionality then all you can do is essentially the bare minimum and dare them to fire you. There’s a certain liberation that you feel in that that I’ve lived in for honestly maybe a year. We finished our summer tour last year at the very end of August and I basically came back from that and was instantly trying to find work but when you’re stuck in a job, it’s hard to find a new job. So the bandaid being ripped off is something that I’m really excited about. It’s exhilarating. It’s ultimately one of those things where you don’t want to be there forever so it’s gotta come to an end sometime. You’ve literally booked yourself into this corner logistically but you don’t have enough PTO to do all the shows that you’re getting to play now and do your honeymoon so it’s like, “Alright, I guess this means that the things I care about have been going amazingly! So I’m just going to walk away from this thing I don’t care about”.

You mentioned that preparing for the wedding had an impact on how you went about writing the EP. What impact did it have?

It was a combination of being both strategic and logistical about the time when things were going on with the band and what my personal schedule was going to be this year mixed with the way the deeply dynamic emotions hit as you prepare for a wedding. It makes you feel so much more open to spilling all these different things out. [laughs]

It seemed like as last year went on, more people found us which was really cool. When the album first dropped, it was our debut of activity. We didn’t really post a lot on social media and we weren’t really super active. We had the EP from 2021 before it but there wasn’t an ability to push because we didn’t have enough material. Shows weren’t really finding their functional logistics post-COVID until 2022, really. It feels like with our type of band, having the live show is such a crucial building block. The best way for this band to broadcast its culture is to physically bring itself into rooms where we get to sing about this shit. The album was simmering over the course of the year it was out and by the time we hit our year mark we had a good amount of listeners for a band that had really only been active for about a year. Within that, we were booking a lot of shows. We played weekenders around the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. We had a lot of listeners in Chicago and we wanted to get out to play there so we booked a Midwest tour. Shoutout to Glazed for taking us out on the Northeast leg of their spring tour in 2023 because that was a huge thing for people finding out about us. I think that was the first time, in a lot of instances, of people seeing our name on a flyer. You got that, “Huh, this band is taking this band out? Let me check them out!” That was a really cool thing for them to do with us being pretty new and unknown.

But we had a lineup change during that so we weren’t able to write much during the year because we had a different friend filling in on bass for each show. As a result, the focus had to be on the live shows and not the writing. We had a decent skeleton of “Rumors” that came about during a practice but then we had to shelve it and we didn't come back to it until November 2023 when we were done with playing shows for the year. We deliberately were like, “Let’s give ourselves 6 weeks from the end of our last show - which was the second week of November - until the holidays. Let’s see all these little ideas that we’ve been able to kick around during practices or when we’ve been killing time or trying to reset the air”. Jacob and I would work on ideas structurally a little bit but as a band we didn’t sit down and focus on any songs until November with the intent of, “Let’s write as much as we can. Let’s try to come up with the strongest songs we can and just focus on writing for this next month.” The wedding was in May so I was giving myself a month and a half before the wedding and one month after of space to not do things for the band.

That was a crunch time of writing, sharpening, and recording songs. There was a sense of urgency that was all throughout that. It was like, “We know what we have to do and we’ve been working our asses off playing a lot of shows. What were things we liked a lot about the album? What were things on the album that we wanted to improve upon or even shy away from?” Thankfully it came together very well. We had the bulk of the full-band versions of those four songs after the first session. It feels like it was maybe because we were aware of what we had to work with. We were all like, “If we only have x amount of time to write, let’s really come as locked in as possible”. Everything kind of coalesced nicely because we were in that environment.

Because you have to be intentional, I have a reference document for what I want to write about and the things I want to really explore on this EP and on the next album. Writing an album is so great creatively but it’s impossible financially. It felt like, “Ok, people found out about us last year. Let’s not wait too long to give them something. Let’s write as many bangers that we believe in in the short time that we have”. For me lyrically, it kind of helped to be like, “You’re feeling a lot right now. Write down what it is that you want to hone in on”. I was setting into motion what I wanted to write about and explore.

Did you find a certain song the most cathartic to write or did you find the whole process that way?

It’s hard for me to say because it is collective. In a meta way, this was the thing that I was going to be writing as I was preparing to get married so there was this feeling of, “You’re getting to have an authentic document of your process of self-reflection”. The album was very much looking outward and processing what you see around you and this EP is when you’ve taken all that in and you have this gloomy disposition about where the world is heading but you still have these values. What is the person you’re going to be and how are you going to carry yourself back into that world indefinitely? What are the flags that you wanna plant? What are the things that you need to stay cognizant of?

For me, it was nice because the songs are each about different headspaces and experiences. “Team Player” is essentially about becoming radicalized by living paycheque to paycheque and instead of letting yourself be beaten into being either meek and overly apologetic or hardened into this nihilistic, individualistic, “I’m a Wolf of Wall Street” guy, focusing on the bigger picture of, “I am one of the many. I’m being fucked over because many people are being fucked over. I’m not going to lose sight of the fact that my enemy is upward, not downward or beside me”.

“Rumors” is about thinking about your mental self and your ability to deal. That song was about this period I went through of not drinking. There wasn’t any big blow-up or anything, there was just this period of feeling numb and low in general and the drinking was not helping anymore. I was becoming more aware of how low I felt and the drinking wasn’t having a utility. I quit drinking and it felt good at first but then everything else came in and showed that the drinking wasn’t the problem but was a symptom of the problem. At a certain point, you’ve lived long enough where you’re like, “This is part of it”. This never-ending cycle of trying to find self-improvement and not knowing how to define that and having to make peace with that.

“Last Thread” is that feeling of, “Ok, if the world is as fucked as I feel it to be and it still eats me up, can I turn it off? Should I turn it off?” and ultimately coming to, “That would feel pretty shameful. It wouldn't make me feel any better and it wouldn’t do anything”. So you might as well just double down and at the very least not lose your sensitivity if that’s the only thing that you can control in the face of that long, deep arc. “One Bad Day” is about not losing sight of the fact that you are much closer to the people who are on the street than you are to the people who are in the penthouse. Specifically not to dehumanize or rationalize the violence that the people further and further down the ladder all get subjected to. To explore all of those things in 4 songs felt like Operation of myself, like there’s this, this, this, and this. [laughs] It felt really great to explore that and so much of that is the result of that kind of lifestyle/headspace at the time.

How do you retain that sensitivity without it crushing you?

It’s a battle. A lot of these songs are about acceptance of the discomfort of what may be inequitable for the rest of our lives. It doesn’t have to be that way and I hope it’s not, but the powers are what the powers are and the score is what the score is. How can you deal? A lot of these songs are about how you deal and when it comes down to it, would you really feel better not caring about people? Would that feel better? Would that even be functional? There are a lot of lyrical references to the fact that you look around and there’s no way to be isolated. There’s no disconnect between the things that you’re feeling and struggling with and when you look at that at large, chances are that it’s connected.

That’s what that second verse of “Team Player” is about, the lack of safety nets yet the complete militarization of our world, of our country and policing, and the destruction of entire peoples all over the world. These things are connected. If anything, your indignity for your own self-preservation is tied to your sensitivity. On top of that, it’s the right thing to do. As corny and as trite as that might be, it is the right thing to do. I think it’s the only way that you can really live with yourself. It’s really stark but it’s a thing that I’ve thought about in the context of Gaza and the Philippines and it’s what can you do? Sometimes it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Years down the line, are you going to look back and say that you were doing things that you could be proud of in those moments of crises? The answer is being brutally honest about what you can live with.

How do you make sure you’re practicing solidarity in a meaningful way?

Understanding that these are life-long disciplines and paths. There are specifics; it’s being mindful about what you give money to, it’s being mindful on a cultural level, and having at least a generalized awareness of material conditions specifically in what’s considered the Global South or “developing countries” - the currently and formerly imperialized world. Depending on what levels of experience you have, linking up with other people who are taking on the same heat that you are or if you are privileged enough to not be under the gun, finding out how you can connect and build power with those people and make space for those people who don’t have as much of a platform or protection are things you can do. That’s everything from doing mutual aid in your neighbourhood to being mindful of what various advocacy groups exist.

I think the biggest thing is - and this is what the album was largely about - staying aware can’t just be that you’re on the internet getting into arguments about the headlines with the worst people you went to high school with on Facebook. That doesn’t do anything at all. Whatever that hot button issue is that you care about, find out where the nearest advocacy group that handles it is, whether that's disability rights, abortion rights, immigration protection, or anything like that. Chances are that in your county or your city, there is some collective near you that has something that you can participate in. If it’s an avenue for your lived experience to come up - great, but if it’s a thing that you want to show up for and support in numbers, in phone calls, in all of that, there’s that too.

You recorded I’ll Always Be This with Joe Rom at Hilda Music Co in 4 days. What was that recording experience like?

It was awesome. We had so much time to work on the album and tinker with it because we had anonymity, we weren’t actively being a band so we had all the time in the world. In this instance, people were catching on to us and catching on to the message. That was great but the songs, at that point for us, had been recorded 2 years prior and written in some instances 3 years prior so we had that desire to get new stuff out there. Only having 4 days to get this done, you just have to do it. It was like, “We’re prepared, just let it rip”. We had so many practices that were just focusing on keeping the songs sharp. It helped that before the end of the previous year, we were still tinkering with little details but things were pretty much there by that point. I think I was still working out some melodies and lyrics here or there. Even with those it was like, “Ok, I think this verse is going to be this and the chorus is this. Verse 1 is gonna be this”. Then it was figuring out what verse 2 was gonna be and seeing if that changed what the first one would be. All that fun stuff.

I had a vocal session with my vocal coach dedicated to each song to work out every single thing. We’re trying to make the best thing that we’ve made and we did it in a window of time because we wanted to make a statement as to what this band’s level is at now. We want people to buy into us because we want to make another album. Getting to explore all these thoughts in 10 songs is a lot easier than doing it in 4 and creatively we can play a bit more musically.

It was this nice thing where everybody became better at what they do because of this process. Joe was so chill the whole time, kicking in an idea here or there or saying, “I think we can get a better one. I think it’s this, why don’t we try this?” It was one of those things where it went fast in a good way. I pulled a muscle in my back - playing hockey! - and it didn’t rear itself until the day before I had to track vocals. Breathing is actually a pretty big part of singing so with my ribs and back being banged up it took a little bit of adjusting. I was like, “Just give me a minute” and if that minute became 4 or 5 there wasn’t any, “Let’s go, let’s go”. I’d get into it and then we’d get the takes. It was one of those things where our process mirrored a lot of the feeling of the music. This very intense urgency that you’re having to delicately and precisely navigate.

The back thing - oh my god!

It was crazy! I played goalie and there was a loose puck. I went to dive to cover it and this guy pulled it backwards while I was diving. I was like, “Oh shit!” I landed on my ribs and I tried to spin my leg up and doing that pulled something in my back. For days I thought my rib was hurt because I fell forward and then it slowly got worse. We had to drive an hour out deep into Long Island to record and I was the one who was driving us so having to sit in the car too… it was an experience. It was nuts. It helped with the more anguished songs for sure.

This is your first recorded material with your new bassist, Robbie. What impact have they had on the dynamic of the band?

They’re very energetic, in the live show especially. Jacob moves around too and Ryan drums so there’s only so much movement you can do there. Robbie is a ball of energy. They play other instruments and on “Last Thread” there’s a synth part that comes in on the second verse that they just absolutely killed. They’ve been super helpful in the creative process. There’s a vibrance that they have that really matches the energy of what this band is trying to do and be. Also, they are a therapist and as a result, it helps inform a lot of the conversations that we get to have in general about the world and life as a band. It helps inform the internal culture of the band.

You released a video for “Rumors of My Wellness” and you have some references to different movies like The Matrix in there. Why did you decide to include these references? Do you have a favourite one that made it in?

One of the references is “Move Along” by All-American Rejects. Sean Mana, the director, is a comedian and does improv. Robbie and Sean used to do improv together. Sean always wanted to direct a music video and I wanted to do a video that wasn’t just a performance video. I wanted to do something that had a good deal of narrative commentary to it at least. With this, we were able to explore different reference points of archetypes of characters that if you were them and you were living differently, would that be inherently healthy? Would that be better or would it be another type of sickness?

I think my favourite one might have been the stock market bro with the headset. That one was fun just because that’s the one I think I look the most unhinged and depraved in. I’m hopeful that Deutsche Bank sues us because that would be really good. The preppy finance bro that has the Deutsche Bank sleeveless vest with the plaid underneath felt like if we get sued then it’s free advertising.

What was really funny was the ironworker look. A friend of mine is an actual New York City ironworker and that was actually an old ironworking helmet of his and an ironworking wrench of his. Weirdly enough the cinematographer, Maddalena, lives in the same neighbourhood of Queens that I live in and I met her for the first time there. [laughs] We took an Uber back together and I’m just on the other side of the subway tracks from her so we’re literally one block away from each other. Rather than pay for 2 stops I was like, “I’ll just get off at her place and walk the block”. I had two bags full of different shoes - my feet didn’t even make it into the shot! - and all the different outfits, some of which were on hangers. I had the helmet on and I had the wrench. It was 1am, cars were driving by because even though it was a Wednesday it’s New York City, and a couple of people were walking by. I was so curious as to what they thought, who they talked to about that, and how they described what they saw when they saw me exhaustedly walking around with all that stuff on me.

It’d be funny if you see some post about it.

Maybe on the Nextdoor app! I’m curious if I made it onto there. “Look at what Kamala’s bussing in! Say hello to your new neighbours if that radical communist Kamala Harris wins!”

The most leftist president ever.

Nothing says leftist like Ronald Reagan staffers endorsing you.

That actually happened?

Yeah, they were proudly posting that, “We got endorsed by Reagan staffers!” and it’s like, “No, that’s not good”. You don’t need that. Who is this endorsement for?

You have some tour dates coming up in October including playing Fest for the first time.

First time at Fest!! That’s been a goal of this band since we started, since Jacob and I started writing songs together in late 2019 right before the pandemic. The idea was like, “Man, it would be fun to have anybody care about our stuff, that’d be great, but if we ever got to do something like playing Fest, that would be everything”. When we got that email we were like, “This year is gonna be great already!” We’re going to be playing every day until Fest begins and then we play on the Sunday. Lauren, my wife, is flying down which is going to be nice! It’s gonna be a mix of making sure to network and also getting to enjoy not being in whatever SUV rental that we’ll be jammed into for the 7 days prior. Being able to shower at my leisure will be nice. We’re excited!

We have a home show and then we play the DC-area suburbs and then we play Richmond, Virginia which we haven’t played before. Really everywhere we’re playing is our first time there. We’ve played in DC but not in the DC suburbs. We’ve had a bit of Maryland overlap. We haven’t played Richmond yet and Richmond is an awesome town from what I’ve heard as far as music goes, and it’s a college town. Every local that we’re playing with is super chill. Most of them we reached out to 4 months ago just to be like, “Hey, we’re trying to tour down. We’re reaching out to bands who we want to play with. It’d be great to play with you”. We have fun lineups we’re playing with in new cities all the way down. Then we get to play Fest! [laughs] We get to rest before our Fest set so it’s gonna be great.

Two weeks later we go on tour again. We’re gonna be touring through the Midwest in November. We’re going to be touring through basically all the swing states and back starting the weekend after the election, maybe they’ll still be counting votes. It’ll be really fun to get to see how much is still on fire and how many new fires are being set. I described it in another interview as being a little bit like an anthropological trip where we get to do some little jingles for a half hour each night. Doing that is kind of exhilarating. It’s gonna be exhausting and a lot of shows but at a certain point you have to bet on yourself.

Believing in yourself and believing that the catharsis matters and can resonate with other people - chase that. You only get so often to do that. I’m only getting older. Right now I know that I have it in me to give my all to this because I feel like I’m communicating more of an energy around social issues in this manner. It feels productive, especially getting to tour and meeting new people and telling them about Philippine solidarity stuff that they can be a part of and how that’s connected to domestic issues that we struggle with here. It makes me feel productive and it feels cathartic. That is part of why the project is so tied to live shows.

I’m becoming able to focus more on the band by assembling more of a flexible schedule for myself. I do want us to get “better” at social media but I’m not trying to make us chase the latest TikTok dance or whatever it is. I think the growth of this band is going to be one of continuously getting the message out. Nothing compares to how you feel. Anytime you see a band that says something that hits you and stays with you, that’s unquantifiable. The conversations I’ve gotten to have with people who either knew us coming in or didn’t know us and can very clearly hear what “No Problem” is about and talk about what that song means to them, is everything.

I feel good doing this so it’s not like blanket altruism or whatever. It’s something that I do get joy out of. I want to get the message to as many people as possible and have that connection with them, but focusing on having that connection with even one person is an unquantifiable feeling of shared humanity. That’s everything, that’s the whole thing to me. That’s why I try not to beat myself up too much about the numbers and the algorithms. If I say so myself, I think they definitely could be better or bigger but I really just believe in continuously getting the message out and that’s something that’s built to last more than making sure you’re getting the right 15-second clip.

Which part of I’ll Always Be This are you proudest of?

I’m not gonna give the cop-out answer - which is an accurate answer - which is the fact that we did it and I feel like it’s our most realized, fleshed-out songwriting to date and I feel the production is massive. On a personal level, I’m really proud of my vocal performance on it. I worked so hard on it. I actually had throat surgery 2 years ago so every time I record and every time I sing, I know it was so close to never happening again. At first, you have this period of having fun and doing it again but then it gets to the point of, “I want to make sure I’m doing this the best I can and I don’t want to just do shouty pop-punk vocals. I want to try to be a bit more melodic and play around with range and dynamic”. The melodies on this EP jump around quite a bit. There’s always the trepidation of hearing yourself. I say all this and there are some times where I hear myself like, “Wait a second, did this quarter of a consonant not get enunciated enough?” Ultimately I just felt good that I tried and I feel like it worked.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?

Word of mouth is everything for a band like us. There are friends of mine who are like, “Oh if you do this it’ll work! Try this!” Sometimes it’s valid but there really isn’t a blueprint for doing this type of band. When you’re intentionally doing an accessible style of music for very weighty, dense topics, it’s hard because you don’t want to be alienating and be like, “Look at how deep our music is!!” That’s wack. I don’t want to do anything that I feel doesn’t respect what these songs mean and what they’re about. If any of this resonates, telling a friend is everything. We are trying to play as much as we can.

I am making a point of trying to push us as much as I can and bending my life into ways that I can make more space to do so. There’s an intersectionality and solidarity that is all around us. The more this band gets out the more we get to not just push the message but enact the message. If there’s a group that does good work on a current event or topic or something, I’ll have a QR code at our table that links to that cause in the area. That way people can actually jump into it. We really appreciate everybody who listens to us and we have endless gratitude for anybody who helps us spread the word.