The cover art for Wearing Out The Refrain looks like swirling water and you have lots of water imagery in the lyrics, especially strong currents. What drew you to water imagery?

David: I feel like one of the lyrical themes that started popping up while we were writing the record was feeling stuck in a state of repetition, which is something that we tried to match with the lyrics and the music and song structure. That was reflected with some of the songs playing on repetition or every time it gets to a peak it starts over, which is something we talked about as being a theme we were returning to over the course of writing the record. I think when you talk about repeating cycles currents and tides are a pretty useful metaphor. When we started talking to the artist about how we wanted it to be represented visually, she picked up on that from looking at the lyrics and took it in that direction. There are songs about how those kinds of currents can pull you underwater and feel like you’re drowning. I think that’s pretty well represented in the artwork.

Katie: I remember during one of our early brainstorms about art one of the lines that I kept coming back to was from “Rats” where it says, “We’re treading cold water,” and how a lot of the album ends up being about this state of stasis or the feeling you’re expending a lot of energy but not really getting anywhere. I had this image of a hand sticking out of the water, which Emma pointed out later is kind of like that meme where someone is drowning and they have their hand sticking out and someone comes along and gives them a high five. [laughs] It’s not not related to the album. That was one of the things that we highlighted when we shared some ideas with our artist, Eloise Leigh, and she was playing with the swirl imagery. We knew we wanted to have a hand in the artwork because that’s always been present in our album covers. She introduced the idea of the living hand and the skeletal hand and looking at these cycles of life and death and things falling to ruin and stuff like that.

It’s funny that you bring up the high-five meme because that’s what I thought of too!

Katie: I wonder who’s high-fiving who. [laughs]

David: There’s some kind of deep metaphor to extrapolate out of the living and the dead high-fiving at the bottom of the whirlpool. I don’t know what it is, but we’ll get there.

How did keeping repetition in mind affect your songwriting process?

David: I think it did a little bit when we started to find these spinning of wheels, Sisyphean purgatorial feelings were being explored and we just tried to make the music feel that way as well. The best example is “Let the Rats Inherit the Earth”. It’s built around this 12/8 rhythm that sort of feels like a motor chugging along and every time it starts to open up into something, it snaps back into that motor feeling to reflect feeling like no matter how hard you’re trying to break out of cycles, you kind of end up right back at the beginning. We did a similar thing in the opening track, “A Drowning Confession”, where the instrumental is meant to feel pretty mechanical. Then there’s these loud, noisy guitar noise moments that I think reflect what it feels like in your brain when you feel like a hamster on a hamster wheel. Maybe you’re just kinda going through the motions, but there’s a lot of chaos that you’re hiding underneath and it snaps back to the hamster wheel every time.

Katie: I feel like “The Undertow” is another good example of this where there’s this central riff that basically goes throughout the entire song. There’s chord changes, there’s changes in the dynamics of the drums, the verse comes in and the chorus comes in, but you still have this repetitive riff going on and on. By the end of the song, it stutters and restarts and feels kind of off-kilter with the drums. That was definitely thinking into that musical repetition. I think the idea of repetition and cycles came out of some of the early songwriting for this record. It was a theme that we observed and were playing with.

As we continued writing songs for the album we were like, “Oh yeah, this manifests in all these other ways too”. It can be on a personal level with feeling like you’re falling into the same behavioural cycles over and over. “Sorry That I’m Not Better” is kind of about that, feeling like, “I’m trying to improve. I’m trying to be better and show up in my life but I keep falling back to the same old stuff”. It can also be seen with a bigger societal and political lens with “Hallelujah” being like, “History is repeating itself”. We’ve made all of this progress in terms of rights and protections and freedoms for trans people, for queer people, for different kinds of gender expression and identities, and yet there’s still this pushback from a conservative, religious right to tear down those protections and to limit those forms of expression and identity. It’s about seeing history double back on itself.

How can we make sure that the fight to protect queer and trans rights remains strong while they’re under attack?

Katie: I think continuing to stay on top of it and to call out all of these insidious ways that freedoms are being undermined is a huge part of it. I believe really strongly in not only looking at these kinds of struggles, hardships, and persecutions but also giving a lot of space for trans and queer joy and community. Just remembering the reason we fight for these things is because it brings us joy. It brings lots of people joy and it brings people together.

David: That song, “Hallelujah”, is a little bit ranty. Like Katie was saying, it’s about feeling disoriented about the way that history does not seem to be very linear and the pushes and pulls sometimes make you feel like it’s hard to get anywhere. The song culminates in shouting, “Shut it down” over and over again. My thought about that is you hear all this bullshit rationalization for bigotry, basically people trying to make a polite argument for dehumanizing other people and it’s so disingenuous. It’s never about whatever version of rationalizing people’s fear of the “other” whether that’s because they’re talking about religion or they’re talking about parental rights or whatever the thing is. It’s just bullshit and you have to shut down that kind of argument when it comes up and when people are trying to make themselves feel better about saying a horrible thing.

A lot of topics that you talk about on the album are heavier. How do you show up for yourself and show up for each other when things are rough?

Katie: I mean, part of it is trying to write bops. [laughs] The world is a really dark and brutal place. The world really grinds you down. The 4 of us have this deep, abiding love of pop music and have really tried to bring the fun and the catharsis of pop into our songwriting and into the ways we hang out. I think that’s a big part of it. Not to ignore all of the darkness in the world - still trying to be really upfront about the horror and the exhaustion and all of that - but also being like, “Well, maybe we can find something we can bop our heads around to”. [laughs]

David: People do often point out or ask about the disconnect between the energy that’s happening in the music versus the lyrical content. When you asked, “How do you show up for yourselves and each other?” I’m just like, “I have no idea, I don’t know”. When I think about the darkness intellectually, I feel quite pessimistic about it, and that is maybe what you hear in the lyrics, but like Katie was saying, on a visceral level we’re pretty dedicated to there being joy in life. The purpose of the music isn’t to bring up dark topics and get everybody down about it. Expressing that pessimistic or realistic - however, you want to look at it - view of the world where you’re not holding anything back but expressing it in a way where the energy of the music is upbeat and maybe makes you feel like there is a way through it even if you don’t know what the way is. Hopefully what we’re able to do with the songs we’re writing. [laughs]

Did you have a song on the album that was the most cathartic to write?

David: I feel like a lot of them are pretty cathartic. “Let The Rats Inherit The Earth” is hard to sing because we’re shouting the whole time. [laughs] Physically, when I think about playing that song I’m like, “That feels like you got a lot out of your system”. I imagine, even though I don’t sing it, that “Days Don’t Quit” might be something like that for Katie.

Katie: Yeah, it’s funny because my mind immediately jumped to those exact same songs. [laughs] “Rats” feels extremely cathartic physically to sing and it feels like you’re shouting alongside all of your friends, which also feels cathartic. You’re like, “Oh yeah, we’re all in this together!” - Oh that’s a line from High School Musical. [laughs] But you feel that sense of togetherness and community even though you’re like, “Wow, the earth’s going to shit, let’s just let society go down!”

“Days Don’t Quit” felt cathartic to me personally. Zillions of people really really struggled with the pandemic and I know I’m not alone in this, but I felt very much broken as a person by so much of what we went through as a society and what we went through interpersonally. In the years where we were thinking about and working on this album, I really wanted to be able to express that in some way and just kept hitting a wall with it. Even though it’s not an album about the pandemic - and “Days Don’t Quit” isn’t even solely about COVID life or whatever - it felt like writing that song and talking about the utter monotony of life, of feeling like time has been stolen from you, that progress has been stolen from you, and feeling lost and broken, felt personally very fulfilling to finally be able to put that into words and express that in a song. We’ve only performed it once live but it did feel really good at the end when the vocals get a lot more intense to really be able to let go of those high notes. [laughs]

David: If I’m not thinking about what feels the most, “I’ve shouted something out of my system” on the record, “A Lapse In The Emptiness” is a song that also feels like it lets a little something out, kinda in a softer way. Ultimately maybe a creeping sad feeling that life can be pointless. I’m not saying that’s my philosophy or anything, but it’s just the way it feels sometimes. I think that’s something that a lot of people carry with them. I feel like that song was able to express that feeling in a way that honours the tone of what it feels like. We got to play that live a couple times when we did our record release shows and I thought that felt pretty nice too.

In “A Lapse In The Emptiness” you incorporate some lyrics from “Me and My Shadow” by The Bananas. How did that come about? What does that song mean to you?

David: [laughs] I’m glad you caught that! Bananas are fucking great and an underappreciated band in punk and rock ‘n’ roll history. They’ve been a huge influence of mine for a long time and I know Katie’s a big fan too. We got to play with them! The one time we played on the West Coast, we got them to come down from Sacramento to do a show in the Bay Area. That was awesome!

Katie: Yeah, talk about cathartic! [laughs]

David: Pulling from the Bananas’ lyrics, if anything, was lazy songwriting. [laughs] Katie and I were working on a way to make the ending dynamic - shoutout to our producer Joe Reinhart who heard the first demo and was like, “You need something else in the ending”. We were working on it and ended up just singing that Bananas’ lyric in a similar melody to the Bananas’ song as a counter melody at the end. We were like, “That’s fine, we’ll swap out those lyrics with something better”. [laughs] There was nothing better. It’s an interpolation of the Bananas’ lyric.

The song is about the everydayness of life and how it can all culminate in feeling this sort of dark sense of pointlessness. “Buildings loom tall and dark”, that little couplet just says so much about what it feels like to live in a city. Eventually, I just texted Scott Banana, the drummer, and was like, “Hey, we’re gonna steal your lyrics. Is that ok?” and he was like, “Yeah, go for it!” Can you expect any other reaction from a member of the Bananas? The whole band is just like, “Yeah, whatever!” in a great way. [laughs] He kindly gave us permission to steal their lyrics.

Your video for “Outta My Head” features a lot of guests including Margaret Cho, Chris Gethard, Cheekface, Suzie True, and a bunch of cool bands. Everyone is wearing dog cones and you filmed parts of it at Lost Sock Roasters and Comet Ping Pong. How did the concept for the video come about?

David: Me and my friend Ben have a video production company called Baby Pony Food. Getting Margaret Cho involved was the first thing because we had heard on the In Defense of Ska podcast that she had shouted us out and we were like, “Oh my god, Margaret Cho knows our band! Why?” We were extremely flattered as fans of her comedy and acting. So we managed to reach out through the podcast, through her publicist, and found out she was down to get on board. From there we also reached out to Chris Gethard through a friend because he had included some of our music on one of his specials so we thought he might be interested. I was mutuals with Josh Gondelman so I was like, “I’ll shoot my shot and see if he wants to do it” because we’re fans of his.

Once we knew we had a few funny people on board, we were gonna try to make a funny video but we also knew we’d be getting the footage remotely, so we came up with the idea of having people shouting at each other through their phones. The whole song is about everybody shouting at each other all the time or that’s what the song is meant to evoke. It’s meant to evoke the feeling of looking for something easier to blame to make yourself feel better when things feel fucked up but when everybody’s doing that all the time, it kinda misses the more complicated reasons for things being fucked up. We were like, “We need something better than just everybody shouting at each other” and we were like, “Everybody shouting at each other wearing dog cones! That’ll be funny”. [laughs]

More meaningfully that is meant to represent everybody being damaged in their own way and we’re all walking around with these coping mechanisms. If the dog cone is to keep the dog from chewing its stitches out or whatever, it’s like we have scars and we have our coping mechanisms to keep ourselves from being more self-destructive but in certain ways our coping mechanisms are clashing with other people’s coping mechanisms. I doubt anybody really watches the video and thinks, “Oh, what a good commentary on a society full of damaged people”. [laughs] Which is fine, because like I said, we wanted it to be a fun, funny video but there is a little bit of that in there.

What was filming the video like?

Katie: I know that wearing a cone is not comfortable for a dog or cat or any animal, obviously, but I didn’t realize how absolutely wild it makes you feel until I was actually walking around the back of Comet Ping Pong trying to load gear while wearing one. [laughs] It completely limits your field of vision and you can’t hear anything. You can’t hear or see anything around your periphery and so you are moving around looking directly at everything you want to see and walking into things too. [laughs] There was a moment where we had to put on the cones and film a scene where we were playing and Emma started to put her bass on and then got her bass strap stuck on the cone. [laughs] It’s like, “Oh yeah, usually we don’t have a giant plastic thing around our heads”.

Just from an individual level, it was quite a different experience shooting the video while wearing a plastic dog cone. [laughs] Very sweaty too, they get sweaty fast. But it was really fun! I was around for the show scene and in Lost Sock. The show scene we filmed at 11 in the morning or something and I was like, “People are gonna be tired, the vibes are gonna be weird. Is it really going to feel like a show?” But bless everyone, they showed up at 11 am, put on these dog cones, and were super ready to party along in the crowd and sing along and jump around and do all sorts of wacky stuff. It was really fun filming that scene.

David: Yeah, shoutout to a couple of our friends who when we were like, “We need someone to chug a beer, sorry” they were like, “Yep!” Just downing it at 11 am. [laughs]

Katie: And spill the beer inside of the cone too! [laughs] Just champs.

David: Comet Ping Pong’s showroom has a skylight which you never notice when you’re at a show because it’s always dark. It was funny to be in that space when it was so bright.

You have a show coming up at Black Cat with Velocity Girl in November. What are you looking forward to about this show?

David: Velocity Girl are a great band!

Katie: Awesome band! I got into Velocity Girl after they had stopped playing. I think a friend had put them on a mix for me when I moved to DC and was like, “This is a classic DC band! They don’t play any longer but I feel like you’d really like them”. So I was like, “I’ll never get to see this band play live”. [laughs] But we got to play with them when they did a reunion show in September 2023. We played one of the Black Cat anniversary shows with Velocity Girl and that was really, really awesome. We got to chat with them and got to know them and they asked us to play another one of their shows. It’ll be really cool to see them play again.

David: Also as someone who is a fan but had never gotten to see them, I was just blown away when we played with them at the Black Cat anniversary party. What a great live band they are! They just rip on another level. Highly recommend folks check out Velocity Girl live. Also, the other band we’re playing with, Outer Worlds, put out an awesome record this year so it’s gonna be a cool show.

How would you describe the DIY scene in DC?

David: DC rocks! Obviously, DC has a really long and important history of shaping and influencing punk and hardcore and post-punk and DIY music in general, not just in DC but all over the world. I feel like in the DIY scene you can’t help but feel that in every kind of continual reinvention of what music is happening in the city and it’s no exception currently. There’s some really awesome bands that are making an impact locally and outside of the city. Ekko Astral are friends of ours. That band is amazing and they’re having an awesome impact. I could run down a list of bands to shout out but then I’d feel like I wouldn’t want to exclude anyone. [laughs] Our friends Bacchae put out an awesome record this year. They just broke up but they broke up after putting out their best record. People should come play DC or hang out in DC and see some shows because there’s always a lot of cool stuff happening.

Which part of Wearing Out the Refrain are you proudest of?

Katie: That’s a hard question!

David: I think that we were pretty painstakingly intentional about a lot of the production choices and I feel like it sounds really good. I think any time you make a record you’re battling between the abstract vision of what you want it to sound like and what it ends up sounding like. I really don’t feel like there was a lot of dissonance between the theoretical and the actual product. I think that we got everything sounding really great. I think the songs are strong and lean into what Bad Moves is best at doing. That’s a cool feeling.

Katie: I was reminded of when we were filming that dumb unboxing video and I was like, “David, what’s your favourite song off the album?” and you said you loved all of them equally. That’s how I feel like, “How could I choose just one thing to be most proud of??” I think a lot of the stuff David said does ring true, I feel that very much.

What does the future hold for Bad Moves?

David: We’re playing a show with Velocity Girl. We were so focussed on making the record and playing some record release shows that we’re kinda chilling now and we’re going to figure out what happens next next.