Considering the depths of his pandemic-era depression and crippling writer’s block, the National‘s Matt Berninger is somewhat incredulous at all the magic he and his bandmates managed to conjure in 2023. The Cincinnati-reared quintet released two albums (First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track) five months apart, sold out their first headlining show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden and welcomed the likes of Patti Smith and Pavement to their hometown Homecoming festival in September.

All of this took place against the backdrop of group member Aaron Dessner‘s increasingly high-profile writing and production work with Taylor Swift, who returned the favor by duetting with Berninger on the Frankenstein track “The Alcott.” Berninger also spoke openly about his mental health struggles in a recent sit-down conversation with David Letterman and returned to work on a semi-fictional TV show concept about his life in the industry, in which he hopes to star with his brother Tom.

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Berninger, 52, rang up SPIN to discuss the genesis of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, the pros and cons of performing in Cincinnati, collaborating with Swift and some of his favorite non-National music of the calendar year.

SPIN: Did the band really not have a plan to do two distinct albums this year? Was Laugh Track truly a happy accident?

Matt Berninger: When we were getting close on First Two Pages of Frankenstein, there were a whole lot of other things that I hadn’t finished or hadn’t done a whole lot to. We put out Frankenstein and hit the road, and we were tinkering with and trying to finish the rest in hotel rooms or at soundchecks. Laugh Track felt like a continuation of Frankenstein. We didn’t start fresh — we just finished the rest of those songs from that whole period. 

The reason we had so much built up was because I didn’t write anything for a long time during the middle of the pandemic. I mean, I guess I had been texting myself more than I thought, but the guys in the band had sent me so much music over that long period where I was not doing anything. Finally, the writing came back and I was writing and writing and writing fast. Once I was able to get back into it and finish songs and write again, I just didn’t want to stop, maybe for fear that it would go away again. Both these records were a very fertile stretch of feverish writing after two years of not being able to do anything at all. It was like, if we’re cooking, let’s not stop now. 

Let’s say there’s an imaginary National fan who was on a desert island in 2023. If you had to describe to them the differences and similarities between the albums, how would you?

They’re connected, but what’s different about the two is that on the second one, you can tell that it’s a band that’s not stuck in the studio. Well, not stuck. We were embracing that intimate headphones/studio/laboratory sort of chemistry. Throughout the two records, you hear what it sounds like when a band that’s had headphones on for two-and-a-half years starts to play live again, and how that changes things. On Laugh Track, you can hear the sound of a live band crackling back together, more than on the first record. Not only am I hearing my own taking apart the cadaver of my mind — a full autopsy of my mental state over that two- or three-year phase — but also the chemistry of the band rekindling and finding itself. For me, it feels like a double album. That’s why I wanted to have the same cover, because these records are different versions of the same idea in many ways, at least in terms of what I was writing about. When I see these on a shelf, I want them to be linked forever. 

Is there any cognitive dissonance in the experience of having Taylor Swift sing a song with the National that you ostensibly wrote about your wife Carin?

No. I’ve been writing characters from the beginning and long since I met my wife. She’s name-checked directly and indirectly on a lot of songs. Almost everything I’ve written in the 18, 19 years since we met has gone through her filter. She’s truly a brilliant editor. She listens to everything I do and not only gives me feedback but also sometimes gives me lines when I’m missing things. When Taylor came in, it was really easy for her to get into that character of a writer. The lyrics I had written talk about somebody writing in a corner with a golden notebook. Taylor wrote everything she sang. This is the only example, really, of a song of ours where someone other than my wife wrote a significant amount of the lyrics. That song is about the idea of having a partner who you love but is also a creative inspiration and collaborator. It didn’t feel weird, because there have been a lot of singers who have sang lyrics I’ve written about my wife or lyrics that I are things my wife would say [laughs]. I’m used to it now, and so is Carin. When we hear people like Phoebe Bridgers or Taylor or Lisa Hannigan or Sufjan Stevens sing songs we’ve written, it’s such a thrill.

If my memory serves, didn’t Taylor meet the band for the first time after a Prospect Park show back in 2019?

I’d met Taylor a couple of years before that. She invited me to a really small performance where she just played piano for a room of people for about 45 minutes. We’d all been communicating. We knew she was a fan and we’d heard that she knew all our songs. I think she met Aaron for the first time at that Prospect Park show, but I barely remember it because there’s always so much chaos when we play in New York. We also had the Brooklyn Children’s Choir with us that night, and people were out of their minds excited knowing she was there watching the show. I don’t think Aaron realized just how much of a cultural force that Taylor’s world is. It’s enlightening! Coming from the indie rock world, you don’t imagine that level of exposure, but I think Aaron’s handled it gracefully.

Is there already any new National music percolating?

We’re in a great phase. We’re trying to play songs we haven’t played in a long time, so we use our whole two-hour soundcheck. Usually, we’re always cooking up something new almost every day on tour. We’re just going to start collecting lots of music. I want to continue to always be writing, but I don’t think there’s anything on the immediate horizon right now. We’re exploring, jamming and having a lot of fun. After such a long period of not being in the same room, now we’re like, let’s fuck around. I suppose you could call that writing [laughs].

I imagine being able to host a festival like Homecoming in Cincinnati is a really special thing, but do people still come out to the woodwork? For example, is your seventh grade biology teacher just now discovering that the National is famous?

It’s really beautiful. I used to see shows at Bogart’s and other places, but Cincinnati was never a cornerstone for touring bands. I think the most satisfying thing is that I get to watch my aunts, uncles and little cousins and nephews rocking out to Pavement and Patti Smith, who probably wouldn’t come through Cincinnati otherwise. There’s also something a little bit embarrassing about it. Even the best shows, I walk off feeling a mixture of accomplishment and humiliation. It’s a bit of a silly thing to stand up and sing love songs you wrote to thousands of people. I’m not an extrovert so much in that sense. I was never a performer. I never did school plays or anything like that. If you’d ask my graduating class of all men at St. Xavier High School who would be most likely to be a stage performer, I would not have been anywhere near that list. People go, where did that guy come from? I do too. Even I’m not sure.

Have you come to know or understand things about David Letterman that might surprise the average viewer?

The interview we did shows a fairly different side to him. If you’d only ever watched his TV show, you’d be like, wow, there’s a lot more going on here. We performed on his show many times and met him there, but you keep it to a quick hello because everyone is in show mode. Dave later came to one our shows, and right away he wanted to get under the surface and talk about lyrics, and specifically about depression. He was so generous in talking about things in his own life. But this was right before we went onstage, and I remember thinking, ‘God, I would really like to talk to him more.’ When Laugh Track was finished, I said, if I’m going to do any interviews, I wonder if I could just talk to Dave? I called him and he couldn’t have been more delighted to do it. He came over and we talked for a couple of hours. I didn’t know if I wanted to film it, but I’m glad I did. We talked about so much stuff, like the difference between indie rock now and before and him growing up in Indianapolis and me just a couple hours away in Cincinnati.

We talked about depression, and it was so great to compare notes with someone who has the perspective based on where he is in his life. I was able to glean more from him than all the time I was talking to therapists, even though we were both just kind of telling each other what our therapist had said half the time [laughs]. I’m so grateful for him for being so genuine. And now, if something like that tough period I had during the pandemic comes back again, he’s on the list of people I can call to talk. There are times when grabbing your bootstraps and yanking on them doesn’t do anything, you know? What was important about that conversation is us both acknowledging that sometimes it gets worse than you realize, and sometimes you need help to get out of it.

Speaking of TV, is it true that your TV show concept has come back to life? I remember you filming scenes for it several years ago backstage at the Eaux Claires festival.

Oh my gosh. You were there for that [laughs]? One of the things that triggered my depression was having to put that TV show down and having to realize that maybe it wasn’t going to happen. When some people reached out to us about it again, I was like, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t? But I can’t resist. Even Dave was like, you’re in the National. Why would you want to make a TV show? From his perspective, getting out of TV was in some ways really healthy for him. And that’s from someone who has produced TV shows like Everybody Loves Raymond. I said, ‘I think I just want to see my brother Tom on TV [laughs].’ That’s the biggest reason. I also don’t think there have been very many good shows about music. I’m calling it Das Apes, which is a wink at The Monkees, which I was in love with as a kid. So, it is alive. I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull it off, but I sure hope so.

I was going to say, it’s not enough for Mistaken for Strangers to be Tom’s only star vehicle.

Anybody who has seen that knows he’s 100% on the surface all the time. Guileless is the most common word used to describe him. He’s a complicated, wonderful person. This would be a totally scripted show. It’s not going to be a fake doc or have that wink-at-the-camera vibe at all. It’s not going to be written just by me, by any means. I’ve been tapping all my people who have had all kinds of different experiences, and not just in the music industry. Sometimes your longstanding projects that go nowhere can still be the most satisfying.

Has any music this year felt really important or satisfying to you?

I’m not saying this just because Sufjan’s a pal, but Javelin is a really powerful, beautiful, healing record. When Trump won, [Stevens’ 2015 album] Carrie & Lowell was the only thing I could listen to. This record has that same power for me. The Billy Woods/Kenny Segal record is incredible. I love all the food references — the skate wing with butter and capers. Then he makes a joke about $400 Japanese jeans from Blue & Cream, of which I own a pair [laughs]. The writing is unbelievable. I’m obviously a huge boygenius fan. What can you say? All three of those women are in constant rotation in my car and house. It’s inspiring on all kinds of levels.

This loose but connected group of people, like the National, Taylor, Phoebe and Jack Antonoff, really seem to have reached a new peak in terms of collaboration and creativity.

I agree. We’ve always enjoyed bringing other people into the studio with us. Even with the TV show, the Walkmen guys have been a really big part of that. It feels like this spiderweb of artists who are fans of each other and love to pick up the phone and ask, hey, want to do this? Rosanne Cash is somebody I never expected to have a relationship with. I reached out to her way before the pandemic. When I was in my deepest depression, I talked to her not just about music but also about how to be a parent and a son. Then you throw David Letterman into that mix and sometimes I don’t know how I got so lucky to be able to connect with all these brilliant artists and thinkers.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Sitting on the back patio of Stories Books & Cafe in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, Destroy Boys make it very clear that they never want to be called “female-fronted” ever again. “It’s just so reductive,” Alexia Roditis says after their bagel sandwich fell apart while attempting to cut it. “That’s not even a category.”

Guitarist Violet Mayugba is quick to point out over avocado toast that not only does it say nothing about a band’s music, but Roditis is nonbinary, so the term is not accurate.

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But even compared to their male-fronted counterparts, the Sacramento natives are beyond ready to turn the mainstream on to their complex blend of punk, garage rock and alternative. After playing a handful of smaller festivals and major tours in recent years, Destroy Boys reached new heights this year. They were a token punk band at Coachella, headlined multiple tours, hit a variety of European and American festivals, spent the summer supporting Blink-182 and Turnstile, and closed 2023 with Pierce the Veil and L.S. Dunes.

Despite only releasing a pair of songs (April’s “Beg for the Torture” and July’s “Shadow [I’m Breaking Down]”) this year ahead of an upcoming album, the group increased their cultural footprint in tremendous ways.

Dressed all in black and hiding from the L.A. sunlight on a bustling Saturday afternoon, Roditis and Mayugba chatted with SPIN about the growth of the bilingual band and the year that was.

SPIN: What was it like to play huge shows for most of the year?

Violet Mayugba: We got the Blink offer only three months beforehand, so as the schedule filled up, it was really cool. I’ve always wanted to spend my life on the road, but I realized that three straight months of international touring can break your body and spirit. I was injured badly on our second European run, and we’re still not sure if it’s permanent damage. But I also feel like we learned so much so fast, and I feel like we became an immensely better band because of it. A year isn’t that long in the span of our career, because we intend to do this until we die, like Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards]. I want to be hooked up to an IV onstage or a heart monitor.

Alexia Roditis: I don’t know if I want that, but I have the same sentiment. We’re always trying to make every show the best show, and we got to have a lot of different experiences. Even just learning how festivals and big shows work was super impactful. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better as a performer because being on tour is so intensive, and I’ve recently been honing in on making improvements at every show.

Mayugba: It was also really fun. I don’t want to understate how incredible it is to tour with Blink-182 and fucking Turnstile. We learned a lot from just watching and talking to them, as well as Pierce the Veil and L.S. Dunes. We’re a very curious and ambitious band, so it’s awesome to tour with and consult with these bands who have been doing this for so long. We’d strive to blow them out of the water and we would hold ourselves to that standard, except they have a floating ambulance and pyro and [drummer] Travis [Barker] goes up in the air.

Roditis: All of our stuff stays on the stage… for now. I’m working on a zipline. Maybe I’ll wear some wings. It’d be fire. But also, talking to these huge bands and learning that they still get insecure was big for me.

You had several firsts this year. Were there any that stood out to you?

Mayugba: We learned about ‘artist liaisons’ at Coachella, and it’s very new to us that there’s someone to help us with everything. We played our first arena tour and our first stadium shows. First time in Europe proper — not just the U.K. It was the first time touring on a bus, which was incredible. We started touring in my car up and down the I-5, and then we would rent vans before owning a van. We love touring, but anyone who’s toured knows how hard it is to sleep in a van. Getting off that flight and seeing the bus was insane.

Roditis: It was also the first time seeing [bassist] David [Orozco] fully naked. The Blink tour had locker room showers, and we would debrief the show in the shower, which was weirdly meditative and a very intimate thing among friends.

How did the European festivals compare with Coachella and the other American ones?

Roditis: I love being outside of America. The catering was generally always pretty fucking delicious and the crowds are very receptive. We played these random-ass festivals where we were some of the only Americans on the bill, and we thought no one in Germany would come see our set, but then we would have a bunch of people. It’s cool to see how rock translates and what the European crowd likes to do differently. Here, it’s all circle pits and fucking mosh pits, and, even though we did some of that in Europe, it’d be more like telling people to jump or trying to speak the German I learned for the show. People in Europe always seem like they’re just trying to have a good time. They have healthcare and shit, so there’s a layer of worry that’s removed compared to America.

Mayugba: When we were in Europe, I felt like I could relax a lot of the time. I’m a bit of a foodie though, and I did not like the food in the U.K. except the Indian food. It’s like, you guys have this whole spice trade situation and you never figured out how to put black pepper in these potatoes.

How do you think fans responded to your two new singles this year?

Mayugba: As long as it’s still Alexia’s voice and my guitar with our songwriting, I feel like fans connect with it. I have moments where I feel pressure to make another ‘[I Threw Glass at My Friend’s Eyes and Now I’m on] Probation’ or ‘Muzzle,’ because I want this to have immense longevity, and those songs had real moments. But then I’ll listen to ‘Shadow’ or lesser-known songs like ‘Soundproof’ and I love it. What’s really lucky about our fan base is that if we love something, they tend to like it and have respect for it.

Roditis: People ask us to play deep cuts all the time. We write about real shit, and that doesn’t change. Our songs are viciously honest, and people fuck with that. But we’ve grown a lot, and that’s reflected in the music. The evolution in our music is not something I would want to shy away from, because I think people can grow with it. It’s like Harry Potter — except fuck J. K. Rowling for being transphobic. With Harry Potter, you grew up with the characters and got to see yourself grow through them. It’s a beautiful relationship, and I feel like we’re the trans Harry Potter — as if Harry Potter isn’t FTM trans already.

How has it felt to see Destroy Boys grow both musically and in terms of popularity?

Mayugba: That growth feels more tangible with every year that passes. Even doing things like this interview, 17-year-old me would have never thought about that being real. Touring with Blink-182 is something we would say to make each other laugh as a joke, because who the fuck would think we’d do that? 

Roditis: I feel like it’s forced me to reconcile more with myself, because I don’t want to die from an overdose or something. Not to be grim, but I don’t want to kill myself and I could see how that spiral happens as everything gets bigger. It’s such high highs and low lows, like getting off a tour after feeding off that energy every single night and then going home to absolutely nothing. It can drive a person insane. I think that’s even reflected in the lyrics as I’ve tried to deviate away from writing about specific situations in my life and discuss some bigger topics.

Mayugba: They’re a great storyteller. They’re a fantastic lyricist and my favorite rock singer.

Roditis: [rolls eyes] We bicker like a married couple, but the band’s growth is also making us good at communicating. In the same way that I don’t want to kill myself, I don’t want the band to break up because we can’t have a conversation. We’ve been doing this from the age of 15 to 24, so we’re super different people than when we started. We were kids, but now we’re adults with our own thriving lives and different interests and personalities. Most bands would’ve broken up by now.

Some of that growth has taken you outside of traditional ‘punk’ as well. Has there been an emphasis on not being put in a box?

Mayugba: We’ve been fighting against the box since the day we started playing. In our first interview ever, we said, don’t call us ‘riot grrrl’ just because we play some punk music. That’s not really what the songs are about, so it feels like being mislabeled. And then the first headline was, ‘Feminist Punk Band from Sacramento,’ and we were like, half of this music isn’t even punk!

Roditis: People feel uncomfortable or confused when they see people who look like us doing what we do, and the only time they’ve seen a person who looks like us is Kathleen Hanna. But we sound more like Green Day than we do Bikini Kill. By the way, how insulting to all the other women that we all get compared to Bikini Kill. Nothing against Bikini Kill, and we’re so grateful for what they did in punk for women, but it’s so reductive. Why doesn’t anyone talk about fucking Joan Jett or the Runaways? These idiots can’t even compare us to a different female punk band. 

Mayugba: When you read an article about an amazing band like Title Fight, you never read the term ‘male-fronted.’ You just see all these adjectives like ‘shoegaze’ and ‘experimental.’ If you go on that same website and pull up an article about Destroy Boys, it’s, ‘they’re these crazy girls who don’t shave their legs. They’re so kooky and they’re feminists who don’t care what you think.’ First of all, I have severe anxiety and care deeply about what you think. But also, I feel like bands that look like us deserve to be talked about as a reflection of what we’re doing musically. We deserve to have our music described in the same light that a band of white dudes would get.

Roditis: We put the same amount of time and work into our songs, if not more because of sexism. If we write a song and then one of us is like, yhat sounds like so-and-so, we’ll rewrite it. Part of that is because we want to carve out our own space, but there’s also a patriarchal thing where we know it has to be fucking good or no one will care. 

Mayugba: We’re held to a significantly higher standard musically. It’s fucking intense to experience the level of success we have and not be jaded. The quality of our music is not about who we are. Our identities are reflected in the songs, because that’s our perspectives — same as any other musician — but that’s not the headline. 

Roditis: Everyone has completely different experiences about patriarchy and racism and all these things. The way that me and Violet see it is different, even though people see us as ‘two punk girls…’

Mayugba: Alexia’s not even a girl, which is something we’re still trying to handle. Sorry for outing you.

Roditis: I’m shy about it, but I’ve also outed myself a lot and no one seems to give a fuck. I had to cut my hair to get any legitimacy. But yeah, Violet always talks about wanting to eradicate the term ‘female-fronted,’ because that doesn’t give any description of what the band sounds like. I want to be the first band that looks like us to headline mainstream festivals. 

Mayugba: My goal is either we incorporate ‘male-fronted’ for 99% of articles that come out about dude bands or ‘female-fronted’ has to go away.

Roditis: Look, it was incredibly important to carve out a women’s space in punk because we wouldn’t be having this conversation without that. But now we’re at the point where we need to accept it into the mainstream as commonplace. It already is in some genres, but it’s a little behind in rock music. Also, when we talk about ‘feminist punk this’ and ‘feminist that,’ I feel like I’m not allowed to be a freak. Do I have to represent women everywhere even though I’m not one?

What’s on deck for Destroy Boys in 2024?

Mayugba: Festivals, tours, crazy hometown shit, really cool collaborations with other people and whatever the fuck else. Our biggest and most ambitious record to date with some crazy features.

Roditis: We’ll do even more mutual aid and more political work with the band to get real shit done. We’ll make funny jokes and be your imperfect role models. We’ll also get even sexier. New hair, maybe? 

Mayugba: That’ll be the headline right there: ‘Destroy Boys To Change Their Hair, But Not the Hair on Their Legs.’

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

When Hotline TNT principal Will Anderson logged onto Zoom with SPIN earlier this month to discuss his band’s 2023 album Cartwheel, he’d woken up in chilly St. Louis but was en route to Louisville, Ky., for their final show of the year. And what a breakthrough it has been: a record deal with Jack White’s Third Man label, praise from nearly every corner of the alt-rock cognoscenti, tours with DIY friends (Sheer Mag) and scene elder statesmen (Quicksand) alike and a firm place alongside Alex G, Wednesday and They Are Gutting a Body of Water amid the umpteenth revival of shoegaze.

While Cartwheel certainly possesses the layered, distorted guitar sound so often associated with the genre popularized in the ’90s by My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Lush, it also evinces the vaguely emo, novice making noise in the bedroom-vibes of Anderson’s Minneapolis-adjacent upbringing. Anderson is the first to admit that while his teenage introduction to shoegaze had a formative impact on him, he was just as content to pore through his monthly Guitar World subscription and teach himself whatever songs happened to be transcribed in that issue. “As much as I love My Bloody Valentine, they’re not really a fun band to try and learn the songs,” he says with a laugh.

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Before forming Hotline TNT in 2018, Anderson cut his teeth in the not-dissimilar-sounding Weed, which released three albums between 2011 and 2017. With Cartwheel, he says he’s finally been able to translate the varied sounds in his brain into actual music — a process greatly aided by separate sessions with producers Ian Teeple and Aron Kobayashi Rich (Momma’s Household Name). Hotline has also reached fans well outside the indie rock world thanks to Anderson’s NBA zine Association Update and Twitch talk show, which have further broken down the walls between performer and fan.

Below, Anderson filled us in on the response to Cartwheel, his initial reservations about Third Man and the merits of individual Mario Kart characters.

SPIN: The word ‘shoegaze’ has probably come up in every piece about Hotline TNT, so I have to ask: what is your personal journey with this music? Do you feel it’s even a relevant description of what you’re making?

Will Anderson: I think ‘shoegaze’ is now kind of similar to what the word ‘indie’ became like 10, 20 years ago. It doesn’t describe a genre anymore. It’s more of a large umbrella for guitar-based music, or music with distorted guitars. Sometimes they’re kind of bendy or going in and out of tune a little bit. Sometimes the vocals have a little more reverb, but that doesn’t describe Hotline necessarily. I think lo-fi is a term that’s also losing its meaning, but it’s fine. It’s just the way language works and trends work. To go back to the beginning, I had a pretty typical journey myself of hearing Loveless by My Bloody Valentine when I was in 10th grade. It had a pretty big effect on me, as it did with many other people. A couple of years after that, I started making my own music and that was one of the big influences on it.

Whatever they call it, it’s very heartening to me to see younger people becoming interested in guitar-based music. I’m thinking of the resurgence of a band like Slowdive, which broke up in 1995 but is now bigger than ever.

I can’t not mention TikTok in this conversation. A lot of bands are having weird moments like Slowdive and Drop Nineteens, because it’s moody, cool, lo-fi-produced guitar music that fits this aesthetic of these clips that go viral. It’s no different than a show like The O.C. having a song where everyone’s like, ‘Oh, this is a really cool show. And what’s this music playing? I want to hear more of it.’ I think it’s a similar phenomenon. We’ve all seen it happen with super random bands. I don’t want to call them random, but, unexpected for that younger age group. The other thing I would just say is: Alex G. I think Alex G started something as far as a resurgence in guitar music. It wasn’t immediate. Alex has been putting out records for years, but it was a slow build and it’s still at fever pitch, in my opinion. He spearheaded a whole scene of people who were rocking with lo-fi and guitar music and home recording and all that. I could talk for hours about it.

With Cartwheel out in the world, how are you feeling about this body of work with the benefit of a month’s worth of perspective? 

The response to this record has been unlike anything I’ve ever put out. It would be disingenuous for me to say, ‘Oh, yeah, moving on to the next record.’ Big moments, or moments where you should take stock and appreciate how far things have come, are often wasted. People don’t do that enough, I don’t think. I feel lucky that I have people around me who have encouraged me to realize that this is really cool. This is not normal.

What was your process like in working with two different producers?

Aron was a wizard. I love the way the Momma album turned out and I definitely wanted his fingerprints on it because of that. The difference between the two is that with Ian, we spent a little more time in the actual songwriting stage. Whereas with Aron, we kind of already had the songs written. His work was more engineering and not as much ‘let’s change the song,’ or, ‘What do you think about adding this part?’ That was more something Ian did, but Aron was like, ‘Let’s just make this fucking huge and get more guitars on here.’ We dug into more of the engineering to get some of those Pumpkins-y tones and synth parts dialed in.

As the music was coming together, what was inspiring you to emote or be creative, lyrically and thematically?

It’s pretty much always relationships, and I don’t necessarily mean romantic all the time. There’s a lot of songs about my parents, my family, my bandmates — former and current — and tons of romance songs throughout my whole body of work. Sometimes I wonder if I should try to write more songs about stuff outside of those kind of petty relationships. There’s no shortage of topics I could wax on, but I leave that political stuff to my day-to-day interactions with people. It just doesn’t feel authentic to bring it into my songwriting, I guess. I honestly don’t think about what I’m writing that much. It just kind of comes out naturally. Maybe that’s selfish. It hasn’t felt appropriate to write, like, a protest song yet. 

Was there a piece of gear or a particular guitar that is emblematic of this record? Something that you found yourself using a lot?

I’m sorry to disappoint you and say no. This is a very anti-gear band. [The 2021 album] Nineteen in Love was recorded with no guitar amps and no physical drums. It’s all GarageBand. This album was recorded with Aron and Ian, so they had some more equipment that I didn’t really use. But I think thanks to Ian, we used a lot of 12-string guitars on this album. I think that took it to a place that I want to go even further for the next album, because it hits more of the Teenage Fanclub/jangly side of my influences, but also works in a shoegaze setting, if you want to call it that.

Were any of these tunes workshopped on the road before they appeared on the album?

Yep, definitely. ‘Protocol,’ for sure. We played that one for a long time before I started recording it. To me, ‘Protocol’ is kind of the title track of the album — it’s kind of like the statement song. It’s the closest to what I’ve been trying to do with this band all along, ‘History Channel’ we played for almost a year, but that was also out on a tape version. A lot of songs were written on the spot in the studio. ‘Stump’ was written in one day on the last day of recording with Ian.

Have you had any interactions with Mr. White himself?

Zero interaction. I’ve not been on one email or one phone call. I haven’t gotten a text. Nothing from Jack at all, which is fine. All of us in the band grew up huge White Stripes fans, but that had nothing to do with this relationship.

What were some of the things that drew you to that world, if not him?

Our main A&R person’s name is Camille Augarde. Camille discovered us because we were on tour with another Third Man band in the U.K. called Island of Love. They are my friends, but they’re, like, teenagers. That was their first new band that I was aware of that I thought was cool. I started to pay attention a little bit because I knew Third Man is a big deal operation, but I wasn’t going to take it too seriously just yet. Camille hit me up after the tour. We kept talking, and then we started getting interest from other labels. After we got a booking agent, things just kind of naturally started heating up a little bit. We did the tour with Snail Mail. Other labels hit me up, most of whom I had even less interest in. Camille wrote me and said, ‘Do you have any new demos for the next record?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, yeah, I do.’ I sent her a handful of demos and she was like, ‘I love these. Can we talk about this more?’ Then I heard that Sheer Mag was signing with Third Man, and that changed everything for me. 

I’m friends with them. They told every label to go fuck themselves and eat shit. It wasn’t even no — it was like, ‘Fuck you,’ and ‘No.’ Sheer Mag was kind of a template for me as far as how I operate in the music industry. I loved how they were self-releasing everything and self-booking. I loved how they were the most punk band you could think of, but they didn’t sound like punk music.

Well, Nirvana probably wouldn’t have signed to Geffen without Sonic Youth, so this kind of thing is part of the deal.

Exactly. I love Sheer Mag and I wanted to be associated with them. I mean, we were already playing shows together, so it wasn’t a huge leap. Eventually, we retained a lawyer who was going over every contract we got. He looked at every label offer and told us, Third Man’s is easily the best deal. Camille and I were both kind of taking a chance on each other. We didn’t know if Hotline was going to translate to a bigger audience, and I didn’t know if people were going to take a record from Jack White’s label as anything serious beyond like, this is Jack White’s label, you know? We’re both pretty happy with the results, but it was a risk.

Hotline just played some shows with Quicksand. True or false: Walter Schreifels is aging in reverse.

He looks great and he’s totally in shape. I didn’t know him before this tour, and I was only tangentially familiar with Quicksand’s work. Those guys are bringing it every night and they sound great. That was a fun tour. The rooms were full. It was awesome.

You’ve talked in interviews about how playing Mario Kart with friends on Twitch was one of the things that got you through the pandemic. Can you settle the age-old debate: Yoshi for quickness and speed, or Wario for pure brute force?

Well, Wario has more than brute force, I would say. He’s got a chaotic element to him, which I love. My old bandmate in my old band Weed, Kevin, played Yoshi in every single game, so I feel like I kind of have to go Wario. Plus, his name starts with W, so I like him for that reason.

What’s on tap for next year? I presume it’s going to be lots of touring, and maybe there’s even new music percolating already?

I’ve got six songs in the works for the new record. I’m hoping to record whenever there’s downtime, but there’s a lot of touring. Tours I could have never imagined on Nov. 2, the day before the album came out, are now in the mix. I won’t tell you too much more than that, but we’re doing a tour with Wednesday in January and February. That’s the first thing up.

It sounds like there are some other things you can’t announce yet but are very excited about.

Yes (big smile).

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The Christmas season, with its outsized themes of transformative cheer and trippy imagery of bearded dudes flying with reindeers through snowy skies, fittingly looms large in Flaming Lips lore. The Oklahoma psych-rock kings have used the holiday as inspiration for numerous songs (“Christmas at the Zoo”), an instrumental album (Atlas Eets Christmas, recorded under the alias Imagene Peise), and an entire goddamn feature film (Christmas on Mars).

So it’s only natural that Wayne Coyne, the band’s eternally youthful frontman and ringleader, has his digs looking pretty festive. “We almost got the place decorated, as you can see,” he says over Zoom from his living room in Oklahoma City, battling the background din of his “two crazy little kids” running around. Multiple decorated trees are visible, including one small, silver one.

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“Good times!” he cackles, seemingly with a sense of relief. Coyne, who co-founded The Flaming Lips in 1983, has earned the right to take a deep breath and review another whirlwind year. The most immediate subject: finally properly touring behind their 2020 LP, American Head.

“We started playing shows last November, so it’s felt like a year of ‘Is this all going to keep happening?'” he says. “At the end of last April, beginning of May, we had to cancel some shows because I caught COVID. As it turned out, a couple of the other guys had it as well. Come the end of February 2023, we will have finally made up all those shows we missed. So in a way, that will end the chapter of the American Head tour that could never get started and then could never finish.”

It feels like The Flaming Lips are entering some kind of new era — one, notably, without co-founding bassist Michael Ivins, who quietly left the band in 2021. (Coyne says the split was best for everyone: “There was no drama. There was no one moment.”) In another chapter-closing move, the band has also emptied the vaults for their beloved 2002 LP, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, issuing a massive box set with B-sides, demos, and live cuts.

And it’s crucial to note the band’s lack of studio output since American Head: Outside of a few side projects and detours — backing then-14-year-old fan Nell Smith on an album of Nick Cave covers, releasing tracks for a birdsong compilation and a Spongebob movie — they’ve been unusually, yet intentionally, more focused.

“By the time we finished American Head, [multi-instrumentalist] Steven [Drozd] and I sort of decided, ‘Let’s not make too many fast records in a row,'” Coyne says. “If I go back to even 2014, we did Flaming Lips records, these offshoot records like the Sgt. Pepper’s [tribute album, 2014’s With a Little Help From My Fwends], the Miley Cyrus records. Those are exhilarating at the time. I think we got that out of our system. Steven and I wanted to be in the thick of it, where we could just be involved in a lot of music and be consumed by it. That’s the only way you can learn and evolve — otherwise, you’re never able to know what you’re doing. We made a lot of music, and a lot of it we loved, and a lot of it was in a hurry, and a lot of it was like, “What the fuck were we thinking?”

In early December, Coyne took a break from his pre-Christmas break to review the Year in Lips. Along the way, we talked about the now-famous space bubble shows, his revealing “Do You Realize??” four-track demo, the fiber-optic Jesus that Jack White gave him, Thom Yorke‘s band The Smile, and when we might hear some new music.

SPIN: It’s been an interesting stretch of touring: space bubbles, cancellations, playing in a cave near Chattanooga. How do you feel about it all? 

Wayne Coyne: Every show has been a complete blowout, with people just losing their minds. I think our shows have gotten better and better. There’s a big venue in [Oklahoma City, The Criterion] where we did the space bubble concerts. We were there for almost that whole year of COVID: setting up and rehearsing our shows and the front-of-house mixes and video mixes. We didn’t realize how much work we were able to catch up on. Always being on tour is a motherfucker because you’re always on the go and always fixing equipment. The way we do stuff, a lot of times our equipment is in a truck somewhere and we’re gonna be getting there the day before. We’re lucky if it all works. Whereas this was day after day, week after week of just working on sounds and little nuances and all the boring stuff that we’d just never had a second to fuck with. It just made our shows more dynamic, more precise — with more that people can get involved in.

I’m obsessed with this Yoshimi reissue. It’s disarming to hear you strumming through a raw early take of “Do You Realize??,” without the embellished chords and harmonies that Steven brought later on. Comparing it to the final product, it highlights the balance you two achieve: you with a more big-picture vision, Steven with a more nuanced musical vision.

I have to say, for as beautiful as the song ends up being now, and meaning what it means, you couldn’t really have found a clunkier demo to show everybody. Some of the demos of our songs are a lot better. [Laughs.] But it just goes to show you that this essence, this expression — whatever it is, it’s very difficult to capture. Most songwriters will talk about that: the magic that’s flowing through you or whatever. If you get that, it doesn’t mean the work is over. But the way that we were working on the Yoshimi record, [producer] Dave Fridmann was firing on all cylinders and so was Steven, and we were really moving. Things were sounding great. We really had a confidence that we could make it work.

You don’t need that much. With “Do You Realize??,” I could tell Steven and Dave Fridmann were excited. That kind of gives you confidence to go for it and try things. I’m hesitant to make it seem like it’s all about the song and lyrics and stuff like that. I love every millisecond of recording and making our music, but especially with the things I’m doing, it’s like, “Let’s get on with the way the cowbell is going to sound.” [Laughs.] But I understand that [essence] is what Steven was hearing, what Dave Fridmann was hearing, what the audience is hearing — the way this message is getting across. If the song hadn’t been received as well as it has been, I probably wouldn’t be as brave with those demos as I am now. I can say, “See how it started? Isn’t it great now?”

“Assassination of the Sun” might be one of the most beautiful Flaming Lips songs. It’s still wild to me that you guys ended up cutting it from Yoshimi. When you went back through the archives, did you find anything that surprised you or made you think of the album in a new way?

It usually takes us about five years to be like “Fuck, we had no idea what we were doing.” It just shows you that when it works right, it’s a mystery as well. In our defense, I think by the end of the Yoshimi [sessions], the stuff that even came out after Yoshimi, like the song you’re talking about, we’d been working at Dave Fridmann’s studio since 1997 — that would have been Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin, and Yoshimi. It comes pretty quickly. It was a pretty intense five years or whatever. And I think by the end of doing the Yoshimi record, we were just sick of songs. We’d gotten to where we had some really good ones, although they weren’t giving us the thrill anymore. That would have been one of them — half of us were like, “That’s such a great song.” And the other half were like, “I know, but I’m sick of [songs]. [Laughs.] It’s pathetic.

I make it a promise to the gods of music. “If you give me a good song, I’ll work until my death to make that work.” But you don’t always know what you’re gonna do with them and how much time you’ll have. There are a lot of factors. But there are songs on our records where you’re like “You put that on there but didn’t put that on there?” But you also just don’t take it all that seriously. We like having everybody chime in and say “Here’s what I think,” but there are times when we don’t want to be influenced by what everybody thinks. We just want to bravely say “This is what we want to do.” In hindsight, I definitely regret it. But in the moment, if we haven’t done what we want to do, we would have regretted it. It’s like we say in our songs all the time: “You’re fucked if you do; you’re fucked if you don’t.” You’ve gotta go with the thing you really love right now. And you hope you get lucky.

This reissue made me remember how much I love “Thank You Jack White.”

Me too! Me too! [Laughs.]

It’s so funny and casually catchy and very Flaming Lips in how absurd of a scenario it documents. Of course Jack White gave you a fiber-optic Jesus. Do you still have it? Has any other musician given you a gift that’s managed to top it?

I probably have it. I’m in a giant house, and people have moved in upstairs, and we would have moved storage around. The fiber-optic Jesus came back [with me] from that tour — we were on tour with Beck in 2002, so this was a long time ago. I plugged it in, and it was on the mantle in my living room, and it stopped working after about a year. Then I looked, and there was a sticker on the bottom that said, “Do not leave turned on for more than eight hours at a time,” and I’d literally plugged it in and left it turned on for more than a year. [Laughs.] We’d come up with the song, and after I had that song and people heard it, people would give me a lot of things like the fiber-optic Jesus. It’s like your aunt who knows you like elephants, so she’ll give you an elephant painting for the rest of your life.

Just a constant barrage of Jesuses.

[Laughs.] Yeah! So I would get a lot of stuff like that. I’m sure I have it somewhere because I have everything I’ve ever had. I’m not a hoarder. I always say, “Hey, it’s cool stuff. I just don’t like throwing things away.” We have a song we sing when we have a dilemma like that [sings in a very sweet, childlike tone]: “Maybe this is trash / Maybe this is trash.” We had to throw away a big screen TV the other day because it had a glitch in it. It was perfectly expensive and good, but we got a new one. TVs are like $400 now — you get a TV the size of your fucking garage. The fiber-optic Jesus, I’m sure I would have put it somewhere, like “I’ve gotta keep this because we’re gonna be talking about this 20 years from now.” The way I keep things, I have no fucking idea where it is. I’m sure I’ll stumble upon it some time.

It’s year-end list season, so I had to ask about what you’ve been listening to. My favorite album this year is the debut from The Smile, the new band with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Did you check that out?

Yeah, yeah! I don’t know all of it. I heard the first two or three things they put out in advance of it and stuff. If you’d told me it was Radiohead, I would have said, “Of course it is.” It doesn’t sound like it’s off on a different tangent from Radiohead or Atoms for Peace or the Thom solo stuff. It’s of the same shade. I love that they’re called — it’s The Smile, right?

Yes.

Atoms for Peace — all those fucking great names. Of all the names, I’ve always thought Radiohead is one of the worst names ever. It ranks up there with The Beatles and The Flaming Lips. [Laughs.] I feel like Thom and Johnny were like, “Let’s do it again. Let’s call our band The Smile.” I love it. I don’t get to play it enough because we have a couple little kids. Eventually I will. I still want to see them — they’re on tour right now. They’re always top-notch. It’s always amazing.

Any other interesting music you’ve discovered this year?

I wouldn’t even remember what came out this year. If I’m lucky, I’ll get maybe two hours [for an] Alexa or Google or Spotify run where I’ll say something like “Alexa, play Animal Collective,” and it’ll play some things you’re familiar with and then go off on a tangent. I have a phone but don’t have a computer right there with me. It could be Animal Collective or a group that sounds like them that’s on the same trip. I’ve heard so many things where I wish I had some electronic assistant that said “This is what that was.” The same would be true to listening to Portishead or something. You listen to 45 minutes of Portishead and suddenly you’re into something [new]. There are tons of things I’ve heard, but I’ve not been able to keep up with it or know what it was.

Finally, since you’re finally approaching the end of the American Head era, what’s the status on new music? Do you have anything in the works? 

Not too much. American Head was a big record too. There are a lot of songs on that. That was already an accumulation of three years of picking and choosing which songs were gonna work and all that. Once we knew that that record was done and was gonna work, we said “Let’s not make a record for a couple years and not worry about it too much. Let’s see if we can sort out what The Flaming Lips are now.” I think that’s where American Head dropped us off: “Now you’re this kind of band.” And we’re like, “Finally! Cool!” And that seemed like a good spot.

We definitely always have songs and bits floating around but no great momentum to turn it into something that would come out a year from now or something. It’s funny how things can happen and you get inspired, but I think we made a hard choice to not make something in a hurry just so we have more music. Dave Fridmann urged us in that same way. Without regretting the clusterfuck of all the stuff we did, we’ve reached the point where we can pick what we want to work on, work hard on it, and give it everything we have. I think on some of the stuff we did, like the stuff we did with Miley, we wanted another six months to work on it. You don’t get it. It’s just the way scheduling and all that shit works. It’s frustrating when you see these things that could bend a different way. So I guess the answer [to your question] is “not too much.” [Laughs.]

I’m sure we won’t have to wait too long. 

We also have such a big catalog that we always neglect. People ask us about songs, and Steven and I will be like, “I swear to God, I don’t remember that song at all.” It’s like that song you mentioned, “The Assassination of the Sun” — we love that people have given their time and energy and part of their soul to listen to that, to let it become part of their lives. I think we thought, “We should make that important to us too. We should be a little less consumed with who we are now and more aware of what we’ve been and what that means to people.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

One night recently at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, Ben Harper got a surprise visit backstage from Harry Styles, headliner for their 12-date (which was originally scheduled to be 15 but three were canceled due to illness) residency at the old arena. He arrived bearing a very special gift: an ancient Roland CompuRhythm drum machine, a contraption heard on generations of classic pop and dance hits in the 1980s and ’90s, from Hall and Oates to Blondie to Culture Club.

“He just brought it into my dressing room and said, ‘You need this,’” Harper recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know drum machines could be this good. The beats are so futuristic. It’s so sick.”

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Retro-future beats aside, the connections between Styles and the journeyman singer-songwriter-guitar hero are rooted in a tradition that is less about computers than something more organic: songcraft. When Styles released his self-titled debut solo album in 2017, one of his first gigs was at the 500-capacity Troubadour in West Hollywood — the same club where Harper performed his first showcase as a new artist on Virgin Records in 1994.

Harper met the former One Direction singer when Styles invited him to play on “Boyfriends,” an understated, gently psychedelic track on the hit album Harry’s House. That led to Harper being asked by Styles to be the opening act at his long run of shows at the Forum. Intrigued, Harper accepted, even if it meant facing the tightrope of any act opening for a major star — the possibility of total rejection from the headliner’s most fanatic listeners (or worse, no reaction at all).

Instead, Styles fans quickly embraced Harper from the very first night.

“I’ve heard people singing songs,” Harper says. “His fans are incredible, and they gave me a chance on opening night. They gave it a shot, and I just can’t thank his fans enough for actually letting me through the door. I felt welcome there.”

At the Nov. 12 show, Harper stepped onto the Forum stage alone. Wearing a pink beanie and a white sweater streaked with color, he performed an eight-song set, much of it solo. He was then joined by a four-person choir for the a cappella “Below Sea Level,” which opens his new album, Bloodline Maintenance (which is currently nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album).

During the song “Waiting on An Angel,” the arena lit up with fans holding up their glowing cell phones. Harper also included a cover of “Boyfriends,” which Styles did not perform that night. Throughout, he chose to strip things down as a contrast to what he calls the “extraordinary exquisite” production of Styles’ performances. “I wanted to counter it with songs in their purest forms — basically just me and a guitar. I rolled the dice on it, hoping that what would connect most directly was the intimacy.”

That also meant reaching back to songs from Harper’s earliest albums from the 1990s, when he was the same age as much of Styles’ audience is today. He plucked at the same vintage Martin 00-18 acoustic he played on those records (and at the “Boyfriends” session), even though that guitar is now on permanent loan to his daughter, Harris, 23, who joined Harper and her brother C.J., 25, onstage for her song “Longest Apocalypse.”

“I would never in a thousand lifetimes bring my kids into an environment they weren’t ready for,” Harper says. “Harris is ready, and she’s been ready for a long time.”

Later, during his headlining set, Styles thanked Harper and told the crowd “I would sit and listen to that man play instruments for a worrying amount of time.”

Music and family connections have been part of Harper’s life since he was born. Both his parents were musicians, and his grandparents founded the Folk Music Center in the 1950s in Claremont, where he grew up and learned to play and repair instruments. On the cover of Bloodline Maintenance is a picture from around 1974 that shows him as a toddler with his late father, percussionist Leonard Edward Harper II.

Over the years, the Harper has brought home three Grammys and been nominated on three other occasions. He says it’s always meaningful whenever his name is included, and the latest nomination still “feels like the first time” — though he won’t be able to attend due to previously scheduled live dates in Australia. The category of “Contemporary Blues” may be a bit of a catch-all for an album that travels through genres of rock, funk, folk and blues — but the connecting thread is always present.

“Really when you extract the bones of the music I make, the DNA of it is blue — it’s blues,” he says.

For Harper, the connections are not just about sound, but the message. The lyrics on Bloodline Maintenance are deeply felt and socially conscious as he dives into some deep, sticky funk on the smoldering “We Need to Talk About It” with rage against those who want to sweep away public acknowledgment of America’s history of slavery. “Whoever said time heals all wounds / Wasn’t a slave I’m guessing / Hundreds of years / That’s just too long of a lesson … we need to talk about it!”

That song and others are part of a tradition of protest within many of Harper’s songs through the years, including the title track from 2016’s Call it What it Is album. That one listed the names of several unarmed young Black men killed by police — a troubling roll call that helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It’s never not a part of how I wake up,” Harper explains. “Listen, I’m black. My dad is Black, my mom is Jewish. But when I walk into the room, I’m a Black man. Every morning I walk out of my house, I’m a Black man with Black man struggles. If you wake up Black in America and don’t recognize the struggle, shame on you. How could America have landed in the lap of Donald Trump for fuck’s sake. And that’s the blues right there. That’s contemporary blues — inner city blues.”

Harper turns the volume down a bit on his next album, the acoustic-based Wide Open Light, due to release in June. It includes “Trying Not To Fall In Love With You,” which he performed at the Styles shows singing wistfully at a piano. Other songs are spare and organic, with Harper’s voice usually accompanied by acoustic guitar. One track is a duet with Jack Johnson.

“I haven’t been that raw and that exposed on record — just me and guitar — for an entire album ever,” Harper says. The album lands somewhere in the vicinity of Bruce Springsteen’s hauntingly raw and acoustic Nebraska, a favorite that Harper calls “one of the greatest records of all time.”

For Harper, songwriting remains a calling and being invited to share his music to another generation of listeners at the Styles concerts was like a return to his earliest days onstage.

“It really did feel like something was happening all over again — from introducing young people to my songs to playing an opening gig,” Harper says. “It just was really refreshing. I’ve loved every minute of it.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The fans assembled outside Brooklyn metal haven Saint Vitus in October were eager to get a glimpse of Chat Pile, the night’s headliner. But first, they wanted to meet the purple man.

As soon as the doors opened for the sold-out show, people swarmed the band’s merch table, hoping to score the night’s holy grail: a limited-edition DIY figurine, cast in sickly Dimetapp purple, of McDonaldland mainstay Grimace, red-eyed and holding a fully packed bong. The toy served as a lovably literal tribute to “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg,” the nine-minute nervous breakdown set to music that caps Chat Pile’s recent full-length debut, God’s Country, on a breathtakingly bleak note. “Purple man, stop coming into my room,” vocalist Raygun Busch (say “Reagan Bush”; all members go by pseudonyms) half-sobs, half-screams on the track, portraying a delusional narrator on the brink of suicide.

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“I felt bad,” says guitarist Luther Manhole, reflecting on the merch-table crush for the toys, which persisted even during an opening band’s set, on a full-band Zoom with SPIN a month later. “There were only, like, eight of them.”

“They’re rare, baby!” Busch chimes in. “That’s why you gotta get there early.”

The purple-man mob feels like a perfect summation of Chat Pile’s surreal year, during which the Oklahoma City quartet has unveiled an unapologetically disturbing record to improbably wide acclaim, played well-received shows nationwide, and earned an invitation to the 2023 edition of prestigious Netherlands heavy-music fest Roadburn.

God’s Country sharpens and amplifies the grimy pummel of mid-‘80s noise-rock pioneers like Scratch Acid and Big Black, stirring in bassist Stin’s abiding love of Korn and a true-crime doc’s worth of references to grisly local lore, including a 1978 robbery and multiple murder inside an Oklahoma City steakhouse, invoked on “The Mask,” as well as the infamous beheading that took place at a food-processing plant in nearby Moore in 2014, which lurks behind album opener “Slaughterhouse.” (The band’s name itself refers to the toxic mining waste that litters a ghost town in the northeast part of the state.) As abrasive as the record is — with Stin and his drummer brother Cap’n Ron, playing an ugly-sounding electronic kit, pounding out lumbering riffs that Manhole seasons with sickly melody and Busch muttering and raving over top — it often harnesses a strange sort of pathos, especially on the post-punk-ish grief monologue “Pamela” and “Why,” where Busch confronts the homelessness epidemic with uncomfortable directness. The Grimace nods on the final track sit nicely in the Chat Pile mythos next to “Rainbow Meat,” a song from the band’s 2019 EP This Dungeon Earth that finds Busch bellowing, “Send my body to Arby’s!”

So far, fans have blessed the band with a slew of Grimace memes, as well as a brilliant mash-up (“What’s the deal with Chat Pile?”) that layers Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bits over “Why.” The members of the three-year-old band seem bemused but delighted by the range of playful responses to their abrasive art, which recently expanded in surprising ways (placid ambient instrumentals; the rollicking, made-to-order country anthem “Lake Time”) on the soundtrack to Tenkiller, a dark new Oklahoma-set drama about a splintering family coping with the aftermath of tragedy. Chat Pile spoke with SPIN about ‘90s musical detritus, the dark allure of McDonald’s and the distinct brand of regional darkness that fueled one of the year’s best albums.

SPIN: Along with the unveiling of the Grimace toy, the Seinfeld mash-up was another landmark moment in the Year of Chat Pile. What did you think when you first heard it?
Stin: I’m always just honored that people feel in any way motivated or inspired to create something, even if it’s, like, a dorky meme. Or some people create cool paintings and that kind of stuff. It’s interesting that people think of us at all.

Manhole: We mainly just get fast-food-related jokes. So I’ll take a TV sitcom-related one.

Stin: Yeah, we had the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade on in the background while we were cooking, and I look over and see Grimace, and I’m like, “Oh, God, here we go…” And immediately, my phone starts buzzing with people tagging me.

Manhole: It’s just funny to be anchored to Arby’s and McDonald’s. Who knows, maybe it’ll be Carl’s Jr. next?

When was the last time you all actually ate at McDonald’s?
Manhole: Oh, like last week.

Busch: We all ate it this year, for sure.

Manhole: Maybe not Ron…

Ron: Yeah, it’s probably been close to 10 years.

Busch: See, in my house, my mom just didn’t cook that much, so we ate McDonald’s a lot. To me, it’s like comfort food. Plus, I live literally, like, 1/8 of a mile from a McDonald’s. It’s open 24 hours. I mean, if I’m a criminal, lock me up…

Manhole: Every good restaurant in Oklahoma City is closed at, like, 9 p.m., and we don’t have diner culture here, really, so it’s just fast food; that is the option late at night. I like Whataburger more, but sometimes it’s just the pull of McDonald’s, especially breakfast.

Busch: The french fries are sprinkled with some kind of magical dust. I mean, part of my body is McDonald’s french fries.

It is apt that we’re sitting around talking about Mickey D’s and Seinfeld when in the backdrop is a record that really couldn’t be any darker. That juxtaposition of silliness and terror seems central to what you guys do.
Ron: We use humor to try to lighten the situation up a little since everything tends to be pretty heavy in terms of the topics that we cover.

Stin: Sometimes all you can do is laugh at how bleak things are. I almost feel like that’s at the core of Chat Pile in a way, kind of throwing your hands up and laughing at how fucked up everything is.

Manhole: I think Raygun does a good job of having a sense of humor, but it’s not like we’re making fun of the people that are characters in the songs, or the topics. I think you can be funny and say stuff like “Whose line is it, anyway?” and “Send my body to Arby’s” but not have it be, like, punching down. And I think that is a fine line, especially with trying to be funny in music — comedy music can be some of the worst stuff imaginable. It might be the worst type of music.

Busch: Nahhh, it’s not the worst. It’s in a ring of hell but not the center.

What’s the center? Now I want to know what that is.
Busch: Probably, like, the acoustic version of a Nickelback song, or something.

Manhole: There’s a restaurant on the northwest side of Oklahoma City, a Thai restaurant, that every single time I’d go in there and get takeout, they would be playing the same cover version — ukulele, no vocals — of ”I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. I swear I heard it in there 20 times.

Busch: Oh, man, you know what? You just triggered me, and I realized what the real worst song is: It’s “Pinch Me” by Barenaked Ladies. That is, like… Whoo, man.

Stin: I was in an antique store over the weekend and dude was playing deep Red Hot Chili Pepper cuts from a more modern album, but he was playing it on the Spotify that you don’t pay for, so in between the songs, there were ads. So that counts too, maybe.

Speaking of rock deep cuts, I was enjoying the playlist you guys made for Roadburn of, as you put it, “artists updating their sound to compete with the all-consuming grunge revolution of the ‘90s.” There are some real forgotten gems on there by everyone from Extreme to Entombed.
Stin: Oh, yeah, we lived through that stuff, so you can’t deny the reality of that situation. Nothing annoys me more than when people are like, “Oh, yeah, I love the ‘90s,” but then you don’t acknowledge that there were, like, four Bryan Adams albums with huge hits on them. That was a major part of the ecosystem back then.

We appreciate music from a more historical context, too, like maybe you know a whole lot about a band that you don’t particularly love but their career arc is really interesting, or their place in the culture and time. There’s a little bit of that subtext in the music that we’re making with Chat Pile, too, like the fact that we have like an extreme-metal logo but we’re not that extreme-sounding — playing with these tropes and kind of funneling them into this weird funhouse-mirror approach to taking the bits and pieces that we like.

Busch: Cultural trash-compacting, you know? Just mashing it all together into something new.

That aspect of Chat Pile, the range of your interests, really comes through on the Tenkiller soundtrack. Was it freeing to be able to stretch out like that?
Stin: Yeah, absolutely. Painting a little bit of the backdrop, we recorded that in the height of the pandemic. We were kind of our only physical social group for an entire year. We’d see each other twice a week, practicing but then eventually starting to work on this album, and for me, freeing is the right word — it was really fun to get together, just the four of us, and be like, “OK, how about the two of you sit in this room and we’ll set up a microphone and you bang on some stuff, and then the two of us will hang out in here and we’ll scream and play with a power drill?”

Manhole: I had a lot of fun doing it. My favorite part of it was everyone being able to play instruments that they don’t play in the normal band. I played drums on it and bass, Ron played a lot of guitar, Ray played guitar, there’s synth on there. So I just thought it was cool to try to have it still sound like something that the four of us made but completely reconfigured. I’d definitely like to do it more. If anyone is making a movie that people will see and want us to make music for…

Busch: Please, please have us!

Stin: They specifically asked for a country song for a scene, so we knew that was coming and there’s a lot of directions we could have gone with that, but we definitely wanted to do more of an arena-rock, Alan Jackson–style… Because, I mean, Garth Brooks is from Oklahoma.

Manhole: Toby Keith. He’s from my town.

Stin: We even dissected a couple songs, and we’re like, “OK, this is basically the formula, so we can just do our own version.”

Manhole: Yeah, Ron and I, we just played a chord progression and that essentially was the song. And I played drums and Raygun sang, obviously, and played acoustic guitar, and then Ron did all the electric and slide work, which is really cool.

Stin: And then the lyrics we wrote together. We sat in a room, got high as shit and just banged out these lyrics. And that whole redneck lake culture is definitely a thing out here; that shit’s in our blood. But there’s also tons of Godzilla references, too.

Manhole: That’s the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time, for sure.

Stin: The peak of it is, there’s a line at the end where Ray lists off all the Kid Rock albums…

Busch: [Sings in redneck voice] “Devil Without a Cause, Cocky and Born Free / Rock n Roll Jesus, all my favorite CDs.

[All laugh]

Local culture in all its forms is something that’s pretty central to Chat Pile. God’s Country is almost an Oklahoma true-crime digest in album form: I have to say I’d never heard about the Sirloin Stockade shootings, for example, before delving into the record.
Busch: Every state has fucked-up stories — we’re nothing special. There’s darkness all over America.

Stin: We have our own brand of darkness, though. And I won’t speak for everybody, but for me, that is a stated goal thematically for the band, whenever I have input, is that I do like exposing our very Southern Plains–, Bible Belt–specific brand of darkness. That’s the thing that’s funny: Oklahoma doesn’t have much of an identity, but there’s a lot of identity to be found in the wretched history of this state. If we do have an identity, that’s what it is, all this trauma.

The Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing. I mean, the term “going postal” was invented because of one of the first notorious mass shootings that ever took place, in Edmond, Oklahoma, and that just scratches the surface of all the nightmarish bullshit that goes on here.

Judging by the reception to the record and your shows, clearly that nightmarish bullshit is resonating pretty widely. Looking back on this breakthrough year for Chat Pile, what has been the highlight, for each of you?
Ron: I think just generally seeing people’s response — the more shows we play, hearing people singing along and getting into it, and then seeing people make art and be inspired definitely means quite a bit.

Manhole: The response that we’ve gotten at shows has just been super cool. We only started the band in 2019, so I just did not think that just a few years later, we’d be playing to groups of people that actually know our stuff and are going crazy.

Stin: Playing Kansas City in May, that was the last show on a five-show run — we don’t play out very much at all, so five days for us feels like we’ve been on the road for two months. But we could tell that with each show, people were getting more and more hyped, and Kansas City is the hometown of Bummer and Nerver, who are both friends of ours and who both played that show, and Meth from Chicago also played.

First off, the venue was big and people were really piling in, and we did not expect it. But by the time we got onstage, the place was packed and the energy was just through the roof — people were going insane, including the other bands. They were jumping onstage and stage-diving, and maybe for the first time in my entire life, I really felt like I was a part of a community and a movement and something really special.

Manhole: Yeah, that show was really something. Matt from Bummer did the worm onstage while we were playing. And I had a really good time at the Philly show this year, too.

Busch: Me too. My favorite moment was, after the Chicago show, we all got in the van and threw on “Flex” by Mad Cobra. That’s maybe the best I’ve felt in a long time. Just laughing maniacally: “I can’t believe we’re here. I can’t believe that just happened.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

These are just a few of the things that happened to the members of Australia’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in 2022: they released five new studio albums (including three in October), they watched helplessly as some of their instruments were crushed by an elevator in Barcelona amid a run of five shows in six nights with no repeated songs, they danced a lot, they jammed even more, they almost got bed bugs, they released two behind-the-scenes films, they substituted a drum machine for drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh while he missed two shows recovering from COVID-19, they hosted record fairs so their hardcore fans could buy and trade both official and bootleg vinyl and merchandise, they got drunk at a New York Rangers hockey game and watched their antics transmitted in real time on the Madison Square Garden jumbotron, and they played the most triumphant American gigs in their 12 years of existence, including selling nearly 30,000 tickets to three marathon, three-hour concerts at Red Rocks outside Denver. And the year’s not even over yet!

The six-piece outfit — multi-instrumentalists Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, Cook Craig, and Ambrose Kenny-Smith, in tandem with Cavanagh and bassist Lucas Harwood — will keep the proverbial good vibes going in 2023 with another extensive world tour, including unique U.S. residencies in four cities and Gizzard’s largest American headlining show ever at the 17,000-capacity Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on June 21. There will undoubtedly be fresh music as well.

More from Spin:

• King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard ‘Stick’ The Landing
• King Gizzard Expand Bootlegger Program For Ongoing Tour
• King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard Keep Rocking On ‘Flight b741’

While driving from his home in Geelong to the Gizzard studio in Melbourne, Harwood phoned up SPIN to reflect on the band’s milestone year, the appeal of the residency concept, the pros and cons of life on a tour bus, and the work that’s already underway on two new albums.

King Gizz played a lot of big shows in 2022, but were there any that stand out for other reasons? Maybe an unexpectedly awesome gig in an off-the-beaten-path locale?
Lucas Harwood: The tour we did earlier in the year was interesting. The October tour was postponed a handful of times, but we were then able to tour in the U.S. beforehand. We said yes to everything without stepping on our own toes in the cities we were going to play in the fall. It felt weird to go twice to cities where fans already had tickets, so we hit some spots we hadn’t hit before. We’re always willing to play in smaller towns, but we wouldn’t usually do a whole tour of those, which is kind of what April was like.

Two shows stick out. One was Columbus, Ohio, which I didn’t know anything about. We sold 4,000 tickets, which surprised us. It was a really cool venue next to a big baseball stadium. It rained, which made it even more interesting. Our bus had bedbugs, and at that venue, we had these special dogs come sniff all our possessions to make sure there weren’t any bugs on them. This big truck came up next to the bus and basically turned it into an oven to kill whatever was in there. They were discovered a few days beforehand, and it was fortuitous we had a couple of day drives and that none of us were really sleeping overnight on the bus. Unfortunately, one of our crew members slept on it during the day and they got bitten, which is how we discovered what was going on.

The other one I remember quite distinctly was St. Paul. It had such a cool vibe and an insane record store. It was also one of the smallest shows of the tour, in an old church. In places like that, the fans are so pumped and appreciative that you’re coming through their town.

What about the two shows you had to play in Europe without Cavs when he came down with COVID? Wasn’t it weird to look to your right and not see him in his usual position on stage?
Definitely, but it was also fun. A big part of Gizzard’s ethos, and how we approach making albums, is putting ourselves in a zone that’s uncomfortable. We like having to think on our feet. It makes us better musicians. I think we had a day or two off before those two shows, so we bought a little drum machine and Joey and Stu experimented a bit with it. It was mostly improvised though. We tailored the set to be mostly 4/4 songs, or songs with time signatures that didn’t change. Those would have been impossible to play on the fly. We recorded both of those shows and I think they’d be fun to bootleg one day. There were definitely some really cool moments. This is what COVID does to a band. We’re very fortunate we didn’t have to cancel more than one show. At the start of this year, we’d said that if anyone’s not well enough to play because of COVID, we just won’t play. But we realized sometimes the show must go on, even if it’s not ideal.

Can we run through each of the five Gizz albums from this year and say a few words about them? Made in Timeland was the first one — I think people enjoy how weird and electronic that one sounds.
What I loved about it is how freeform it was. We all made bits of music at 120 BPM, and that was the only limitation. Stu then stitched it all together in tandem with the ticking clock in the background. I don’t know why it ended up sounding like that, but I guess it’s what we were all experimenting with at the time. People hear the electronic bits, but there’s a lot of different stuff on there that I wouldn’t necessarily consider as such. It feels like a cool pastiche of almost all the demos we were working on at that time, turned into something weird and different.

Omnium Gatherum is almost like a fake Gizzard greatest hits, touching on all the different musical styles — and even some rapping.
[Album opener] ‘The Dripping Tap’ was the first time we were able to get back together and jam during the pandemic, which was really fun. We didn’t start out intending to make a double album, but it just kind of fell together. Stu did a really good job of bringing all the pieces together, as he always does. I think some people find Gizzard weird and jarring with the span of genres, even within the context of an album, but when it goes through Stu’s filter, it all make sense within the same world to me. It’s like our White Album, which is incredibly varied. With all of our records, we impose constraints. It challenges us to be creative in other ways, but sometimes it’s fun to flip that and make a record of whatever’s going on at that moment.

Then there are the three distinct albums that came out in October, starting with Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava.
Ice, Death is definitely my favorite of the bunch and the one I contributed the most to. I contribute to the albums in varying degrees, because most of time when I’m at home, I’m a stay-at-home parent. On Ice, Death, I contributed more than I usually would. It was also the first time we’d done collaborative lyric writing. I hadn’t written lyrics in a long time, so I really enjoyed doing that. Having writing prompts got me personally out of a bit of a lyric-writing funk. The jamming in the studio had constraints, because every song was in a certain scale, but other than that, it was really freeform. For every song, there’s probably a couple hours of material that we edited down. We’d never made music like that before, with the impetus being ‘The Dripping Tap.’ Live, the songs keep evolving. ‘Ice V’ has been my favorite to play, because I don’t think we’ve ever gotten that funky before. It was such a crazy year. In between the tours, I came home, and I think Amby did too, but most of the other guys stayed overseas. We did two days of rehearsal in L.A. in October and used that time to focus on interpreting the Ice, Death songs and getting them to work live. They were definitely honed and developed by playing them every night. It’s such a good feeling as the tour progresses.

Laminated Denim was made to serve as intermission music during the Red Rocks shows, but one of the songs, “Hypertension,” made it into the live repertoire very quickly.
Yeah. That’s another really fun one to play. Similar to Ice, Death, it’s pretty proggy. We play it pretty close to the recording, but within that, there’s a lot of room for improvisation. On the October tour in particular, and beyond that, we’ve really been enjoying jamming.

When I asked you about Changes in October, you deferred the answer to Joey because you said you were still wrapping your head around it, musically.
I’m definitely starting to understand the theory behind it a lot more. I’m also really keen to start playing those songs live as well. This year’s setup doesn’t work for those songs, but maybe next year we can bring some of them in. They may have to be reinterpreted to be a bit more guitar-y. I practiced all those songs at home and got them ready to play, but we still haven’t done that yet. I really love those songs and hope we can bring them into the fold because I think that record is a real fan favorite.

If nothing else, we need to see you play that crazy funky bass part from ‘Astroturf.’
I have to level with you, man. It was either Stu or Joe that played that bass part. Changes is funny because it has taken years to come together, and there were two or three incarnations of each song. That’s just the part that ended up on the record, and it’s incredible. I’ve learned it, and it’s so fun to play. I don’t feel bitter in any way when that kind of stuff happens. Everyone contributes, and we see what sticks. I mentioned the Gizzard filter before, and we really trust Stu as a producer to pick and choose what ends up on the finished products. I didn’t play or write a good portion of the recorded bass lines, but I love learning and interpreting them. It’s a privilege.

Most of Gizz has been home for about six weeks since the end of the North American tour. Have you made any headway on new music?
I don’t know what I can give away [Laughs]. We’re working on two albums concurrently. They’re both very collaborative in different ways. They’re going to be very different sounding to each other, but we’re going to try to make them complement each other in a yin and yang kind of way. We’re all writing lyrics for both albums again, which has been fun. I think that’s about all I can say.

This is all newly written material?
It’s all really fresh. None of it is stuff we’ve been sitting on for ages, which is exciting.

Looking ahead to the U.S. residency shows in June, it seems like once again Gizz is really thinking about how to create unique experiences for the audience.
We definitely are doing this for the fans, but we’re doing it for ourselves as well, to change everything up as much as possible. A residency tour seems like something fun and different. Part of the impetus was trying to make our touring a bit more family-friendly, so we can bring partners and kids on the road and be in one city for a few nights in a row. We can get comfy in the venue and really get to know it. I think we’ve played as many as four nights in one venue before, and it’s a different feel. You become more willing to take musical risks. For those shows, seeing a lot of similar faces in the audience is really heartening. We’re just trying to keep it fresh, and these venues are really interesting as well. We can’t wait to come back.

Can you relate to the ever-growing levels of Gizzard fandom? Did you ever follow a band around like so many people now seem to be doing with you guys?
I grew up going to music festivals with my parents — things like the Port Fairy Folk Festival and the Queenscliff Music Festival. It was folk and country music, and a lot more adult contemporary stuff. I was at an age where I didn’t have a style that I was into, so I’d just get into the bands that were at the folk festival and buy their CDs. I’d try to chase down artists to get autographs. I really think the whole Gizzhead thing is uniquely American. We definitely grew up doing that kind of stuff, but this level of fandom and mania is a uniquely American cultural thing: tailgating, bootlegging, and traveling around the country to see multiple shows. Stu and a friend drove to Sydney to see Brian Jonestown Massacre when we were teenagers, and at the time I remember thinking it was kind of crazy. I didn’t know anybody else who would do that, because the capital cities are so far apart. If you wanted to follow a national tour, you’d just have to fly everywhere. We notice the difference from America to other countries. We have great fans almost everywhere, which we’re really grateful for, but the kind of fandom we experienced on this last tour is definitely the most extreme, in terms of everything that goes with it. It’s wild.

How do you stay sane while on tour?
Not partying too much! I only do that when we have a day off the next day. When we get to a city, I usually go on a big walk on my own for an hour or two to get coffee and food. I love alone time on tour, especially when you’re on a bus tour. I love the guys, and I love our crew, but that alone time is really important to have some space and take yourself out of the weird existence that is touring. As a stay-at-home parent when I’m not on tour, I really appreciate that time and space to myself on the road.

What can you tell us about your new side project, Heavy Moss?
I’ve previously written my own stuff and I had my own band a long time ago, but I can’t give you an honest answer as to why I stopped. I lost a bit of the zest for it, and maybe the confidence. But with the help and support of the guys from Gizzard, and the guys I’m starting this new band with, I’m writing and recording again. It’s funny starting a band in your 30s. Things are a lot different. I’ve been playing keys a lot, and even getting lessons, so all the songs I’ve been writing are on keys. It’s something different. We’re just chipping away at recordings at the moment. I don’t know if I’ll get an album together next year, but maybe an EP. I definitely work a lot slower than the usual Gizzard pace (laughs). I’m pretty much playing keys exclusively in this band. I’d like to play shows eventually, but that’s a daunting prospect as well — playing keys and singing upfront in a band is pretty different than what I do in Gizzard. I’m hoping we can get a couple of songs out during the first half of next year.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

When you’re up, you’re up—and it’s certainly been an up year for Sophie Allison of Soccer Mommy. Triumphant third record Sometimes, Forever took her band to new critical peaks and their biggest headlining stages yet. But after years on the album cycle rodeo circuit, Allison knows firsthand that highs and lows are temporary structures—moments worth inhabiting, but sure to fade, no matter how intensely felt. With production from cinematically-oriented composer Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, Sometimes, Forever loops through those cyclic poles of exhilaration and melancholy, pairing sonic daring with observant retellings of crystallized feelings. It’s Soccer Mommy’s boldest, most cutting collection, melding shadowy electronic gestures with Allison’s increasingly clever guitars and darkly droll pop delivery.

Inspiration for the record came to Allison in many forms: biting anti-careerism sparks flames across the driving “Unholy Affliction,” while shoegaze-y “Shotgun” shimmers with sweet anecdotes of quotidian love. Allison’s lyrical bent skews personal, but she’s also keen to source others’ stories for shards of narrative—as on the eerily arpeggiated “Following Eyes,” which channels the gothic brilliance of Mary Shelley, and on the propulsive “Darkness Forever,” which alludes to the tragic death of Sylvia Plath. Though the scrutinous songwriter works painstakingly on her material and performances, she equally values restorative time at home with bandmate and longtime partner Julian Powell. In recapping the highlights of her 2022, Allison is as excited about the band’s accomplishments as she is the creature comforts she enjoyed as a fan: creepy TV (Wednesday & First Kill), absorbing novels (Neal Stephenson’s & Vladimir Nabokov’s), and her favorite games (mainstay Stardew Valley, different Pokémon for different platforms, plus Mario Tennis on the band’s first tour bus).

More from Spin:

• 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte of 3OH!3
• Soccer Mommy Navigates Profound Loss On New LP, ‘Evergreen’
• Soccer Mommy Shows Her ‘Bones,’ Plots Fall North American Tour

On a day off outside Boise, ID at an off-highway shopping center, Allison’s got her afternoon cut out for her: she needs new work gloves and boots to replace her old winter touring staples, respectively fraying at the fingers and soles. The now-seasoned itinerant is still a few weeks away from finishing her 2022 engagements—cheekily dubbed Touring, Forever—before resuming in February on an Australian leg. The rest of Soccer Mommy’s 2023? Some to-be-announced support dates and festivals, a potential run in the U.K., and a hopeful eye toward tracking a new album—the pieces of which Allison is already puzzling over in her few moments of downtime.

SPIN: 2022 was Soccer Mommy’s biggest year so far. Did it live up to your hopes?
Sophie Allison: This year definitely met expectations. It’s been really fun and all the tours went well. I bought a house at the beginning of the year, and that has been as amazing as I thought it would be, and has made my life feel much less chaotic. I had the summer at home, which was really nice—I wanted time to write and work on new stuff.

Everybody else is wrapping up their year, but you just released a new music video for “Feel It All the Time.”
I really like doing videos that are chill. I don’t want a bunch of lights in my face and a ton of cameras. Of course, that stuff looks great in the end but it’s always fun to get to do a video that’s low maintenance. This was just a handheld camera [director] Zev [Magasis] had, driving around with me in my car. We rode horses and I played around with a sword. So it was really fun and goofy, rather than stressful. Fortunately, it was right around Halloween, so I hit the Spirit Halloween and got some goods. Being in Tennessee, it’s easy to go to a horseback riding place and be like, “We’re making a music video.” And they say, “Okay, that’s fine,” because all the country music people do that.

You’re also hosting a film screening of Fantastic Planet this week—tell me about that.
Brain Dead, a streetwear company, reached out wanting to do a collab on a shirt. But they have a theater in LA and we have an off day. They said, “Do you want to come? You can pick a movie and do a meet and greet.” I love [Fantastic Planet] and have a poster in my living room. Since I’ve only seen it on my TV. I thought it’d be cool to see in an actual theater.

What other movies did you love in 2022?
The best modern movie I’ve seen is Smile. It was really scary! I like to see a lot of horror movies, and that one was solid. I saw Bound and But I’m A Cheerleader for the first time this year, both at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, which was doing a queer classics series. I also saw Let the Right One In for the first time.

The “Darkness Forever” demo you released around Halloween is so intricate, and made me curious about your journey as a producer. What did you learn this year that might go toward future recordings?
When I did the Sometimes, Forever demos, I was playing around on the computer with drum machines to make cool demos. But now I’ve been doing all my demoing on tape. I have a Tascam 8-track Portastudio and really love how it sounds. I want to use tape on the next batch [of songs]—not only recording to tape, but using tape to make live effects with warps and speeds. That’s most of what I’ve been messing with. It’s simple and clean compared to the stuff I was demoing for Sometimes, Forever.

Have you been listening to anything that inspires you?
I’ve been listening to more classical music this year. I’ve been really loving using flute sounds and doing things that sound more arranged. I’ve been listening to the Sundays, and Velocity Girl a lot—that ‘90s jangly, riffy pop stuff is always exciting to me.

You kicked the year off in Mexico with Wilco. What were some other show highlights?
Nashville shows always feel monumental, as do New York shows—[Webster Hall] is literally across the street from my freshman dorm, so any time I went out of the venue to do something, I was right by where I’d lived. It was surreal. But playing a two-night stand at 9:30 Club [in Washington D.C.] was really cool. On the first tour I ever played that went to the East Coast, there were two nights at 9:30—it felt crazy that we got to play there, even as openers. Those things can feel surreal, because it’s something you witnessed early on that you thought you’d never get to.

Apart from festivals, this year was almost all headlining dates for Soccer Mommy. Tell me about some of the bands you brought out with you, and why they’re special.
I always pick the bands, and it makes it so much more fun. You’re gonna listen to that music every night so it’s important to have something good. The first band on this tour was Lightning Bug, who opened for us last fall—they’re amazing, and did a cover of “Dreams” by the Cranberries on Halloween. Then it was Helena Deland, who’s from Montréal; [former Soccer Mommy producer] Gabe Wax did their record, and it’s really good. Now we’re out with TOPS, who I’ve liked for years now, as has Julian. Everyone’s been great. If you pick artists who you genuinely like and want to listen to every night, it’s a blast.

As a gamer, how did you like recording “Shotgun” in Simlish?
That was very hard! It’s not just babbling, they send you specific lyrics, and it’s hard to sing them without laughing. I screwed myself on that too, because I did it with my bandmate Rodrigo [Avendano] recording—it was hard not to laugh, singing that to a friend. But it was a lot of fun, and I played so much Sims growing up. So doing a song in Simlish is a big accomplishment in my mind.

Then you did a listening party in Roblox.
That was crazy. I had never used Roblox, and had mostly heard about it from my friends who babysit and nanny. I would log into a world for 15 minutes and then bounce into another one, doing a Q&A in the chat while we’re playing Floor is Lava, and the album is just streaming. The last world I did was my favorite—you went in and picked a profession, and one of them was “criminal,” and all you’d do is set fire to things. It was wild: buildings on fire, people crashing their cars, while the album was playing.

You did a series of Magic the Gathering-themed digital trading cards for Sometimes, Forever. Do you play?
I have never played. What a shame! I think they look really cool, but I don’t have anyone to play them with. I’ve never played that or Dungeons and Dragons—I’ve played DND in Stardew Valley once, so I’ve kind of done it. But I wanted the trading cards idea to play into the fantasy idea we were going with, a personalized thing we could put different magical ideas onto.

Was this your first year with a tour bus?
This is the first tour with it, this fall. It’s great and so much better. Not having to sit in a van all day is really good for everybody’s backs. We’ve got a lot of people at this point, nine. [The bus] gives us more time in each city. We can actually have time to go do things between soundcheck and load-in. We can bring production. We have a backdrop, and we have a giant floating cloud, painted like the cells on the album cover. It looks like a giant spleen floating in the air and has lights inside of it. The stage is a much bigger production in terms of design, but soundwise we have boards for monitors and front of house, so it’s all smoother up there.

Any creative dreams for 2023?
I’d love to record an album by the end of next year. I’ll have one ready by mid-next year, I’d guess, and it’d be great to either get in the studio or be making the plans to do that. From record to record you have to find a producer who fits the vibe you’re going for, but I’m stuck right now—I’ve had a lot of ideas sent to me and don’t know what I need yet.

Maybe you need a break first. How are you gonna relax when this tour ends?
Honestly, just be at home! I’m having a great time on tour but it’ll be nice to be home for the holidays and spend a lot of time with my friends and family. Growing up, we were not religious, so the holidays were just fun—a giant day of presents and candy—and it’s still very fantastical to me. I love being able to have holiday-themed cocktails with friends or make Christmas cookies, so I’m very excited to get back to that.

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An album about death and addiction may seem like an unlikely way to help a band become more popular. In the weird, wonderful world of IDLES, it’s par for the course. Indeed, the U.K. quintet found catharsis in tragedy while also greatly expanding the palette of IDLES’ dense, heavy, and often punishing sound.

Following the album’s November 2021 release, IDLES made its American TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, played nearly 150 shows all over the world (including two high-profile performances at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival), and scored Grammy nominations for best rock performance and best rock album. Produced by Kenny Beats and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen, Crawler certainly set a high bar for whatever the band will do next, but Bowen tells SPIN he and his bandmates — frontman Joe Talbot, bassist Adam “Dev” Devonshire, guitarist Lee Kiernan, and drummer Jon Beavis — are more than ready for the challenge.

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The musician and new dad of a baby boy chatted with SPIN by Zoom the same day England defeated Wales 3-0 in the World Cup group stage, and the conversation ranged from how the Crawler material is working within IDLES’ famously visceral live shows, the plan for new music, and why spicy candy had a brief but shining moment during the pandemic.

Have you been paying attention to the World Cup?
Mark Bowen: No, actually. Not at all. I’m not really a fan of football.

Do you have a preferred sport?
No, not really. I’m not really a sports guy. I’m more of an athlete than a sportsperson, do you know what I mean? [Flexes muscles.]

So it’s more about general body excellence for you?
That’s all I care about. Whether the thing goes in the thing isn’t the thing for me.

IDLES have been playing material from Crawler live for more than a year at this point. What has it been like integrating these songs into the set lists?
Crawler has a little bit more of those nuanced, quiet moments. None of it is ‘quiet,’ but songs like ‘MTT 420’ and ‘The Beachland Ballroom’ aren’t all chaos from our end. On our old songs, we are swinging about, slashing, and head-banging everywhere. The energy you pick up is from your own personal chaos you’re feeding into the crowd. ‘Beachland Ballroom’ and ‘MTT’ give us time to see the impact the music is having on people, rather than just the chaos of the performance. It was quite startling at first. We played ‘Beachland Ballroom’ at this time last year, and that was when we really started to notice that feeling. We debuted ‘MTT’ in Brixton, and it’s a completely different experience. It’s really hard to play these songs live. We don’t have difficult music normally, and it was a real steep learning curve how to transfer the songs from Crawler into the live arena. It took us six months, actually, to really enjoy them, because there’s a significant amount of muscle and brain memory you have to rely on before you can become automatic. Whenever you can become slightly more automatic in the intricacies of performance, you can focus on the feel a lot more. It’s really, really enjoyable, and it’s really nice to have those moments in the set because it can center you like the music was intended to. It reminds you to be present in what you’re doing at that point, rather than getting completely lost in it.

Has the material evolved and changed on stage?
Completely transformed. In some respects, you can’t recreate a studio album live without relying on backing tracks or 150 musicians. We can’t afford 150 musicians and we didn’t want to be playing to a backing track, so the songs out of necessity had to grow and evolve into something that becomes more involved, performance-wise. We were talking about this today. We did From the Basement, which was a real moment for us. We didn’t have any shows around that time, so we had a six-week period to rehearse, and that’s where we really found those songs. They’re performed in a certain way on that, and it’s really intense between the five members of the band. Everyone is laser-sharp-focused. When we perform live, other than Joe, there really isn’t that focus within the band. It’s more about the chaos and the audience experiencing it together. So, it evolved into this other level. The songs have found their place in the set. They’ve moved around and now they sit next to their brothers and sisters from other albums. It creates an ebb and flow that’s making me more and more excited about writing new music because I know that when we write something a bit slower, thoughtful, or more reserved, it will have as much of a place in our live set as ‘Danny Nedelko’ or ‘Never Fight a Man With a Perm.’ It makes the set more of a complete thing.

Can you give me a specific example of a Crawler song that now might have a different arrangement or instrumentation in the live version? Did the lion’s share of the work fall to you to cover more of the parts?
Yeah. As the producer, I think I was the only one aware of certain complexities. I’ve got this thing we call the Crawler Machine. After we finished the album, I told my guitar tech, Gavin Maxwell, that we were going to have a real problem reproducing some of this stuff live. A song like ‘MTT 420’ has maybe 32 guitars playing at different times, and they’re all being put through Moog pedals. He said, write down everything you need to happen, and we’ll work out how to do it. He designed the Crawler Machine, which sits above my piano on the side of the stage. I have a loop station on the top and bottom. The bottom one I control with my feet, and the top one I control with my hands. On ‘MTT 420,’ I catch a loop, and while it’s being played, I have to play the next part of the song and put that in the loop. I have to find moments where I can play the guitar and then other moments where I need to be turning knobs. It becomes a bit of a dance. I’ll be counting it off in my head. On ‘Meds,’ I am in control of Dev’s bass sound. On ‘Car Crash,’ I can change Joe’s vocal sound. There’s live production going on onstage.

The Grammys have been famously out of touch about recognizing the heavier side of rock music, which is why the two nominations for IDLES seem so significant. What, if anything, does this mean to you guys?
The nominations mean a lot, and its recognition within an industry. In America, we’ve been welcomed with open arms. Our experience with the industry here has been great. But we spent 12 years being a band and everyone ignored us, or said that rock and guitar music is dead. Nobody wanted to release our albums. It’s nice to be up there with a band like Turnstile. Who would have thought there’d be two quote-unquote hardcore bands with multiple Grammy nominations? That’s cool. The idea of saying music is better or worse or deserving of accolades doesn’t make sense to me, because most people would say my taste in music is terrible. It is a real honor to be nominated because all of my favorite massive bands have been Grammy-nominated. It shows that there’s potential for growth in the band, I think. That’s exciting. Anyone saying, hey, I think you’re band’s cool, whether it’s a 20-year-old kid discovering rock or hardcore, or a 65-year-old like my wife’s dad, who likes ‘Beachland Ballroom,’ that’s a plus.

Can IDLES write on the road? Have they?
Absolutely not [Laughs]. We wrote Ultra Mono on the road. Maybe 60% of it was written in soundchecks, and I don’t have a clue why that worked, because there’s absolutely no way in hell that would happen anymore. Ultra Mono is a very blunt, straightforward thing, and I think we’re looking to be slightly more complex and nuanced in our music now. That requires a bit of premeditation and discussion, as well as spontaneity. We’ve learned the hard way to set boundaries. When you’re gigging, you’re gigging. And when you’re writing and recording, you’re that. You’re a different beast.

Is there any new music percolating yet?
There is, yeah. We’re not a band who rests on our laurels and we’ve just been nominated for a Grammy a year into having an album out, so we’ll need to use that goodwill in some respects. We’ll be pushing forward as ever. The hunger is there as well. We were excited about what Crawler meant for the band, so we want to do it now, rather than wait for three years.

Of course you don’t want to just make a part two of Crawler, but generally, are you interested in continuing to push the sound to different places?
Yeah. What I enjoyed about the Crawler experience was that at certain points, I felt out of my depth. I’d play Kenny a track and tell him, I really want this to be good but I have no idea how to make it good. Kenny would be like, it’s really good! And I’d realize that it was. I want to try and get as much out of my depth as possible without it being a complete and utter calamity. However, I also think there’s a certain level of seriousness that came with the music on Crawler. There was a respect we had to show to the craft. What I love most about being in IDLES is, generally, the lack of respect we show anything, from hegemony to hierarchy to expectation or being told how to do something. We definitely have to do that. We can’t be a serious, navel-gazing band all the time. I really want to bring the chaos and the fun back in as well. The next stage of IDLES is taking something like Crawler and using the lessons we’ve learned there to bring the humor and fun and exhilaration of Brutalism and Joy back into the fold. That’s my goal with the next one.

Are you open to working with Kenny again?
100%.

What were some other highlights of the year for you?
We played Mexico for the first time, which was an incredible experience. It was pretty special. That was a big moment for us this year. My favorite gig this year was when we played Glastonbury. We did a secret set the following day where we played our first album in full. I went on in my underwear, like I used to. Joe had been over-indulging the night before and Dev was a mess. It was literally like we were transported back to 2016, playing to 20 people. We had the same gear and everything. It was the most fun I’ve had playing this year because it was complete chaos. All the muscle memory was still there.

Were there songs from that album that hadn’t been played in ages?
My God, yeah. Since Crawler, quite a bit of Brutalism has been nudged out. In certain countries, Brutalism wasn’t really a thing. There’s really only ‘Mother,’ ‘Dive and Conquer,’ and ‘Faith in the City’ that cling around the set routinely. I don’t think we’d ever played ‘Rachel Khoo’ live at a gig. We hadn’t played ‘Well Done’ in like three years either. Joe remembered all the lyrics, though. It was shocking. I think we were in some kind of weird time warp that brought us back to 2016, because it felt exactly the same.

Is it possible for musicians to stay sane on the road?
It always falls apart towards the end of a long year. It was definitely starting to fray at the edges the last couple of times we’ve been out. Generally, we’re quite good at giving each other space and checking in on each other. We don’t stay in bed until ridiculous o’clock and only wake up right before the show. One of the really hard things is the transition between touring. Ron Sexsmith was talking about this recently. You don’t really pay attention to the toll of performing every night until you come off the tour, and you realize your brain is mush. You can barely have a coherent conversation. Sometimes we’re good, and sometimes we’re not so good. But that’s just what being a touring band is.

What was some of your favorite music this year?
The Jockstrap album I really dig. I got really into death and black metal out of the blue. I’ve never been into metal in my entire life, and it looks like I’m wearing a metal t-shirt, but it’s actually a Big Thief t-shirt (laughs). Their album is good too. There’s a death metal band called 200 Stab Wounds who sound like Cannibal Corpse, but their riffs are so sick. That’s my album of the year — Slave to the Scalpel. It has some pretty harrowing artwork.

I saw that someone from IDLES played a King Gizzard song during a recent DJ set in Mexico. Did you check out any of their new albums?
I didn’t get a chance to. Didn’t they release a bazillion of them?

Just five this year [Laughs].
That level of prolific is too mysterious and mystical to me. I don’t know how they do it, because every Gizzard song I’ve listened to, I have enjoyed. I’ve been completely stumped by their catalog. I’m like, how the hell do I get in? The Ohsees are my level of prolific. I have managed to follow and understand them.

Have you heard from Mariah Carey about IDLES’ live version of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You?’
We haven’t, but hopefully she’ll be at the Grammys and we’ll be able to apologize. Although, she’s getting a little bit of the IDLES ticket price every night. We’re showing our respect through that.

For a period of time, you were reviewing spicy candy on your Instagram feed, but it has been a minute since your last update. Did you run out of things to analyze?
This is a two-pronged answer, I’m afraid. One, I became a dad, so social media is considerably less interesting to me. Rather, participating in social media. I don’t have the energy. Two, apparently there was a glut of capsicum out in the world. It was a bit like when there was a glut of Skittles and they were feeding them to cows. A big tanker crashed in Wisconsin and there were Skittles all over the motorway. People were like, why are there skittles on the motorway? It was because they were feeding them to cows. So apparently there was a big glut of spice, and they put it in candy. Everybody was adding it — Spicy Reeses Cups, Spicy Starburst. I think I got through all the best ones.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

For Angel Olsen, 2022 was in many ways about continuing to process the events of the past two years, which, beyond the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, encompassed a painful breakup, starting a new relationship, and coming out to her parents as queer. Her father died three days after she told them; her mother died weeks later.

Despite these experiences, Olsen emerged with the Jonathan Wilson-co-produced album Big Time, a return to her folk roots after a period of exploring different genres. She also toured with like-minded artists Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker. “I had gone through a lot of things that I can’t really talk about publicly — some of it was my parents passing away and some of it was health and relationship stuff,” says Olsen. These challenging events slowed her down and “fucked with” her, but also allowed her to view her work through a different, illuminating perspective.

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“I don’t feel grateful that shitty things happened all in a row, but I’ve had a really pure, eye-opening, approach to my music and the audience and what I do for the first time in years,” the singer/songwriter notes. “There’s nothing to fear anymore. Just connect with people and be good to yourself. So much of my career has been traveling and not enjoying it and really trying to work my ass off for some nomination. I’m finally at a point where I can do this for me.”

Olsen has big plans for 2023. She’s going on tour in mid-January and playing Red Rocks with Jason Isbell for two nights in the spring. She’s also working on a project was a collaborator she politely declines to identify. Looking back at 2022, Olsen reflects on touring with Van Etten and Baker, the book she wants to write, and what kind of music might be coming next.

SPIN: The Wild Hearts tour was one of the highlights of your year. What was it like to go back out on the road for your first proper tour since the pandemic?
Angel Olsen: I feel really humbled by the pandemic and by my experience. It allowed me to really just appreciate touring, even if it wasn’t looking the same and the audiences were smaller because of the pandemic and things happening in the world. Also, just being on tour with Sharon [Van Etten] and Julien [Baker] and Quinn [Christopherson], and being in a caravan of bands … it was really fun.

It’s cool also to just be at a point in my career where I’m not threatened to make choices where I collaborate with people who have been … Sharon and I have been compared to each other so much. I also think so much of my early career was just making sure you are the unique female artist. It’s so stupid. Now, there are so many [women in indie]. But I remember when [people thought] you can only have one, which is just simply not true.

With so many talented women in the industry finally getting their time to shine, it seems like there’s less pressure to jump through hoops to cater to what the industry and fans think you should be.
Yeah. The thing is, people will always say what they want to say about it because they’re seeing it through their lens. I just am learning to let go of that more and more. It’s taken years of therapy to balance wanting to care about how my music is perceived, but letting go of it if it’s not perceived the way I’d like it to be. I would be lying to myself if I were like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter what people think of my music.’ That’s not necessarily true. But I am at a point where I feel more comfortable taking risks.

You have a document prepared for journalists that lists topics that are off-limits. It’s surprising, because you’re someone who doesn’t hold back in interviews. Does it feel like having something like that helps you take control of how your personal life and work are presented without having it be warped through somebody else’s lens?
It is funny, because I change my mind so much. I think I just have to forgive myself for being protective and changing my mind. But all I can do is try to set some boundaries and then update them whenever I feel differently. I think it’s really easy to talk. I forget that, for example, because I’m not afraid to talk about it now, but at the beginning of my career, I really didn’t want to talk about my adoption. I think it’s one of those things that I forget. That it’s a stigma or it’s a thing that if you’re at a party or you’re around anybody and you say you’re adopted, someone’s like, ‘Oh, how was that?’ So I get it, but I just didn’t want my whole career to be, ‘And she’s adopted!’ So I was just like, ‘Why don’t we not talk about that for a little while?’

One day maybe I’ll write a book about it if I feel I can get to a place where I won’t psychoanalyze even my own projections of myself. I feel like I would be one of those people who writes a book at 36 years old and calls it something clever. But I would hate myself for putting something out and then being annoyed at myself for putting this out so soon.

Adoption is a no, relationships a no. But those are normal things to not want strangers to fixate on. It’s great that Big Time is a celebration of you coming out, while also tackling the heavy moments in your life that have come since then, like your breakups and your parents’ death. But I think people assume that because you’re so open about that in your music, you owe them access to the most invasive information.
To be honest, sometimes it’s really kind people who are doing their job as a journalist and they’re asking things like, ‘Can I contact your biological mother?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know why your editor thought that would be okay. But absolutely not. No, I don’t think that that would be okay for you to contact my biological mother as part of this interview. I think that, that’s really fucked up. And I wouldn’t have agreed to do the article with you, had I known that would’ve been your intention.’

That’s the reason why I am so protective, because it is no one’s business. I share a lot of myself and I’m so willing to share the depths of my disappointments through my music and my experiences. Why do you need more? I just don’t understand. I’m giving everything. It’s all out there in the music [and] in what I say about the music.

I’ve had interviews on this record about my parents and stuff and they’re like, ‘How are you?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m OK. How are you?’ They’re like, ‘Well, this is a very personal record.’ And then they state, ‘So, your parents died.’ You don’t have to state the facts for me before you ask me a question. We already know that.

It is interesting finding out in interviews how people deal with death because everyone is afraid to say it out loud. I just find it so funny. I’m like, ‘Oh, the inevitable truth of everyone.’ Yeah, that did happen. But I think I give as much of myself as I possibly can. There should be space for me though, to protect myself a little bit.

I remember reading you had written a 10-page essay explaining Big Time and your thoughts and feelings from the time it was written. Do you think you’ll ever share that?
I don’t know. I did it as an exercise to just figure out what was in it that we could use. And then I feel the label [thought] this needs to be [written] from someone else’s perspective because you’re so in it, and they weren’t wrong. But it did make me think for a while that maybe I should be writing other things. It’s scary to act or it’s scary to risk what you are good at by trying something else not good at, or you’re still learning things about in a public way.

Hopefully, maybe one day I’ll write a book of essays that’s not necessarily all autobiographical, but some that are just some words that are autobiographical and some that aren’t. I think that would be more my style than to be, ‘and it all happened here.’ But I wish that I could let go of how much of a writer I am sometimes, because when I listen back to interviews, and I mean this as a musician, I just wish I could just give something to people.

I’m so protective of the intention of the thing that I want to talk about it philosophically with the person because it’s important to me. I think for me, I need to let other people interpret things more and just let go of that as a writer. I’ve just spent a lot of time thinking about every process of what I do. And it’s part of why I have been so deeply disappointed when people misinterpret it.

You were working on a screenplay. What is happening with that?
The screenplay’s finished, but I need to write the book. Because if I ever want to do anything with it, it has to be a book first. That’s just how these things work. You can’t just be like, ‘I’m a musician, and I want to be a screenwriter.’

But I did it as an exercise to just see if I could do it. It’s not the most amazing piece of work. I don’t know how people make films, because as a director and writer and all this stuff, I’m down to just write it and get it out of the way. Sitting with a film for two-and-a-half, three years, through the whole process of it, watching it change dramatically from where you thought you wanted it to be based on what the producers say and the people who are spending the money on it … it just sounds so fucking unrewarding. That’s part of why I like making music videos, because you can do so much and you can make music so quickly that I don’t know if I have the capacity or patience to make something that takes that much time away from my life emotionally.

Your work keeps evolving, with you working on many projects at a time and often taking on different genres. What was it like to return to your folk roots for Big Time after so many years of experimentation?
I released an Americana record and I’m so proud of it. Of all my work, I think it’s probably the most accessible. Not accessible — what’s the word? It’s all one piece, whereas other records are a mixed bag of different styles of things that I’ve acquired throughout the years. This one feels more concrete, from start to end, which I’m proud of.

And yet I know that musically I’ll probably go on to do something completely different. I was thinking today as I was driving around, ‘Why can’t I just turn out the same genre? I don’t know what’s wrong with me?’ But I just have to keep changing it up. And it’s not always by choice — it’s just subconscious, like, ‘Oh, this is what I’m into right now.’ So, I don’t know what’s next, but I don’t think it’s Americana.

At least this year you kept it simple with just Big Time. Last year you had so much going on, with Whole New Mess [an alternate version of All Mirrors] and your ’80s covers EP, Aisles. You’re keeping fans on the edge of their seats wondering what you’ll do next.
I know. And I think it’s been almost to my detriment that I keep changing. I feel I am successful. But I think if I made vibe music, my music would probably reach more people. It’s just something I think about a lot. I just need to make a record that’s just vibes … just hardly understandable lyrics with really nice, floaty sounds. Something they can play at the local H&M or something.

Because what I’m doing is, I put everything of me into [my music] and I psychoanalyze it and I make it this thing. I need to just chill. I listen to a lot of music that’s not lyrical — mainly Brian Eno — and not everything has to be a story. I’m trying to embrace that more in my writing, without necessarily falling into your typical vibe music.

I’m not trying to be Meryl Streep with my career. I just like to explore. I never want to get bored, and I never want to be boring. I want to always just push it a little bit. And it has been to my detriment, I think, a little bit. But that’s okay. Because I don’t want to be stuck producing the same shit.

Are you already beginning to work on whatever’s next?
I’m working on something now that I’m probably just going to self-release or release under my label, maybe. That’s the hope. I don’t want to make something that’s heavily produced every time. And I want to have more opportunities to do that without risking everything and having to do every single thing to keep up with the current. I just want to make something without everybody having their hand in it. I want to take risks and be weird and have the opportunity to do that. I loved talking about Big Time, even if it was hard because that record was really meaningful to me. It was just crazy that I even went into the studio that early after everything that happened.

But I just felt [producer] Jonathan [Wilson] and everybody involved in the record really understood this space. They understood what I was going for. I didn’t have to over-explain. So it was really nice to make a record where I had the words to say what I wanted and it was understood.

I saw your Instagram post that was a half-joking obit to your iconic bangs, which you’ve been growing out throughout the year. You wrote that you’re no longer hiding behind the frame. Do you actually feel that way?
No. It was really fun to say that though!

It’s easy to buy it either way because it’s been such a big year of transformation for you.
The whole campaign for the record was just trying to be cheeky. And then some of it was, we were getting really into ’70s ads, and my manager was like, ‘what if we did ’70s ads for the campaign?’ I was like, ‘Ooh, I love ’70 ads, where they’re over-explained or they’ll say things that are just very apparent.’

So I was like, ‘Let’s just be weird in our advertising about this. Let’s have fun with it.’ I think that was just one of the many things that fell into line with that. But for me, I’m going to keep changing. I do know that I feel like myself and I feel I’m still me throughout all of the changes. I’d gone through a breakup. When you go through a breakup, you get a haircut, and you’ve got to cut off the grief a little bit. I thought I needed something else. I need to look different for a little while. But I finally feel mostly back to myself.

After such a difficult 2021, it seems like you’re getting more in touch with yourself now and relearning who you are, too.
I think that the pandemic still left a low-grade depression on everybody. But it really, really was a hard time for me personally because of what had happened in my life. I just separated from my body. And now I’m like, ‘Huh, people don’t just drink all day because it’s the end of the world. It is the end of the world, still. But we have to try [to persevere].’

Part of that is taking care of your body and your mind, making sure that you’re connecting with people, and not letting yourself get into these patterns of being alone and convincing yourself of negativity. I’m glad there are distractions so that I can doomscroll sometimes, because I don’t know if I have the space to hold all of it. I am grateful that I live in a place where I can go out into nature and forget about people and forget about what I do, and I don’t have to be up against it all the time.

But there’s so much that has happened and I am still emotionally processing all of it. And so I’m thankful that I had music to work on. People might think it’s crazy to make a record when your parents die or to do something like that, but it’s really important to exorcize those feelings and get them out and start the process of grieving, instead of trying to numb yourself to it. You can’t compartmentalize dealing with that. It just comes up in its own ways at different times for different reasons. You have to continue working through it.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.