Chalk: a relentless and genre-busting band from Belfast

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: It's a little bit early in the day for rock and roll, I would imagine, but thank you for making it.

Ben: It's okay. Yeah, jet lag still. Actually, we've been okay with jet lag. We're still early rising.

Luke: We got some good rest, slept well, and are feeling quite regulated, I'd say. Yeah, we've adjusted.

LP: I take it you're not having the South By that you planned on having?

Ross: We've been here with our girlfriends for a couple of days now, just taking in the city of Austin, which is great.

LP: Have you seen any music?

Ross: Yeah, we've seen a couple of different acts. I think there was an act called Artless Jab, which was really cool. It was their first show at the Cheer Up Charlies. Yeah, they were great.

Luke: Maia Simonez from New York City. She played at Twinkie's, Central Austin. We just walked in. We just happened by chance upon that gig, and it was really cool. There was a lot of Bossa Nova influence, and it was a great show. Really cool venue as well. It was just outdoors. They were just playing by this tree and in this outdoor area at the pub. Those are the kind of gigs I think I love - just showing up and seeing an artist I've never heard of.

LP: It's what South By is great for.

Luke: But no, first impressions of the city have been great. It's a really cool place. Obviously, we're not used to the heat. It feels very hot for us. I don't know about locals, but we're coming from about eight or nine degrees Celsius weather back home at the minute, so it's been adjusting to the heat as well, but the city's been amazing. Really cool, the skyline, it's something a lot bigger than Belfast, scale anyway, but, yeah, really cool.

LP: It's interesting you say that about the heat. I was dreading coming down because it can be very punishingly hot here this time of year, but it's actually pretty mild.

When I was preparing for our time together, one of the things that I read - I forget which publication it was - but it was basically trying to describe the genre that you guys operate in, and it said you were "pulsating techno rock." And I was like - you know, it's one of those things where I'm not big on asking artists to talk about genre or categorize themselves. But I was like, well, those are kind of meaningless words. And then, as I listened to you more, I was like, actually, it is kind of pulsating techno rock! (laughter)

Luke: Yeah. I mean, there's certainly been a lot of different terms branded around the band's sound and things. And I think there are definitely words that we've all discussed in the past when we were trying to formulate that sound, and "pulsating" is a great word. I'll take that. That means to me there's a lot of energy there, and if people are getting that from the music, what we're after, I think that's really.

Ben: Something quite rhythmic about pulsating as well isn't there, which feels appropriate.

Luke: Yeah, there's also "Berghain Rock," which was one we got, you know, referencing the club in Berlin. That's a cool one. We're just kind of happy for people to say what they feel about the music, and we like people having different opinions and views on the sound.

LP: Is there a governing principle or a mission statement for the band? When you're starting a project, do you have to sit around and say, "Alright, here's the objective," like you might with an outside producer or something like that?

Ross: Not really, but I think we each sort of came together wanting to do something a bit different in the region of just our city, Belfast, and even now, that scope has grown to Ireland and trying to do something that's new to us but still taking in the influences around us. But I think we're still so early on in this stage of our careers that we're still trying to figure ourselves out as people as well, and I think that the tool of the band is maybe helping us find ourselves a bit more, at least personally, that's what I'm hoping to get out of it.

Luke: Early days of the band, we were very good at talking and conceptualizing things. We weren't really playing gigs, so a lot of the conversation was just around, "Okay, what is the objective?" We definitely had those discussions about trying to cross the borders between punk and dance and techno and how can we achieve that and get a bit of everything from our city into one kind of group of music, essentially. I think just all that talking - it was always in our heads that whole time, and I think it made writing the music just a little bit easier for us early on because we had this idea of the sound, just from fleshing it out through conversation.

Ben: It's good when you do stuff like that as well because if you talk about it a lot, even when you're not actively doing it, you're always thinking about it. It's like when you're writing: if you're not physically writing, it's going over in your head. I could only recommend trying to really spend the time to figure out what you want to do and then just try your best to encapsulate that in any way you can.

Luke: It's probably just - it's definitely felt with some level of angst to the city. So there's always going to be somewhat of an aggression to our music. I think we always want to have that kind of heavy side to the music in the spirit of it. And I think that is maybe something that you're born with in Belfast. Obviously, it has a troubled past, but it's not something we necessarily directly attach to the music. it's definitely something that's subconsciously there, this kind of rebellious spirit. And that just comes through with the bashing nature of some of the songs we have.

Ross: The dance side of Belfast is like the biggest genre there for gigs and concerts. Whereas compared to somewhere like Dublin, guitar bands are more popular. So, as we talked about in the early days, trying to bring something from both worlds together was a long process because we were a completely different band when we started. We were basically on the verge of that wave of bands like Parquet Courts, who we were big fans of, and just that wave of British guitar bands in the last five years. We were sort of watching everyone do a lot more of the spoken word thing and the guitars, like that idea of the post-punk revival. We were very much aware of it, but now we've come out and realized, you know, we just want to take what's around us, the dancing and Belfast, and we all enjoy that side of things as well. We try to do something new, challenge ourselves, and not just fall into this sort of pigeonhole of that world or just another sort of project.

Ross: We all met in university. We started university in 2017 and we met - was it the first or second year? It was probably the first.

Luke: Ben and I met originally, and we started throwing around the concept of starting a band just because I knew he played guitar. I was drumming for years at the time, and we always threw the idea of maybe starting something as a band together, but I don't think we ever rehearsed together or anything. It was just this idea we had in conversation. And then, I think maybe in our second year at uni, we discovered through Ben's partner that Ross had this kind of poster in his room. It was like this band, Girl Band, from Dublin. And we knew immediately that Ross would be into a similar kind of range of music to us. So, I think we had that conversation then with Ross, and we formed from there. So it did start at uni.

Ben: The thing is 2017, but our first gig is like 2019? So that's why we talk about it. It's like a long time, but we're all friends really as well. And I suppose the fact we were in film school, we were like there to learn how to make films. That's why we are - so it wasn't that we were a band, but we were like great friends, and we're learning film, but then we're kind of slowly starting to rehearse and stuff, and it's like a slow thing. So that's why it feels longer for us.

Luke: The debut single came out in 2022, "Kimura."

Ross: Yeah, we all kind of, me and you lived together. And we responded to the right music and gave it a go. The music was written around probably 2021 and was the first inklings of Chalk. It was the project that we had been working on before. We had our friend Ethan, who was the bassist. We were called a different name. And then we just took that time off with lockdown and things like that and we decided to take the project a bit further, something new for us, and that's enter Chalk.

Ross: Yeah, definitely. It forced us - we were all living in Belfast. We all moved back home. We were still in our final year of film school, so we had things to do, but I found myself a bit more involved in making demos. I was getting more into Logic Pro X with an audio interface and getting more into that and recording things. I think maybe three or four months into the pandemic, I already had three or four demos that I could send to the guys that had drums that were just from the software, just as a demo, and I would never have had that before. So it forced into the room lots more time to do things, and I was able to send the guys some of my early ideas. It kind of did prove to be a blessing. I don't know, if we were still in university and living there, I don't know if it would have happened.

Luke: It just gave us time to get hands-on. Obviously, we were still fighting about roles, and there was a period of time when I went to their house and moved in for a month, and we brought the electronic drum kit, and that was the first time we actually started really adding things to Logic files and things like that. You had all these ideas that were finally being fleshed out and developed, and that's where the debut single came from.

Ben: We also couldn't do anything but write songs. There was no work - it was pretty good, it was like COVID pay and stuff like that. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't work on film or work in general. People just weren't working. And you couldn't even go to gigs or any shows or something like that. And because we were around each other, ideas were forming. It was around that time - from what Ross was saying, when those original demos were happening, it was like, okay, this is something, and it was different to the stuff that we were thinking about or playing a few years before, but it finally felt like, oh, this is actually our sound here, and it took that time, but we were just maybe different, where we never gigged to find our sound, we just - maybe it was a more maddening way of doing it. That's why when we released the song, it was a thing where nobody knew who we were because we weren't a band because we didn't play even though we'd been together for four years. We'd never really played a show.

Luke: We weren't in the music scene or anything. We weren't pillars of music of any kind of scene, and so when the song came out, I was like, "What the hell?"

Ben: Yeah, what's this? It's because it wasn't road-tested at all; it was bedroom-tested.

Ross: Yeah, it was a bedroom project for like a year.

LP: Were you a singer before this group? Because they both spoke about having already been playing for a while, but had you been a singer before?

Ross: No. I think in the early days of the band, Ben and I were sort of doing vocals, and I had a guitar, and I was playing lead guitar. But I think I was in a duo with my friend Alex, and he was the better singer, so he sang, and I just played the guitar.

Luke: I didn't realize you could shout really well. I just can't do that. I immediately need to cough and throw up or something, but Ross can shout so well; he could really project that.

Ben: That was in those rehearsals where I'd sing two or three songs, and my voice would be gone completely. But I remember early on; it was like Ross can shout with inflection if you get what I mean. You can actually hear emotion and stuff like you could convey with the shout, which was incredible. It was like, this is obvious. And I was like, yeah, I'm not singing. This is what we're doing now.

Luke: Definitely got a lot to radio, because, thanks to a couple of pals in bands in Ireland. They touched on this idea of radio plugging and we had no idea what that was. It felt quite foreign and alien to us. We were like, "Okay, this is groovy. I'm not sure about going down this path." But through this service, we managed to get the song onto the airwaves on BBC 6 Music, which is a huge deal for alternative music in the UK and Ireland. It's the station you want to listen to discover new alternative bands, and it got on there, got on Steve Lamacq's Daily Show, onto the roundtable. It ended up winning the track of the week on that, and then from there, we just had promoters, agents, and emails all of a sudden coming through, and it just was so quick, it was just a complete whirlwind those next few weeks.

Ross: I think credit to—we're film students, so Ben directed the music video, and I shot it and edited it. We had all of us in the video, and we came out of it with this product, like this aesthetic, and the video really helped for the debut single.

Ben: It's a really interesting thing because we really didn't know anything. The one thing we did know - well, we learned, we were so green, so it's this kind of thing just for people - it's like, we just heard of a radio plugger. It was basically you could pay someone just to show it to Radio 6 so it was able just to get it in the eyes of Radio 6 DJs, and then all we had was the song, and we thought we were film students, we'll make a video for it, so that's what we had. And then it's just like how these things happen - it was like the one - because we didn't have management or anything, we didn't really know how to do it. That's just like the fortune of that song did well on the radio. When people then looked at us, all they saw was a video of that song. And it just happened to be that was just enough for, as Luke said, like promoters - like some really good promoters got on. And then they put us in contact with our booking agent, Mother Artists. They're the booking agency for like, Idles and Foster the People. It's like huge, but so it's just one of those things where - and when we got them, we still didn't play a gig for like-

Luke: No, but they were so good, they were so patient with us. Clearly, they have such a keen eye on scouting these new bands, and they were just happy to let us do our thing. They thought they saw something in that video and the song that was different and unique enough to make a splash in the scene, and fair play to them, they took a gamble. We love those guys so much, they basically were pseudo-managing us for the first few months. They were giving us a lot of advice in emails and in Zoom calls and advising us on the next best steps. We were eternally grateful to those guys, and we still have a really strong relationship with them. And we couldn't have asked for a better booking agent to lead us through the unknown.

Ross: And it gave us - it allowed us to gauge ahead of all these people we were going to meet, like, in the next year. That sort of gut feeling, that sort of trust, we knew that they were good people, we had that feeling. And we were able to build this sort of filter whenever we were deciding to work with certain people. We knew that Mother, them, Natasha, and James set the benchmark. And if we didn't feel right, we would always just compare how they came across. And it was - it felt, yeah, it felt right.

Ben: It's the classic thing as well, where if we knew what we knew now, we never would have done what we did at all. I couldn't even like it because you got ahead of yourself. Well, like, you're just like, well, yeah, so like, we wouldn't release the song, and then not have any of our songs, and not be able to play a gig. You know what I mean? Like, it's ridiculous, but that's what - this is the brilliance of it as well, and it's like, I suppose it's - you've just got to do your own thing kind of. Yeah, I guess I wouldn't even advise people really to maybe just release the song and see- maybe you should, but-

Luke: I think it's a kick up the ass. Because it was a kick up the ass because we suddenly had pressure then - okay, we gotta deliver and start really taking this seriously and writing new stuff.

Ben: We've talked a lot about - I mean, one of the biggest things would probably be right now - so we just put the second EP out; we weren't ready for an album. We just felt conceptually like it was a big thing for us, an album, and we were still figuring ourselves out. That was definitely the first EP, maybe. It was like taking it song by song, and then you're just - I suppose we treated the first EP like an album we had in our head because there's like a narrative for it, and there's themes and all that kind of stuff. But I suppose, just off the top of my head, maybe six months ago, eight months ago, we weren't ready for the debut album.

Luke: The first EP was definitely single by single, and I think we realized after the fact that we had created some kind of narrative and story, and so that was definitely something that came into the second EP, which in turn it was, to be honest with you, an EP that came from the live show, and we started playing these songs live and thought, this is interesting, the crowd reaction we're gauging, how people are viewing these different songs, we were playing with different genres all of a sudden, like the song "Claw," you know, we're just embracing that techno experience more, and we started to say, "Okay, hold on, we can piece together this scenario," and that's where Conditions II came into, really. We realized we had something coherent, and we wanted to make EPs that weren't just a typical throw of a couple of songs, and this here it is, an EP at the end. We wanted to have some kind of continuation and narrative element to it. To the album point, I think, like Ben said, we just weren't really ready to build that right now. I think we definitely will be very soon, and we're very excited about that. We're so excited to work on an album. But I think it just felt right between the three of us and between Chris as well, our producer, to work on these EPs and create something with those EPs and not just throw it out there.

LP: How did you connect with Chris?

Ross: Well, we were aware of Chris' work with the Nola Gay and Just Mustard and Newdad, Irish bands, so we just reached out.

Ben: And he's from Belfast as well, which was the big thing.

Ross: There weren't really any other options —I don't think there were any other. There were some options down south, maybe, but in Belfast, he was the first choice, and we were delighted to get that email back that he wanted to work with us.

Luke: Oh, we were buzzing because we had honestly crowded him early doors, like, "This is our guy." He was doing all the Shoegaze stuff, all the post-punky stuff, and just felt perfect in that world. And the way our relationship with him has blossomed in such a short space of time has been amazing. We just see Chris as one of our closest friends and another member of the band, really.

Ross: Yeah, as I've said in the past, he's like the fourth member, an unofficial member.

Ben: It's like a George Martin situation, you know, that, the fifth Beatle member. He's just a great guy.

LP: Does he have his own studio?

Ben: Yeah. He has a home studio, yeah.

Luke: He's a great drummer and great frontman of Rubicava Quartet, a band. He's a really cool band. But I think the thing we love about Chris is that he's so experimental and willing just to do whatever, just get really weird in the studio, and just try things. We love that because we just kind of record things in layers; we're not like a live recording band, so we can just experiment so much with it. And Chris is always great with that.

Ross: It's that bedroom project feel as well. A Chalk song could still be written on a laptop. It doesn't need to be written in a room or anything. But he's sort of allowed us to flourish, and I think that's what a good producer does. And he's made us comfortable as well. So that's just the relationship that we've built on and will continue to.

Luke: I'll always remember the first time we thought, "Okay, Chris is serious." 'Cause when we were in the studio recording the debut single, we'd never worked in a studio before, never worked with a producer before. And he just said, "Cut the entire first chorus, just get rid of it." "Just lose the first chorus and just go into the second verse, after a little long section." And I just thought, "Wow, okay," because immediately the weight came off the song. It just felt way brighter and more engaging.

LP: That's incredible, isn't it?

Luke: Yeah, I just dropped the chorus, and we were like, "Oh God, that's insane just to say that." And we tried it, and we're like, "Okay, he is - he knows his stuff. And this might work out here really well for us," you know? So that was - that was a moment I'll always remember. Like, just compositionally, you can just drop a chorus like that and it can really lift the song.

Ross: It normally starts at home. A computer, I'm maybe coming up with some ideas and some lyrics and words and just programming some simple drums or whatever, and then it normally moves to Luke's house, where he's got his setup, and I'll bring the setup. We work on the song a bit more, and then the three of us are together, maybe in the room where we rehearse or at Luke's, talking about the song a bit more, going back and forth throughout the demo, and doing different versions of the song. And then when we're happy, we give it to Chris and go around to his house, do some pre-production. All three of us are there and then move it to the studio, and we're all there playing the parts.

LP: So you start again, or do you use the demo?

Ross: Start with the demo. The demo, like early on, Chris was very keen on some of the demo material. I'd say a lot of the music that you hear is from the demos, and I have no experience in music production. It was just something that I learned a bit more about during the lockdown, but it was very nice to hear Chris's sort of, yeah, "Keep whatever you're doing; don't change anything. The sounds you're coming up with are quite raw and cool," and he can fix them.

Luke: Keeps it grounded is cool, isn't it? I have like drum recordings just from my bedroom of a snare, and that's still in the track, the final product, and it's just like this rough recording I did so I could sound raw, so quick before I went to work or something, I just threw it together. And it's still in there and Chris really embraces that. I love that in the production side of things. It's really cool.

LP: Are all of the drums live, or do you sample?

Luke: There's definitely elements of layering with electronic drums and different elements of percussion, but I love getting in the studio, and the fact that all those live drums are in the song means a lot to me, you know. I never want to lose that connection with the drums. I think that one of the cool things about our music is having live drums and still having this dance element to it. I think the live drums - I just love having that in the recording still. So they'll always be in there, but there might be certain songs where we embrace kind of electronic snare sounds more, like "Bliss," where you really get that kind of '80s New Order kind of snare sound, but yeah, I think we all like having live drums rooted in there always.

LP: So much of what you referenced only exists because of the technology, right? And there's now a good - at least twenty years into the ability for the first sort of consumer HD cameras were around, and you've mentioned the audio production software multiple times that allowed you to come out appearing fully formed, to present a sonic and visual universe. And I'm really curious about the video portion in particular because my perception is that it's a little easier with audio, right? It's a different medium, but the video is a bit less forgiving. I'm watching it, it has to look a certain way. Does the film school background - are you shooting above your weight in terms of the production value? How does your education impact what we're seeing on the screen?

Ben: It's interesting because the band itself is always very DIY. It was a very important thing for us, especially Ross, very early on. And it's really the same for the videos. It was important that, like most times, our videos are like a crew of four, five, six. And like two of them are actors. Just for our film backgrounds, we've worked on stuff with people who have ten crew, twenty crew. Me and Luke have worked on Dungeons and Dragons, like, you know, which had, I don't know, like 500 people or something like that? So there's a real freeing element. So the film school definitely helped. The videos were a very important way because they were something we could have complete creative control over. We really like black and white. It really works for us. We love digital. Digital is amazing, even though we sometimes push digital in our videos to look like film. Still, the manipulation of it is very - that's why we're big fans of digital and being able to do unlimited possibilities. But the black and white really helped because we love it, but we were shooting it on a DSLR and, like Ross's stepdad's, a really good DSLR. And Ross is like shooting it, but because we wanted to look like '60s black and white movies, like half of our videos, like, there are spots on the camera, you know, like there's dirt on it, and that's not intentional at all, but thankfully, yeah, thankfully that was - you see a little hair sometimes.

Ben: But it's just because we're doing that, and we're just trying to do very - we just like that stark black and white, and it just thankfully so happens to favor that kind of DIY approach. But it was very much ours - that was what was so great about it - and I think that's one thing we knew even though we only had one song from that. We wanted to be able to create something, a music video that was in service to the song but could also live alongside it. Basically, it had to be a music video that established who we were as a band without us being in it. And I think it definitely achieved that. Even achieving it made people ask more questions. It was like the one thing we had just to get people interested. At work, which is great.

LP: Something that strikes me about what you were saying at the very beginning was the small crew and a couple of actors, and in the limited - limited experience I've had making a film, it always - especially when it's DIY filmmakers, it's like everybody works on everybody else's project. So somebody might need a script supervisor and so you might have different credit on five different projects because you're helping your friend make their thing. And then when it's your turn, they come, and they, you know, tote the lights or whatever for you. Just having access to all those different skill sets plays a part in this.

Ben: Totally, but what was great was we kind of went through film school and working on other films - we made the films knowing we could make them with three or four people, you know, but that is - Ross did like camera and lighting. I mean, they're all natural lights. We shoot stuff like that in our living room, you know, with a black sheet over it. The band members are also the actors, like in costume or like our friends. Luke is like the big demonic ghost thing, standing on like an apple box.

Ben: You know, so he's like eight foot tall. And I just have our guy producers and all that stuff in there with me holding the stool.

LP: Yeah, it's like the grand tradition of doing it.

Ben: Yes, it was just a really nice way of - it was making our videos, which is basically what I thought moviemaking was when I was a kid. It really is - you just go and make something cool with your friends, and it's not like whenever something has like a £20,000 or £50,000 or £5 million - we've worked on a film that had a $200 million budget, you know? It's not like that at all. And when you even go to film school, you start learning the ways you're supposed to do stuff. All the department heads and all that, you know? Which is great, and you need to do them, but so the music videos for us, it really is - it's nice to be - I suppose it's like anything, it's the fewer people involved, just choose as many key collaborators as you can just to - and everyone's on the same page to make a cohesive vision. But also we love collaboration as well.

Ben: Maybe it's one of those - because fundamentally, everything is done because of lack of resources. Really, I mean, we didn't - I'm sure we would have made videos with twenty people if we could have, you know what I mean? But - I mean, we enjoy it. And same thing - and it's also like, you have to have a - if you don't have a massive gigantic network of people, you do just do stuff yourselves.

Luke: Yeah, that's just the reality. The minute we're forced, the way you guys are doing it and the way you're directing it, so that's just the way it is—our hand is forced at the minute. It's hard to know when more resources are involved. How will that all go down? I guess we'll find out at some point.

LP: Is it important to you guys to not be on camera other than with a hooded-

Ben: Well, no. So we did the first - we just did a video for our last song, which came out a few weeks ago. And we're in it. And that's a big thing for us. That was a big deal. 'Cause we did-

LP: Like some sort of a Pink Floyd thing, like not gonna be on the album covers.

Ben: It felt right for the song; it would be our most indie—or pop-oriented song. It's a stupid word to throw out there, you know what I mean.

LP: I'm really curious about the live shows and about the live presentation of this music. When I was first listening, going through all the music and listening and then reading some other interviews - they were from a different point in time where you were alluding to just starting to get on stage and build the show. You guys talked a little bit earlier about the evolution of that. The video from KEXP was definitely helpful to watch because I was very intrigued, and it's something that's actually been interesting about this visit to South By in particular. There are so many bands that don't have the sort of traditional guitar, bass, drum, or keyboard setup, and it's really fun to stand there as an audience member and be like, "Where the fuck is all that sound coming from? Is everybody like using all their limbs to make noise?" I feel like it's finally - electronic-based or electronic-heavy music is really starting to find a compelling live presentation that equals what a great rock band can do, where you could actually watch people and be intrigued. I don't know, it's an exciting moment to see. And so I went into looking for some video of you all live to see - how do they pull this off? It was only a little bit into I think "Static" is the first track - I was like, "Okay, I get this. This is like - this is heavy shit." One thing I'm curious about is that the video seems to be fairly relentless. It's track after track. Was it edited that way, or is that your live presentation? Like you get on stage, and it's boom, we just keep going with no stops.

Ross: That's live. Yeah, it's - it's one after the other. We set it up that way. We know the exact setlist before going on. So sometimes transitions in between the songs, but the idea is for the early days, it was like it's just like a DJ set. We wanted to sort of meld the tracks one after the other seamlessly. In some tracks, there's just a small gap in audio, but it's all pre-planned. There's pretty much no silence. It's why I'm always tuning my guitar.

LP: So you're leaving an audience - the idea is like the audience is gonna be pummeled. (laughter)

Ben: And why we have short enough sets, 'cause it's quite a physical - there is no - it's like Ross said, it's a DJ set, it doesn't stop, basically. And yeah, it's great that KEXP was able to encapsulate that just in seventeen minutes, but that is like our live show. It's like when it's like for forty minutes, it's just - it doesn't stop.

Luke: At the start, there are parts of the set where people aren't sure if the song is over. They had to clap, and oh, I think we've got that little illusion and something a bit different for an audience member. They're not sure whether to dance or mosh.

Ben: There are no applause breaks.

Luke: Yeah, because we don't just stop and say, "Okay. There's your time to applaud, audience. Let me do the next one." It's just like, let's keep going, and people can just get on the train with us. Do you know what I mean? And let's just see how this goes. Every gig was different because of that at the start, you know?

LP: Can you see a world where you build up to like a seventy-minute set that's like that? Can you do that?

Ben: We're working on it. (laughter) Well, that's why we have a song like "Kevlar." Actually, that's very good. There's a song on the album that is a live set, which is just Ross singing. So maybe that's also so you get a breather. You guys can just cool out for a minute.

Luke: Yeah, I gotta get a break in somewhere as if, yeah, risks, you know, but, yeah, no, we love playing with the live set. And as Ross said, the DJ set thing, like we just thought, let's try this as a band set up and just see what people think of it. And I think people have grabbed onto that, and we just love doing it that way. I think we'll just continue with it.

LP: Is everything generated live, or are you triggering pre-recorded things?

Luke: Yeah, we don't have a bass player live, of course. So most of what you're going to hear is just pumping - bass through the system. There are definitely a few elements of percussion in there, and there are a few kinds of vocal effects scattered in there.

LP: And you're all just triggering stuff as you- It's just yeah, you're playing, and you're now - it's crazy.

Luke: Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I honestly think it's like bands like Death Grips. We love Death Grips, and those guys run tracks and - but it's the energy they bring to the stage that really grabs you and captivates people. And I think with three of us, there was a bit of extra pressure on us to really give energy and go for it. But I think all of us just feel incredibly painful after a gig because we're throwing our necks around, bodies around. We're all like old men really deep down. I think it's because I have a bad neck after every gig like he's moving loads. Yeah, but I think like we love that - we don't honestly - I think the way the world's going - there's so many bands running tracks now, and like yeah, it's just part of that way to get a bigger sound. We can't really afford to pay a lot of people - people that kind of come in and play with us right now. So this is - as a three - how we've achieved the sound on stage.

Ben: It was also our band. And we never knew, you know, before we ever played, we just had to make a decision where, okay, do we become a five-piece now to make this? Pay this live or do we figure out how to do it as a three and then make it - and that was like a big thing for us. 'Cause we didn't like - you know, we didn't just like to start with a five-piece and then just will away. It's - it's just the bands are three of us, so we're gonna perform it as the three.

Luke: Yeah. And the three is just - become this thing now, this kind of visual representation of the band. We have the three of us in a line on stage. There are no drums, if we can. Festivals can be difficult sometimes, but with the changes of changeovers, drums are always on the kind of stage right, rather than back and center, you know, we just have this line of the three of us. I think that's really worked for us as well. And it's just something slightly different for an audience member to look at and think, "Okay, it's not normal - drums are in the back. You can't see the drummer," you know, for me, that's lovely in a selfish way, you know, I'm just like, "I'm upfront. That's really cool." And we love that layout on stage.

LP: Yeah, it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. It's really an exciting time, too; like I was saying earlier - the formula - can be blown up now.

Ben: Yeah, and it does feel where we've had, I think, zero pushback. I'm trying to think of anyone being funny about the way we - because we - because we really went into being like, "We are here to put on a show as well. We can provide that show. It doesn't matter how we do it." Yeah. Because we are able to, and people are - I think - I think it's just all about how people leave after you finish playing. That's really what matters. How they feel after it. And we've just had a positive response. We haven't had too many analog heads or anyone being like, "You can't do that," really.

LP: I think that train has left the station. Anyone who wants to be that way is just being picky.

Luke: Yeah, totally. And to be honest with you, I think people - speak for all of us here. We love getting those little questions about "How did you achieve that?" We love creating the mystery of it. Some people might not know how that is- That's cool. Love that. Love the mystique of it.

Ross: I got asked the question - we did a festival show, and I was doing the vocal effects and the delays. Someone told me they were having an argument with their friend about how it was being done. Was I triggering it, or was it someone off-stage, or was it pre-recorded? Yeah, that's cool.

LP: Yeah, it's awesome. I think it's great, and as an audience member, it's just fun to see and like it's just different. There's not - you go see a rock band, a traditional rock band if you will - but there is not a lot of mystery, and you can love it in different ways. It just adds to the - just adds.

Ben: We like the - I feel like the more - we are very open about saying stuff and kind of say - but we do love the mystery as well because I think that's always - we like talking about stuff, but I do know, as soon as you do reveal a lot of stuff, it removes that, and people like that. I like the mystique as well. I don't like knowing how the sausage is made. You know, there's just something cool about it. It keeps you guessing and thinking. You don't want to answer every question.

LP: I saw a band last night, Mong Tong. It was billed as a Taiwanese psychedelic band. And I was like, "I'm signing up for that. That sounds great." And it was - it's great. Two guys, one has a bass strapped to them, and the other has a guitar strapped to them. They both have what look like the same kind of setups that Kraftwerk has. You can't tell if it's a keyboard or just some kind of modular synth thing or whatever. And then - so they're next to each other with these stations, and then in between them, if they turn and face each other, they have these rolling drum pads. They come out. They put on blindfolds. They pull the blindfolds down, so you can definitely tell they're not cheating. And they start hitting things with sticks. And one guy has a Chinese flute. There are delays, and there are processing. And it gets to the point where you can't even tell what's looped, what's live, what's sampled. Some of it was incredibly abstract. Some of it was incredibly rhythmic and dancy. It was - it's pretty crazy. So if you have a chance to see that.

Luke: That's crazy. I don't think that's something we want to play. I'd love to play around with that more. We love that band Holy Fuck. Holy Fuck. They're creating it all. They're in the flesh, like all these loops; it's all happening. There's nothing being thrown through a computer. They're doing - like, that's so interesting. 'Cause it's going to be different every time.

LP: You have to thank Ed Sheeran. (laughter)

Ben: Yeah, yeah. The king of the main looping standard. The reason our band exists is that he showed the world this is what it is. (laughter)

LP: I mean, say what you want, to be able to pull that off in a stadium by yourself.

Ben: That's kind of crazy, actually. I'll be there to say - agree with you.

LP: I do think it's - not my - it's not my trip, but man, I - it's - it takes some kind of-

Ben: And people are willing to see it and pay for it and be - that shows. And that shows the power of words - the songs, and if you can give a good performance no matter what, that's all people give a shit about as well.

LP: What's next? Like, are you staying in the States and doing shows, or do you have to split? Like, what's next? Well, we're here for the next couple of days.

Ross: We're just going to take in the city, I think. We're going to the waterhole today. Barton Springs.

LP: Oh, yeah. The natural pool.

Ross: Yeah, yeah.

Ben: We had - we got some barbecue on the first day, I think. We're just - we're all kind of foodies.

Ross: Yeah, we're kind of enjoying Austin.

LP: But you're - but you're not here to tour. You're not-

Ben: No, we're heading back on Saturday, and then we go to Dublin, like, midday. And then we have a day off and that's the UK tour. We're doing about ten shows or something or eleven shows around the UK after that. So it's - yeah, be a good couple of weeks.

LP: I would imagine you guys are going to get a reputation as a band that is scary for other bands to let open for them. After - after watching that video, like I wouldn't want to go on stage after that.

Ben: Well, funny - we've only - how many bands - we've only ever opened once. I suppose, and it was our first gig. Yeah. We don't really get offers. I don't think we've ever - no, we don't really get offers.

Luke: We never—I think that was like some—something was set up with the mother. They never wanted us to have our own headline shows and just push that, or rather support early doors. And I think that helped us as well.

Ben: That was cool. They - they were just like, if you guys never wanna support, that's cool. That is what they said. They had noticed that we did that, and we thought that's what you had to do. You had to support, and you know - we're open for - and like we - there is stuff down the line that we're excited about doing in that regard, but they just kind of said you don't have to do that, you know, which is cool. I mean, I feel like because you know when you play festivals, you - I know it's not supporting people, but you do play after people and before people. Yeah, there's a hierarchy. Yeah so you do - I do feel like we get that experience anyway.

LP: Well, it must be a great confidence boost to hear from people, like an experienced high-level booking agent, say you can do it your way. We believe enough in this that we'll do it that way if you want to do it. One of the - one last thing, something that struck me also when listening to the music and watching the video was I would love to see it in a small cramped room club like with just that energy contained, but you could also imagine it in the sort of expanse of a field on a festival stage so it's really neat that it can - that it can scale.

Ben: As long as the small room system is good enough, yeah.

LP: Without you blowing it out? (laughter)

Ben: That's the one, yeah, because the one that is like - we've had some amazing sweaty gigs, but when the system is good, and you can get a good enough system and those kind of sweaty gigs, it can be a really great show. But we have so, like, it really helps the low end for - if we can have something that can help the bass and stuff, you can really feel it, you know?

Luke: Another thing, as well as if it's a festival outdoors, nighttime is obviously gonna really help us. Yeah. Because we love strobe, we love just having this crazy light show if we can. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely at night time if it's a festival. I mean, we have played like bright summer's day, and it's funny, like we had this joke about playing "Kevlar" in Beauregard in France, in just the middle of the beautiful countryside, chapels in France, and we're playing this - this song. Yeah, it's crazy, it was mental. This really sad, like, emo, weird, industrial, atmospheric song in the middle of the beautiful summer, everyone's having a pint.

Ben: It was also our seventh show ever, and it was to like 8,000 people, and nobody knew who we were because how could you? And we were just playing this mad industrial, and it was so bright. I mean, we love France so much. We've had a lot of big first experiences there, and we play there all the time. We've got some really cool stuff coming up in France. But yeah, we've - that was our cherry there with - we played to the most people we could ever imagine playing to. Yeah, it's three o'clock in the afternoon.

Luke: But to your point, we want to play the sweatiest show in a grimy pub. I'm also able to play a crazy festival stage. We want to have 20,000 people and let that experience be special.

LP: Well, I hope you guys get back over to the States. I look forward to seeing you. Thank you for making time.

Ross: Thank you. So excited to be here.