Arcadia Grey are a rarified group. Not many bands who formed at their high school cafeteria table make it past the first couple weeks, let alone become scene defining bands with several critically acclaimed albums. Nat Breeden had transferred back to Carmel High School in Indiana after two years in Japan and realized they didn’t have anyone they was still close with in Carmel. They saw Coraline Kunda sitting at a cafeteria table by herself in a Blink 182 shirt and knew the two would get along, but decided to play things slow. The two future friends ate lunch in silence for a full six weeks before eventually opening their mouths to talk, at which point they realized they did indeed have a lot in common. Not only did Nat and Coraline both love the same punk and emo bands but they both had the ambitions to write music and be in a band themselves. By the end of the semester Coraline and Nat were writing songs and recruiting friends to be their drummer. After a few friends rotated in and out of jam sessions, Nat’s friend Cooper stepped up to the plate to give drums a try. He’d never played drums before but had reconnected with Nat after sitting next to them in class all semester and wanted in on whatever they were building. Nat gave him the test of learning “The Sweater Song” by their next band practice and when Cooper nailed it he was in the group for good.
Arcadia Grey built momentum in their local Indianapolis scene through 2018, thanks to support from local legends like summerbruise. Nat moved to Chicago for film school in the fall of 2018 but the group was committed, continuing to practice and play in either Indy or Chicago every weekend they could. The band recorded their 2019 debut Konami Code in a hectic four day session marred by miscommunication and a ludicrously rushed timeline that Arcadia Grey went along with mostly because the naive band didn’t know any better. Luckily the pressure of the recording process created diamonds, and Konami Code became not just a band defining but a scene defining release. Songs like “Moshpit Girlfriend” and “Skrrt Cobain” not only helped put Arcadia Grey on the map as a band but helped define the exciting group of new emo bands cropping up, which would soon become known as fifth wave emo. Arcadia Grey sounded a bit different than a lot of the groups they were mentioned alongside, however. Where bands like Guitar Fight from Fooly Cooly and Oolong, who the band shared an excellent split with, were into the more noodly aspects of emo music, Arcadia Grey preferred the grandeur and theatricality of My Chemical Romance mixed with the raspy basement bashing mayhem of Prince Daddy and the Hyena.
When COVID 19 struck the country Nat went back to Chicago for film school. Cora and Cooper eventually followed them up from Indiana as the group slowly put together new songs over the course of the next two years. Arcadia Grey hoped to be smarter about their recording process for Casually Crashing, not wanting to rush like last time. They started to imagine their second LP as their Pinkerton, a meaner and edgier record that wore its feelings on its sleeves while showing significant sonic development. The first song Cora technically wrote for the record was early single “Made 4 Luv” which she didn’t originally conceive of as an Arcadia Grey song. The track is about Cora’s difficulty with being able to love herself in spite of the hell society puts her through as a Black trans woman. Nat found the track on the group’s shared Google Drive looking for something else and was immediately blown away. The track has a soaring chorus that makes the plight of finding love feel like the only thing that matters in the universe, which makes the massive cathartic close of self acceptance hit all that much harder. My favorite song on the record right now is easily “Kevin Pickles & The Great Pool Noodle Excursion”, a scathing diss track pointed at roommates who refuse to do the dishes on time. It is hilarious and catchy in a way that caught me off guard. Genuinely funny songs are a bit of a lost art, and Arcadia Grey are a distinguished group that can make me crack up without letting that get in the way of their tracks kicking ass. More than anything Casually Crashing is a love letter to the emo scene who helped make Arcadia Grey the band they are today. Several tracks are named for bands who inspired them along the way, like “Origami Crane”, the homage to their homies in Origami Angel, and the excellent Prince Daddy & The Hyena tribute “PDaddy Hoodie”. The latter is not just a tribute to the Albany band but to their iconic collegiate typeface green hoodie, which Nat both hilariously and accurately described as “historically significant”. I can already imagine a pack of emo fans wearing their PDaddy hoodies to Arcadia Grey tracks specifically to sing along to that track.
Arcadia Grey are doing what they can to soak in the glow of this new record, though it isn’t always easy to stop and smell the roses. Bassist and singer Nat Breeden said they hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks in anticipation for the record, and Cora has similarly been taking time away from the band to take care of family matters. Nat said that the group is most excited for the songs from Casually Crashing to finally leave their hard drives and become other people’s songs. They said their favorite part of Konami Code was “hearing how people related to it, hearing what it reminded them of and how they interpreted the lyrics. All the stories we got to hear and the people we connected with because we put that record out into the world.” I can’t wait to reconnect with them in a few years time and hear all about the debauchery, friendships, and love that Casually Crashing will no-doubt inspire.
I talked with Arcadia Grey bassist, singer, and songwriter Nat Breeden about growing up in Indiana, finding punk music while living in Japan, and the process of putting together their excellent new record.
GSC: What’s your name, your preferred pronouns, and what do you do in the band Arcadia Grey?
AG: I’m Nat Breeden. I use they/them pronouns. I play bass, I sing and I write songs in Arcadia Grey. I also do a lot of the behind the scenes stuff for the band. Then we have Cooper, he/they pronouns, he plays drums. Sometimes he sings, he actually does some backup vocals on this record. And Cora she writes and sings and plays guitar.
GSC: What are your earliest musical memories? Who was playing music around the house and what were they playing? Also did you grow up in Indianapolis proper or outside?
AG: We like to say Indianapolis, but technically we’re from Carmel, which was like the rich kids town. We were not the rich kids in Carmel though, we all came from working class backgrounds. My dad was really into the Talking Heads and Nirvana. He liked to keep up with the hits on the radio. He liked Jet. He was a huge Death Cab for Cutie fan, though now I think I’m a bigger fan of that band than he is. Also we went to church a lot. Before I began my deconstruction of religion, we were into religious rock music, which I recently realized influenced the way I listen to and appreciate music more than I realized.
GSC: What denomination?
AG: We were, like, Christian. Yeah, I don’t know. We went to the millennial churches where you wear your football jerseys to church on Sunday. We went to the mega church in Carmel, which was Northview. They had a rock band every week that played, which was really my first introduction to live music. Cora and I went to the same church too though we didn’t know each other at the time.
GSC: I interviewed Camp Trash and they said they learned instruments through youth ministry because that was the easiest way to learn how to play instruments in their part of Florida.
AG: Yea, and I wasn’t even good enough to play in the church band or the youth band. But you know how so much of that church music builds as the pastor brings the energy up? That is still sonically so fucking cool. We’ll often joke around in practice and we’ll just start playing a melody from a church song. There’s an inside joke from the church that we all went to about how they used to talk so we’ll talk like pastors as we do a crazy build.
GSC: How and when did you end up gravitating to punk and emo music? Do you remember any bands being a big deal early on?
AG: I do! I grew up in Carmel, then my family moved to Tokyo, Japan. There I realized that the world is more than just America and God. I started to find things on my own outside of my parents. Discovering Blink-182 was a gateway to me finding other punk music. I remember my mom being like, you shouldn’t be listening to music that’s explicit. And my dad being like, they’re 15! What do you want them to do? I was listening to the Screeching Weasels and Descendants and the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Weezer was like a big stepping stone, their Blue Album and Pinkerton were fundamental.
GSC: Where were you finding music? Locally or online?
AG: Mostly through YouTube deep dives. The teachers were pretty helpful with pointing me in the right direction with music too, which they were really cool for.
GSC: I went to Japan last year for the first time, they have an amazing emo scene. I saw a number of bands including 7th Jet Balloon who I later interviewed after also hanging with them at an Algernon show.
AG: That is so sick. I wish I got into live music when I was there. I had a band in Japan with the three other kids who were into the music I was into, but we never played shows and I never went to shows. I didn’t know how. The band that I had there would pay to practice at this punk venue. It was honestly my first exposure to a punk rock venue, and it was in the basement of this Tokyo skyscraper. It was so musty, and we’re in the back corner in our practice space. Then one time we tried to leave and they had locked the doors of the venue in prep for the show that night. We couldn’t get out and none of us spoke Japanese, so we’re banging on the door, desperate to get out. I saw our friends in Origami Angel played Tokyo and I am 90% sure they played that same venue I got locked into funnily enough.
GSC: I interviewed Origami Angel all the way back in 2019 right before Somewhere City came out, what a record. So when did you make it back to the states and how did you link up with the rest of the band?
AG: I moved back to America a couple years later, that’s when I met Coraline. First day back at the high school that I had left for two years I didn’t have any friends anymore. Coraline was wearing a Blink 182 shirt at lunchtime, so I was like I’ll sit with her. She seems cool. We didn’t talk for six weeks though, we just sat next to each other, but we eventually talked and became friends. We found bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, American Football, The Violent Femmes was a huge, huge one. Then we found a lot of the third wave revival bands from there which Cora and I really bonded over.
GSC: When would you have first written your own original music? With Cora then or even earlier?
AG: It was kinda when I was in that band in Japan, I started learning bass as that band ended. The first time I really wrote songs with intention was with Cora. She was 15, I was 17, and we would go to my house after school and listen to PUP and play guitar in my tiny bedroom. I’ve been writing music probably as long as I’ve known Cora. I know she had been writing music a little earlier than I was because the first time we jammed she brought over all these lyrics she had written, and they were fucking good. I thought I might be our main songwriter but she was already two steps ahead of me.
GSC: Were you formally Arcadia Grey at that point?
AG: So I get back to Carmel at the beginning of the second semester, we go six weeks quiet and then start hanging at the end of the school year really. Then over the summer we started playing together and finding friends that would play with us. We weren’t Arcadia Grey yet, we were cycling through friends who would come to a few jam sessions then would start dating someone and you’d never see them again. I had known Cooper since middle school and through that next school year we had classes together and I sat next to him. He had never touched drums before but I was always talking about how Cora and I were starting a band and trying to find people. Over the year I guess he got interested. One time, and I think about this all the time, especially whenever we’re on tour, he was like, “Oh it’d be so cool to be a drummer and just chill in the back, hang in the van and tour and stuff.” Almost those words exactly, and now we’re really doing it.
GSC: A story like that warms my heart. I love a family affair.
AG: I know he’s the best. I was like, “I have a drum kit if you want to come over and try it out, if you learn “Sweater Song” by the next day you can play with us.” He didn’t have a drum kit, so I gave him a pair of my drumsticks and he learned it on his pillows, just the rhythm. We played it the next day and he fucking nailed it, and we never looked back. There is nobody I’d rather have back there playing drums. But we originally went by the name Parkview for probably like nine months after that where we hosted a few shows in Cooper’s garage. His parents were super accommodating which I am still grateful for. Then we recorded our first song “She Won’t Ditch School With Me Anymore” and as we were uploading it to Spotify, we saw there were like nine other bands called Parkview. So we had to pivot and Cora came in with the clutch with Arcadia Grey.
GSC: Great name. It is from a game right?
AG: It’s from the choose your own adventure game Life Is Strange. The town is Arcadia Bay, and Cora decided on Aradia Grey instead. I don’t remember why. We say for Cooper’s middle name but he spells it Gray.
GSC: So you guys come out the gate is a band with that single, the Welcome Home Split with Oversight Gallery. And Ouran High School JUUL Club EP. How do you look back on that early time as a band?
AG: That year of us forming as a band is one of my favorite years ever. In the moment it sucked sometimes though. I had graduated high school, Cooper graduated too. Cooper was going to IUPUI, which is like 20 minutes from Carmel. I stayed back for a year to go to Ivy Tech to get easy credits before I went to film school in Chicago. I had just been dumped, and was feeling terrible about it at the time. But we were building Arcadia Grey, which was fundamental and fucking really fun. Cora and I worked at the same restaurant so we would work all day and then go to Cooper’s house, and practice with Cooper all afternoon, three to four times a week. We were working on those songs for those projects you mentioned. Looking back I wish we had taken our time recording, but I’m always like, let’s do it now let’s put it out now. Before we recorded Ouran High School JUUL Club we recorded an EP that no one will ever hear. It was basically us learning how to be a band. We recorded some songs but I don’t think any of those songs made it onto any projects. We self recorded it in our library. Carmel had just opened up a media center in the library with a podcast room that we took a drum kit into. So we were experimenting on our sound and boning over the bands we loved as we got deeper into them. Bands like Mom Jeans and Prince Daddy and The Hyena, Graduating Life. Remo Drive was a really big band for us. That was the first show we went to together as a band.
GSC: Recording drums in a library is as DIY as it gets.
AG: They said it was too loud, go figure! They didn’t let us do it again after that. I think those projects were just us growing in our scene and learning on the fly. In our town Carmel there wasn’t much of a scene. There were a few other bands like Oversight Gallery that were starting to grow. Then we discovered the Indiana scene through bands like Dana Scully and the Tiger Sharks and Summerbruise. Mike from Summerbruise was one of the first people to take us from playing shows in our own garages to playing shows at the Hoosier Dome.
GSC: I know the recording process for Konami Code was a hectic four day rush. Do you remember why you were so tight on time? Also, as stressful as it was, do you feel that the pressure helped make diamonds there?
AG: So by fall 2018 we had a whole year together, then I went to school in Chicago. Before I left, we had talked about writing a record together to put out so we could tour off it in the summer of 2019. I was writing my songs, Cora was writing her songs, and we’d meet on the weekends, either in Indiana or Chicago, and play together. We had another guitarist at the time who isn’t in the band anymore who’d play too. We tried saving up for Pallet Sound In Chicago but it was too much, so we hit up the person who mixed Ouran High School JUUL Club. We asked to record with them over ten days, paying for all ten, and they said, “No, we can do it in four.” I think recording was part time for them and they couldn’t take off from their full time gig to do more days, but we really should have pushed for 10. We were very naive on the process and just went with the flow, we really could have used more time. We basically had two days to record drums, two days to record guitar, four hours for bass and two hours for vocals and one take for the viola at the end. There was also a lot of confusion between Chris who recorded the record and Zach Weeks at God City in Salem who mastered the record. Zach sent over information on what he’d need and how he’d need it which Chris promptly threw out. The first mixes we got back… I cried. It was the most money we’d ever spent on anything. In hindsight, that record only cost us a total of like $1,500 but that’s a lot of money for an 18 year old. After that we talked to Zach about what we wanted our record to sound like. We sent him sonic influences, Joyce Manor among them, and I guess Joyce Manor had just recorded Million Dollars to Kill Me and that helped make it click with Zach with what we wanted. All the drums that we had recorded were pretty much unusable though, so the record is spliced together with some electronic drums. Again, I wish we had taken our time with that record. As a band, we wrote that album a week before Christmas, and then recorded it the first week of January 2019. It was so hectic, people can’t believe we did it all in the timeframe we did when I tell them.
GSC: “Mosh Pit Girlfriend” was the first song I heard of yours as the lead off track on that record. The second I heard it I knew I was gonna like this band for a long time. Is that a track you look back on fondly? How did it come together?
AG: I love “Moshpit Girlfriend”. It’s one of my favorite tracks on that record. If I had to change it now I would just cut the four measures of like no vocals at the end which we don’t do live, we play a lot of our songs differently live. I love the gang vocals on that song and I love the chorus performance. I remember hearing Cora sing those first lyrics for the first time and like getting to hear them isolated and just having a chill run down my spine I was so impressed.
GSC: “Skrrt Cobain” is one that’s really taken on a life of its own. It reminds me of Prince Daddy and the Hyena meets MCR, I can imagine the pyrotechnics on stage when I hear it.
AG: You hit that on the head, Cora’s biggest emo influence was probably My Chemical Romance. My core is Weezer and Cora’s is probably My Chem. I remember Cora writing this song and going “We’re gonna have to play this a fuck-ton aren’t we?”
GSC: That’s gotta be a good feeling though.
AG: Yeah, it’s a good feeling that that song rocks. It’s just got so much energy. That’s one I wouldn’t change. Well, that’s one that is missing a lead part, and also it does have the Dragonball Z lead guitar part in it. I didn’t know that until two months after the album dropped when someone left a comment saying it was the DBZ guitar on YouTube and Cora was like “Duhh”.
AG: Goku has made enough money anyway. I also love “Godzilla ’98 Sux” off this record. Do you stand by that opinion? Have you seen either of the new Godzilla’s?
AG: I am a big fan of Godzilla Minus One, I haven’t seen Godzilla vs Kong yet because that came out when we were on tour with Glass Beach. I do enjoy Shin Godzilla a little bit more than Minus One, I think it has more to say about the modern era in Japan, but Minus One still ruled. Godzilla ‘98 I didn’t like it at the time. We named the song that and the album came out like a year later which led to me watching it in my dorm and I was like… dang this movie kind of rocks. Matthew Broderick is pretty cool. It isn’t a Godzilla movie, but it is a fun 90s action movie. So I’ve come around.
GSC: I was a huge fan of the Fatal Four Way split, I wrote about it back when it dropped. How did that come about? How did you get locked in with those other groups?
AG: One of the first tours we ever did was with Guitar Fight from Fooly Cooley. Cora had discovered them, probably through r/emo back when it was popping. We just shot our shot and messaged them like hey, lets book a weekend, we like your music, and we kind of became besties with them through that experience. In winter 2019, almost a full year after recording Konami Code, we wanted to put out singles and recorded “Wildmutt” and “Braum”. I think I wrote “Wildmutt ” after seeing Free Throw and Macseal and Chris Farren when I came home with so much energy from the show. We then did another tour early 2020 where we did a show with a battle set against Guitar Fight where we kicked their asses.
GSC: They’re a great live band too, they destroyed the DIY Super Bowl when I saw them, mighta been the best set that night.
AG: They are fucking impressive. They’re really good, but we did indeed kick their asses. We hung out after and talked about doing a split together. They messaged us saying they were obsessed with this new band Oolong and wanted to get them on the split. I am not sure how Dannythestreet got involved, I’d imagine through Oolong or Guitar Fight, I just remember eventually getting a group chat invite with the four bands. It was supposed to come out Summer 2020 but not everyone was able to get their songs recorded so we got it out closer to Halloween.
GSC: I love a good split.
AG: Someone wrote that splits are great for cementing where a scene is at a specific point in time and I remember being hyped because it felt like the first split from the new exciting crop of emo bands we were hyped to be a part of.
GSC: I remember feeling that way at the time. I know that when you guys finished Konami Code, you both had a lot of ideas left on the cutting room floor, but approaching the record felt like an impossible task. Were you able to take those scraps and make them into new tracks? What helped you get back into album making mode for LP2?
AG: There are a couple tracks we recorded then that made their way to splits or were otherwise released, like the first song we ever recorded “She Won’t Ditch School with Me Anymore” which we originally thought would be on Konami Code. There’s another song called “Accidental Math Rock” which we are currently in the process of rewriting, it might go on our next LP. We rewrote it for Casually Crashing and gave it another shot, and it’s closer but not there yet. The thing with Konami Code too is while Cora knew how to sing and play her guitar, Cooper and I were still very much learning how to play our instruments. On Casually Crashing, Cooper knows how to drum now, I know how to play bass, and Cora is even better at singing and guitar and songwriting as a whole.
AG: When did the LP2 writing process start then?
AG: So 2020 happens. Cora and Cooper and I are all locked away from each other and kind of bored. I wanted to go back to school after I had dropped out because we weren’t doing anything as a band. So I moved to Chicago and Cora followed me. Cooper was going to but he just couldn’t afford it at the time. We first did the Trilogy EP that came out in 2021 and once we did that it felt like time to put a record out. 2020 through 2022 Cora and I collected a bunch of songs. We got back from our first West Coast tour, and wanted to get in the studio but life kept getting in the way as it will, so we kept writing and honing the songs. We finally booked studio time for fall 2022. Cora had written probably a full length LP in her time of lockdown. Cora is the type of writer who can just sit down and write a song in five minutes, at least it feels that way to me. She’ll have full demos with every instrument possible ready to go, it is so impressive working with her. My process is more, I have an acoustic demo on my iPhone that I bring to practice and we figure out together as a band. In this whole PR press stuff leading up to it, I have been saying this is our Pinkerton. It’s harsher, it’s got more of an edge but it is sonically a more mature and realized record than the one before it.
GSC: “Top Deck Jinzo” is a ripper. Y’all do not mince words on that track. The dichotomy between how intense the lyrics are and how peppy the track is really sets the tone. How did that song come together and how did you know it was a lead off track?
AG: We weren’t totally sure what our tracklisting was going to be until almost five days before we had to like send send our mixes off to press the vinyl. “Top Deck Jinzo” was one of the first songs that Cora had shown me off the record. She had written a an EP called Nihilist Manifesto, that we didn’t end up recording but it had a few songs that are on this record. “Jet Set Greydio”, “Halley”, and “PDaddy Hoodie” I believe were the others. We felt like this was catchy and a good tone setter for the record. If you heard Konami Code hopefully this gets you hyped for the direction we are taking this record in. Also as far as the name, I understand that a Jinzo is a Yu-Gi-Oh card that you want at the top of your deck, so of course that’s gotta lead off the record.
GSC: “Kevin Pickles and the Great Pool Noodle Excursion” is one of the most important songs I have ever heard, there is nothing worse than a roommate that refuses to do the dishes. Can you talk about that track and how it came together? I know you were all roommates at one point too.
AG: My bandmates like to say it’s about them, though it isn’t really, it’s just about my experience with roommates in general. They were sloppy roommates honestly don’t get me wrong but they weren’t the worst roommates I’ve ever had. We just had a chore chart that turned into four mentally ill people using a piece of paper as a means of creating grievances. I have not had a roommate who is good at doing dishes up until moving in with my partner who is better than I am. I’m bad at it too, but I can at least do them within a day or two. There is definitely a learning curve to living with people that you love. You don’t want to destroy those friendships but at the same time, their behaviors are affecting you in a way that you weren’t expecting and I often didn’t know how to communicate that.
GSC: Every time I hear “I have a lot of weed to smoke.” I crack up. I feel like there is a lost art to being able to make a song that is genuinely funny without being a Lil Dicky type guy.
AG: That was an amalgamation of every argument I’ve had with my roommates about doing dishes. That whole scene at the end too was just Cora and I improvising in the studio in like two takes too, that was so much fun to do. I can’t even remember exactly what headspace I was in when I wrote the track because I wrote it in like 2021, but I definitely was inspired by film school and wanted the track to feel cinematic and like a funny short film. I am glad that came through.
GSC: You have a whole mumblecore movie there if you want it. “Made 4 Luv” is such a ripper. It has a twitchy ska drum at the beginning that is so much fun and then closes so huge it feels like a rock opera. How did that song come together?
AG: Cora hid that song from me. When she wrote it, she said she didn’t think it was an Arcadia Grey song. I was scrolling through Google Drive one day looking for a shared doc and then I noticed that there was a song of hers I hadn’t heard. I was bored at work so I like hit play and I was instantly hooked. I texted her like “What da hell is this?” I think it can technically be called the first song any of us wrote on the record. It is a song about Cora learning to love herself outside of being a musician and especially when times are tough. She has been through so much bullshit as a queer person and a trans person especially in the midwest and she pours it all into her music. I really feel so lucky to be in a band with her hearing songs like that.
GSC: The music video for that track with the puppets is incredible. I also love the music video for the following track, “Everything is Miserable And I’m Brooding Alone in My Dark Dark Room”, which felt like a tour diary and a music video all in one. These two had such high production value too, they look professionally done.
AG: Thank you! For Arcadia Grey’s videos, I both don’t love giving up creative control to someone else and it’s just cheaper for us to make our own music videos. I make music videos for bands professionally so I know how to be cost effective about it and still make it look kinda cool. My roommate, the only roommate I had who was able to do the dishes in college, he and I make music videos together. In fact, we’re supposed to chat today about a music video. He’s been really helpful at making these more high production. “Made 4 Love” I wanted to do with Cora and not puppets, but she was busy at the time and we wanted to get that video out shortly after the song came out, so we said let’s just do it with puppets, and we rewrote the story. I own a Blackmagic and my friend owns all the lights and we know a lot of production designers who are in school or through school. We just have the resources now.
GSC: They’re impressive. That’s the nicest shot sock puppet I have ever seen.
AG: I appreciate that. Our production designer, Emmitt, made all those in a weekend and blew us away.
GSC: “PDaddy Hoodie”, another amazing track. I can already imagine crowds singing along to that one. I also nearly wore that hoodie for the interview but that felt passe.
AG: Cora and I have that hoodie too. We will often show up to shows or band practices wearing the same hoodie and one of us will switch. It’s one of those historically significant hoodies. Cora got hers much earlier, I got mine and 2020 when they did a repress. It’s both this is a hoodie we feel comfortable in, we will wrap ourselves in when times are tough. It’s a garment I wore during my highest and lowest moments, it’s always there for you. And it’s also just because we absolutely love Prince Daddy. They’re pretty clearly one of our bigger influences. There’s easter eggs to Cosmic Thrill Seekers in the lyrics so it’s very much a love letter to the band and their hoodie.
GSC: “Origami Crane” I have to imagine might have been inspired by another band in the scene.
AG: Definitely. Konami Code came out in 2019 and a few months later, Somewhere City fucking blows the world away. WeI had been listening to Origami Angel since their EP Doing the Most, but Somewhere City just blew our minds. It was such an impressive record, no surprise it left the mark it did. That song and “Jet Set Greydio” are the two Gami influenced ones on the record.
GSC: One of you said that you thought “Origami Crane” might be the best written song in your discography. Did y’all immediately know it was a slapper?
AG: It’s one of those where Cora will just randomly DM me demos. They’re usually distorted where you can’t hear the lyrics, its just to get the ball rolling, but that was one of the demos where I was like this is a fucking song. I’ve listened to this song probably 1000 times, I’ve had access to it since 2020, and it’s still one of those that doesn’t get old for me. If anything I was fighting against changing things in the studio, it was so phenomenal as she originally presented it.
GSC: As you’ve mentioned, a lot of these songs were written and recorded years ago. How does it feel to be 48 hours from the album drop? I’m sure that you were playing these tracks on the Glass Beach tour, how are you feeling on the precipice of this drop?
AG: I haven’t been able to sleep all week. I have been holding down a lot of the logistics and stuff around this record and I’m very excited to not have to think about it anymore. But I am also like, oh, shit, we gotta do this again! After Konami Code we approached this second record completely differently. Here’s what we’re not going to do, this is what failed last time, here’s what we can learn from our mistakes. I think we did a good job with Casually Crashing, but we still made mistakes. The reaction to the singles so far has been incredible though. We put out songs between Konami Code and now and none have done the streaming numbers these tracks are doing. I’m super stoked to finally hear what other people think. I have listened so many times where one day I think it’s the best record ever and the next the worst, so I am excited to sit back and soak in other people’s thoughts, where they see it ranking in our discography and hopefully the greater emo pantheon. I think my favorite part of Konami Code and that whole process was hearing how people related to it, hearing what it reminded them of and how they interpreted the lyrics. All the stories we got to hear and the people we connected with because we put that record out into the world.
GSC: It’s been a great year for emo music, has anything really caught your ear?
AG: The Riley! record is fucking amazing, it might be my favorite record of the year.
GSC: Love the cover on that one too.
AG: Perfect emo cover. The Glass Beach record was so good too, it was amazing hearing it night in and our on tour with them. The Oolong self-titled was mind blowing too, and I absolutely loved Ferried Away the new Stay Inside record. They kick so much ass and you might see something happening with us and them soon so stay tuned.
GSC: Have you guys started formulating ideas for LP 3 or are you trying to let this record breathe?
AG: I mean the goal, and I’m not sure how realistic it is, but we talked about putting out this record and another one about a year later. We did a lot of sitting on our asses with the pandemic and whatnot but we’re trying to really keep the momentum going. We’re in writing mode now. Cora has been playing a ton of her demos, so the process has begun for sure.
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