If you know me in real life you’ve likely had to suffer through my rant about how music publications release their end of the year lists way too early. Every year an artist comes along and makes a moment for themselves by dropping when people least expect it, upending all the year end lists that were published seven weeks earlier. This year one of my absolute favorite bands did me a favor and proved me right once again, as Pueblo, Colorado emo rising stars Lobsterfight dropped right on New Years Eve, screwing up every 2024 Album of the Year list but mine.
Lobsterfight exploded onto the scene with their 2020 debut record pink, black and orange in the corners, which garnered widespread acclaim from both critics and their peers in the soon to be christened fifth wave emo scene. As Anguel, Lobsterfight’s songwriter, singer, guitarist, and pianist put it, he got into emo thanks to a series of fateful youtube deep dives and was inspired to flip his jokey high school solo project into a serious band inspired by the groups they found online like Merchant Ships, Snowing, and The Brave Little Abacus. There wasn’t much of a local scene for them to play in but Anguel and his longtime friend and drummer, James Gove, scraped together a collection of tracks that they thought sounded good and that they hoped would solidify Lobsterfight as a real project. As Anguel and James were in the midst of releasing and promoting the album online the group found that there were many more similarly minded bands putting out their unique spin on the emo genre than they realized, from Ogbert the Nerd to Hey ily! to Your Arms Are My Cocoon. The vague collection of bands learned about one another on the fly and the group started to be known as emo’s fifth wave. Lobsterfight were quickly christened as vanguard members, whose multi-instrumental and highly experimental blend of emo music was particularly in its own field. It even caught the ear of one particularly busy music critic.
The band immediately got to work on their next record, hoping to top the high expectations that the first one set. Anguel was able to write four songs before being set with a bad case of writer’s block. At the end of 2021 he finally felt the need to write thanks to a number of personal tragedies small and large, including the passing of his older brother. He wrote the rest of what would become Sun Soaking as a way of finding silver linings in the plentiful rain clouds that life had sent his way. He’d been listening to a lot of the Beach Boys and wrote a series of piano driven, chaotic, vocal harmony laden odes to the friends and family who stayed by their side through an awful year. It was a cathartic record for the band to put to tape and now, with distance, is Anguel’s favorite Lobsterfight record.
However at the time things weren’t as cheery. Their friends were supportive but the greater online music community had many an issue with the project, particularly the charlatans on RYM. For better or worse, the internet’s busiest music nerd did not take the time to weigh in, and the anonymous critics online were the ones coming through the loudest. The group felt jaded about their second record for a long time, only playing two shows to promote it in the end.
They got right back to work on LP3, in their head trying to right their wrongs and impress the high and mighty anonymous internet posters who once lifted them up. Early songs were written with that intention in mind, until a fateful night when Anguel was compelled to chop up a sample. He threw the loop at the front of “Ralph’s Damp Spots To Hell (Long) “ and decided he was going to worry a lot less about what the people he didn’t know online thought and focus more on making a record he could proudly send to friends and family in his real life and have them enjoy. As a result My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace is somehow far and away the most inventive Lobsterfight record to date, playing with genres as wide ranging as salsa, rap, and ska. The group melded the twinkly guitar forward sensibilities of the first record with the Beach Boys inspired piano licks of the second into a sound only Lobsterfight could produce. There is still chaos a plenty but this is a much cleaner record. The chaos, when it comes, feels more purposeful and less like it’s hiding something. These are the most ambitious and fully realized songs that the band has written to date and stand among the best emo songs any fifth wave emo band has produced. HomeIsWhere’s Bea MacDonald went as far to call My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace “ without hyperbole, the best emo record since Just Got Back From The Discomfort,” the masterpiece that made Brave Little Abacus a household name in these circles. Anguel credited “My Grasshopper I See The Sun Soaking Through Your Teeth” as being the album’s true achievement for the band, sounding like the DIY symphony he’s imagined in his head all along. So somehow, even as the Lobsterfight is putting out their best work to date, the group does still seem to have plenty of room to grow. The lads are just twenty-two after all.
Lobsterfight is slow rolling things this time around. They decided to soak in this record rather than immediately going back in the studio on the next like they usually do. They are excitedly planning their first true USA tour, a major step for a group whose played barely a dozen shows to date. Lobsterfight knows that they have a phenomenal group of songs on their hands with this new record, the best batch of songs they’ve come up with to date, and they’re excited to bring them to the world the old fashioned way for once. Instead of wasting away reading RYM reviews they’ll be driving city to city to see their fans and enemies face to face, screaming at the crowd with the crowd screaming back right there in front of them.
I talked with Anguel from Lobsterfight about starting off as a comic book artist, the band’s humble origins, and surviving emos fifth wave. The interview has been condensed for clarity.
GSC: Who are you and what do you do in the band Lobsterfight?
LF: I’m Anguel Sanchez-Quintana. I play the piano, guitar, and a lot of instruments. I sing, I scream, and I do all the art. James Chase Gove is our drummer who couldn’t make it today.
GSC: What are your earliest musical memories?
LF: Funnily I don’t come from a musical background at all, no family members played any instruments. I have an uncle who was in a mariachi band but he was it. I grew up as an aspiring comic book artist.
GSC: We’re any family members artists outside of music?
LF: My grandpa drew all the time. My older brother drew a lot too. I was the only one of my family who took it really seriously, but they both definitely enjoyed drawing too.
GSC: How did you start pursuing the arts, music and drawing? Did school bring it out of you or were they passions you developed independently?
LF: I grew up drawing. Ever since I could write I have drawn. That’s been a part of my life forever. For music, I grew up in a conservative Christian household. When I was in middle school I got grounded and all I had was this little keyboard so I just messed around with that. Eventually I started learning songs and that grew into playing music. I don’t know why but I’m one of those people when I get interested in something I am voracious until I know everything.
GSC: What was it like growing up in Pueblo, Colorado? Was there much of a music scene or an art scene in general?
LF: The music scene is very punk and metal, but it’s actually a hub for art. I grew up around a lot of people who draw and sculpt and paint murals.
GSC: Is there a big art school in town or something?
LF: We have a big college, Colorado State University Pueblo. The school has art programs but it’s mainly just the culture of the town. I don’t know how to explain it, people there just do art all the time.
GSC: What are your early music and art discovery memories? How were you first finding both the music, comics, and art that felt like it was yours?
LF: For drawing I’m really inspired by Bill Waterson and Jhonen Vasquez, the latter of which may be obvious. To this day I’m a huge Twenty One Pilots fan. I don’t know what that says about me. I love Gorillaz. I have a Gorillaz shirt I wear to work pretty much every day. People of all ages love that shirt.
GSC: Gorillas are an art project as much as they are a music project, being a cartoon band.
LF: I love that, that side of the band inspires the art side of Lobsterfight. Emo I got into through YouTube recommendations honestly, that can be a huge rabbit hole. I can’t really remember exactly where that started, maybe the Front Bottoms, who aren’t really emo, and Modern Baseball. Two Knights were extremely huge for me too. Merchant Ships are the reason we are a band though, they’re hugely influential to us.
GSC: I know that you met your bandmate and drummer, James, before you guys started the band. How did you guys first meet? What initially made you bond?
LF: I’ve known James for almost 10 years, since 2015. By the way, if anyone reading this comments “OMG 2015 was ten years ago” I’m gonna steal some shit out of your house. We started off with a weird relationship. I really wanted to be friends with him and he was kinda along for the ride. I used to message him a lot, we both had Twitter for some reason. Eventually we started hanging out and bonding over video games and other 13 year old boy stuff. YouTube videos. He’s an exclusively PC gaming guy which has been a long joke with us. We started the band in high school late in our sophomore year as a joke project for our friends. Eventually we said hey, let’s take this a little seriously. I was working on a solo album at the time, and I was like, James you can drum, we should actually try this out.
GSC: Was it keyboard and drums or had you started bringing other instruments to the fold?
LF: The lost solo record was very eclectic. I was listening to The Brave Little Abacus at that time. It was mainly guitar and drums, an Origami Angel set up. We didn’t have the full vision of what instruments we’d be playing yet.
GSC: How did you beef up your musicianship to feature all the instruments they do?
LF: It’s a lot of trial and error. I’ll generally have an idea of what the song will sound like in my head. Then I’ll be like maybe an accordion part will sound cool here, maybe a synth part will sound cool. I’ve even learned instruments to just play a part I hear in my head, like for Sun Soaking I don’t play the clarinet, but I learned it just for the album.
GSC: That’s sick. You went full Squidward mode for the art. What was life like as you’re starting this band? Was Lobsterfight part of a local scene or did you feel like this was more on the internet?
LF: Definitely on the internet. There was another band in our scene called Keep Sweet, also a Midwest emo band. They were the Beatles to our Beach Boys, a friendly rivalry, but it was just us two really. I’ve met maybe one fan in person one time, but it’s predominantly on the internet.
GSC: What was life like as you’re writing and recording that debut record, pink, black and orange in the corners in 2020?
LF: The new album we just put out, My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace, has origins all the way back to the beginning of 2020. It was supposed to be the first Lobsterfight album but it was too ambitious. I could hear all the music in my head but my hands couldn’t catch up. With that record I wanted to make something that sounded good and that solidified us as a real project. pink, black and orange in the corners started as a four song EP. It had “II”, which at the time was actually “III”, “MOONPIE”, “V” and “frog”. Eventually I added a couple more and that became the album. We put it up on Bandcamp and a bunch of people gravitated towards it. I can’t really explain why or how honestly.
GSC: There was a moment in late 2020 early 2021 where people were really excited to ordain the fifth wave. I don’t know if it was because of the HomeIsWhere tweet, it felt like it was going on before that. Did you have a sense of those other fifth wave bands as you were writing and recording, or is that all just kind of like a bizarre surprise?
LF: I didn’t know of them at the time but the whole scene is really heartwarming, I really do feel like we belong. There are so many great bands like Ogbert the Nerd who was so nice to us early on. Madison is genuinely one of the most supportive people I’ve ever met, even though we haven’t met in person. A lot of these fifth wave legends have been huge supporters like, Your Arms Are My Cocoon, my friend Tyler. If you go back thru our Twitter followers he’s the third person who ever followed us.
GSC: There for the start of it all!
LF: Experiencing that wave in real time was so crazy honestly. So in January 2020, Rookie Card, another one of my friend Gunnar’s old band, released their EP For Ryan. We released our album pink, black and orange in the corners in August. Then literally two days later, September 2nd, Tyler releases the Your Arms Are My Cocoon EP. That became a movement that became a wave that led to a bunch of people doing it, 2021, was the big year for the wave where a lot of great artists were coming out. Ogbert released I Don’t Hate You at the tail end of 2020 where it got traction in 2021. Hey, Ily! dropped an EP and LP that were so good and influential. Then HomeIsWhere dropped their monumental record in the spring and like you said that tweet caught a lot of people up to speed. So yeah, I had no idea any of these people had the same idea, I was discovering them in real time as they dropped. My initial vision was that I want to make something different because I love Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing, and I guess a lot of us did.
GSC: “frog” is a real epic. How do you go about putting together a 12 minute track like that?
LF: Honestly, I don’t like long songs being written like that because it just has a long outro. “The Theme for This Evening’s Warm Dinner Salad” is my preferred long song. That’s a full song that goes for nine minutes where “frog” is lengthened by that outro. I hit my keyboard so we have the synth on a single note and I built on that from there to make a six minute jazz song tacked on at the end. That first record was made in two months at lightning speed. James plays on the record but his drums are actually sometimes sampled from old videos. That end part where he’s drumming that’s from an old video that I resampled. We add a guitar, bass, whatever, on top of it, and that becomes the song. A lot of the drums were done on a keyboard, and I was embarrassed by how it sounded. That’s when the idea of bit-crushing them and compressing the hell out of them came to me. I think Weatherday does that too, a lot of bands do, but I didn’t know any of those other bands.
GSC: What do you think of when reflecting on that record?
LF: The songs are there but I’ll be honest, I don’t like it at all. The songs are good, it’s just the way it was recorded. We were 17 making it after all, we’re in high school. I’ve always said “V” and “frog” still hold up. We play those live a lot. I have a soft spot for “III” that song is really cool. So is “MOONPIE!”. I’d love to rerecord it and make it sound less terrible. We never would have thought so many people would like it honestly. It’s really lofi, shitty, and all over the place, but people like that apparently. So while I don’t have a good relationship with it, I appreciate the people who listen to it and who like it. We’ve done a lot with the record. We did that vinyl with Chillwavve and so many cassettes. If you like it, that’s nice, thank you. You should listen to our new record though because it’s better.
GSC: Your second record, Sun Soaking, felt like a major step up to me. You had a better sense of your sound and you cleaned things up while also keeping your chaotic energy. What was life like as that second record is being written and recorded?
LF: Not really a fun time. Honestly, 2021 was the worst year of my life. So many things with that record are me trying to smile through everything going on, trying to make something good within the bad. It’s almost desperate. I was listening to the Beach Boys a ton while making that record. Pet Sounds, Sunflower, Friends is one of my favorite albums ever. The vibe was meant to contrast with how terrible my life was at the time, between relationship stuff, college issues, and my brother dying.
GSC: Jesus, I am so sorry.
LF: I appreciate that. I am just saying as much because it literally happened while making the record. I really was trying to make something positive and something bright because that’s what I needed. That’s where the title comes from. I’ve always said Sun Soaking is being so happy you could cry. That’s the whole vibe of the album, being so overwhelmed by the people around you who still support you and still love you. Especially because in this time period I was just not a great guy, so having my family and my friends still supporting me and helping me find a way out meant the world. I started going to therapy and stuff. It’s the bittersweet album.
GSC: It sounds like it was least cathartic for you.
LF: Definitely for a short period, because releasing it was a completely different story. I didn’t come up with this, but I have a belief that the sophomore will always slump either critically or commercially. With that record the only mistake I made was expecting people to like it because it’s so different from the first. There’s almost no guitar at all, it’s all piano.
GSC: I remember loving that record from the second it dropped, I didn’t realize there was backlash. Did you get a negative response from people?
LF: If you really want to get in a bad mood, look at the RateYourMusic comments for that one. There’s some venom in there.
GSC: They’re a bunch of goofballs on that website.
LF: It’s easy to say that, but it really did affect my mental health. I was 19 and already insecure about my music. I really wanted this random group of people on the internet to like my music and they didn’t. That was hard for a long time. In time I think it will prove to be our Pinkerton.
GSC: I thought it did decently well on streaming compared to the others, did it not?
LF: Decently. The first one is going to reign supreme for a long time because the funny dude with the mustache talked about it. It was very cathartic to make, though people not liking it definitely affected my viewpoint of that record. I was a little bit disgusted by it, the response made me feel really bad for a long time. The whole release cycle for that album was kind of nothing. We did two shows and that’s it. We didn’t really do much.
GSC: Damn well I gotta tell you, man, I love this record. I appreciate it. Fuck anybody who says different.
LF: Thank you man, that means a lot.
GSC: “grasshopper, and i” for example, that’s a rollicking opener, I love that track. How’d that song come together? How’d you know it was the lead off?
LF: That was inspired by the opener “I Think We’re in Minsk” off I Could Do Whatever I Wanted If I Wanted by Snowing. We were working on it for the entirety of 2021 and we had four songs done, “grasshopper and i”, “The Theme For This Evening’s Warm Salad”, “Lambert Goes to Dinner” and “Let’s Run Through The Cornfield’s”. I was having really bad art block. Originally the record was going to be eight songs, like the first record, but around the end of 2021 when all this stuff was happening I became so inspired that the number grew to twelve.
GSC: We already talked a little about “The Theme For This Evening’s Warm Dinner Salad” but how is playing that live? Do you have to take a break after? That must just take the wind out of you.
LF: We’ve done it live two or three times and it’s always been the closer. There’s a video of a show we did in Syracuse with a bunch of our friends, Fritzleschats, cant, and VALENTVNE. Our friend Clayton recorded the whole show where we closed with that. I was listening to it the other night and I was like, oh, that turned out pretty decently.
GSC: Do you have a favorite track on the record?
LF: “Lambert Goes to Dinner” is a definite favorite, it is a lot of fun to play. I think the best one is “My Grasshopper I See The Sun Soaking Through Your Teeth”. That was a musical achievement for us. It sounds like an orchestra and that’s what we were going for. Jacob from Summer 2000 played cello on the song which was the first cello appearance on a record of ours. It sounds like what I wanted the album to sound like, a symphony. It is inspired by “Let’s Go Away for a While” the instrumental on Pet Sounds.
GSC: Do you feel two years later, with a little bit of distance from the record, you can appreciate it as your Pinkerton? Or do you still have a bit of a tough relationship with the record?
LF: A little bit of a tough one but again just the recording. It’s kinda sloppy and I can understand how someone would be put off by the vocals. Personally, to critics, I’m like what do you expect? We’re an emo band. Ultimately though Sun Soaking is my favorite Lobsterfight record.
GSC: I am glad to hear that, haters be damned.
LF: We’ve thought about rerecording it too. We wrote and recorded it in three months, it was so exhilarating to make. I wish it came out in vinyl, we just never got around to it.
GSC: Never too late! Moving into the third record My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace you were a little bit jaded at the time with the second. What were your goals and your hopes for the third? What was your thought process as you were writing and recording?
LF: The thought process was let’s make a better, cleaner version of Sun Soaking, lotta vocal harmonies, piano driven, all that jazz. On this one we recorded to clicks for the first time ever. After people trashed the second one I initially was really catering to what I thought people wanted. Then one night, I love hip hop, and I got inspired to chop up a sample. I put the sample at the beginning of “Damp Spots” and that completely changed the record’s trajectory. I said I’m gonna do whatever I want. It doesn’t even matter what genre it is or if people online like it, what matters is that I can say with full confidence that I made a great record. Something I could tell my friends and family to listen to with pride.
GSC: More about the offline than the online reaction.
LF: Bringing it offline is pretty much it. Glocca Morra was the main emo influence here, as you can see with the Just Married inspired cover.
GSC: I see that now hell yea.
LF: They were the big one outside of our main influences, like Merchant Ship, Cap’n Jazz, Brave Little Abacus. We brought back twinkly guitars on this record too which was the big dilemma, do we go full piano or try and have the piano and guitar live in harmony. We took the sounds of both our first two records and combined them together to make a super record in the end. The other influences were a whole lot of mallcore, My Chemical Romance and Panic at the Disco. People said the record sounds like Pretty Odd which I am all about. Blink 182 too, Dude Ranch was a pretty big influence. Marvin Gaye was too, What’s Going On? in particular. James said he could hear the influence a lot on the record, I don’t know if I do but it’s there.
GSC: Can you explain the album art and title?
LF: *Pointing at album art* That’s Sebastiana, one of the main characters. That’s Ralph, the whole album is through his lens. This character is the antagonist, we just call it coathanger, It’s a little silhouette type of person with a cyan coat hanger. The record deals with not feeling like you can be yourself at work or in your family, feeling like you have to be so uptight all the time. It feels like you’re being hung up like a jacket on a wall. There is a whole plotline to this one, where the first two records are more loose story wise.
GSC: Do you see the opportunity to do an accompanying comic book?
LF: I had the idea and would love to. Maybe in the future.
GSC: “Always Tired, All The Time”, a barn burner. Really gets the ball rolling right off the bat. Did you similarly know that was going to be the album opener from the get go?
LF: That one took some time to figure out. We started production officially around September 2022 and the original album opener was pretty slow and atmospheric. The dilemma was should we take our time and make it a slow burner or should we go right into it? I think going right into it was the right decision. People’s attention spans, unfortunately, are cooked, so you really have to grab them. We ended up combining the two because it starts off not fully in your face, but it is a head bopper.
GSC: Interesting how these songs could have gone in so many directions.
LF: This one took a lot. We’d blown through the other records where every song here was rewritten at some point. “Sebastiana, Tell Me About Your Knots and Ties” not only did we rewrite that one five different times, we also re-recorded it from scratch five different times.
GSC: Damn. “Sleeper’s Disease” is another great track. How did that come together, particularly sequentially in the album?
LF: “Sleepers Disease” was supposed to be the opener, the main piano part at least. We had a song called “There’s Nowhere Else I’d Rather Be” which was the original opener, a tight two minuter that was really in your face. It was a good song. I took it off because it didn’t fit the themes well and it felt outdated. “Sleepers Disease” took forever to rewrite. I was telling Holden from Combat, or I guess whoever runs the Combat account, that Stay Golden was the inspiration for that track.
GSC: They’re an elite band.
LF: Great band, very influential on this one. The chord progression was also from “Never See Me Again” a demo from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I certainly do not support the man these days or the foul shit he has been saying but that song did seep in. Funnily while recording it I got the cops called on me cause I was being too loud. I record all the vocals, or at least I did, in my garage. We got new neighbors who decided it was too loud. The cop really liked our music hilariously, so luckily we didn’t need to deal with them for long.
GSC: People needing to involve the cops instead of solving their own problems drives me insane. Thank God it didn’t go worse.
LF: Most disappointingly, they were younger. I expect that behavior for someone who’s 40 and up. You’re my age calling the cops? Super fucked. Luckily my friend Vaughan who does sound bites in “Decaying Clouds” let me record the rest of the vocals in his garage, because he’s an awesome guy.
GSC: “The First Time I Didn’t Get Fucked Up Was At Weekends During Mr. Brightside by The Killers” what a song title, what a romp. Just off the song title I know this song has a good story behind it.
LF: Yes it does. A lot of people criticize nerdy emo bands because their songs will be called “fart pickle” and they’ll be like, oh, this song is so emotional. That song was a practice in my philosophy of how to do a long stupid song title right. The song title is a reference, first, to a Merchant Ship song, “The First Time I Got Fucked Up Was to The Party Song By 182”. There’s a bar in Alamosa, Colorado called Weekends and the song is about a time I went there and I was shrouded with discomfort. I dropped out of college and I don’t drink or smoke at all, so being in a bar is often uncomfortable for me. It was really loud and on a really busy night too, it’s a one bar town and that’s the one bar. The song also has context in the album’s story. The song takes place in a bar, and the main character, Ralph, gets a proposition from the devil who says, “These dreams you’ve been having about how you’ll die, I’ll tell you what’s going on but in return I want your soul and the closest person to your heart will die.” He doesn’t take the devil’s offer which causes a mental break from all the stress of knowing something so terrible could or might happen that comes up in songs down the line.
GSC: “Front Seat Drivers” rocks, how did that song come together and what does it mean in the context of the record?
LF: That song is inspired by “Rock Bottom” by Modern Baseball. Very similar chord progression, very similar song structure. I wrote all the songs on an acoustic guitar and then brought them on to a big arrangement. Originally there was a lot more of a pop punk feel to it, but James turned it on his head. There’s an instrumental break after the first verse where he went into a salsa beat, and it completely changed the whole trajectory of the song, he made it one of the most unique songs on the record. That’s James’ superpower and why he’s such a great drummer, he can make a song completely his own like that. The sample choice was inspired by hip hop. There’s a YouTube channel where this guy reuploads seven inch rips of old r&b, the 60s and all that.There was one called “Reputation” by a band called The Attractions. The drum intro is “The Beers” by The Front Bottoms, I was like, James just steal that. In the context of the album, Ralph is having visions about how he’s gonna die, and he sees rainfall, which is why the water and drying off is all over this record. His nightmare comes true when a lot of rainfall starts picking up at the party as you can see on the cover. Everyone’s having a great time, but a hurricane is about to sweep through the whole house. So that’s the moment of nerve wracking realization.
GSC: I love the last two tracks but they feel so distinct from the rest of the record, you really feel the hip hop influence. How did those come about and how do they resolve the album’s story?
LF: “VeggieTales Superstar” is about growing up Christian.
GSC: We were a big VeggieTales family.
LF: I actually didn’t even see VeggieTales until I was thirteen funnily enough. It’s a song about my disdain for the church, it’s very personal. They’ll preach about love and treating others the way you want to be treated, but there’s so much homophobia and hatred within the church.
GSC: The pedophilia certainly helped drive me away.
LF: There’s a lot of really bad stuff that goes on in the church. The song isn’t theological in nature also, just the human organization that is The Church. There’s a verse at the end of the song that details what happens at the end of the story when the hurricane takes its toll. I’d argue it’s open to interpretation who dies at the end, I have my idea but I don’t want to force one necessarily. Does Ralph die? Does he stop this hurricane from taking the closest person in his life? The song calls back to “Knots and Ties”. “Veggie Tales” is also a spiritual dying of this part of myself that grew up within the church. I haven’t gone in a few years. I am who I am and hopefully I can coexist with my church going loved ones. The next song, “Even After All, You’re Here” the feeling is that the battle is won but the war isn’t over. It’s very much like a sequel to “…as we commence (one day at a time)”, the closer to “Sun Soaking”. The song is me talking to someone I love where I want to be better. That person picks me back up saying, you’re gonna be just fine, we got your back. For me, it’s very cathartic. There’s a world where the whole album sounds like that. Jacob from Summer 2000 plays cello, Nicholas Garza plays violin, there’s a whole mini DIY orchestra at the end of that song. So regardless of your interpretation of the events of the album, we’ll make it out fine in the end. Whatever was lost needed to be lost to carry on.
GSC: You need to sacrifice the old self to be reborn as a better person.
LF: It’s very, very spiritual, ironically, given our convo on the church. It’s about accepting who you are and that your environment doesn’t make you you. Just because I don’t accept that environment doesn’t make me a bad person, and just because people I love stay in the Church doesn’t make them bad either.
GSC: Do you have a favorite song on the record that we haven’t talked about?
LF: Probably “Decaying Clouds”. I love playing that song live. It’s really fun singing it. A lot of people have told me it is their favorite off the record. We had to take the album down and re-upload it with a cleaner take for the verses for that track and I’m really glad we did. I found the main sample in a 60s movie. I play drums on that and the drums aren’t super good, it would have been better if James played it, but that was like a Sun Soaking type song where I was so inspired that I just completely did the whole thing in a day.
GSC: How has the reception to the record been so far? Warmer than the last one I hope?
LF: Way warmer. What’s interesting is that people are struggling to find things bad to say about it but that could change. With Sun Soaking it was everything. The vocals are bad, the mixing sucks, the production sucks, song structures are weird. People are always gonna say the mix sucks because half of them don’t know what a mix actually is. We paid Abe Anderson to mix this one professionally and I think he did a wonderful job, any problem I have with the record are takes I could have done better. But the songs are there on this one and that’s what we’ve heard so far.
GSC: You’re a noisy emo band. Sometimes it’s like, what are you looking for? Do you want this pristine, clean song? Everyone liked the first record because of how lofi it was!
LF: Agreed. This one hasn’t gotten as much attention so far also. With Sun Soaking there was more hype built up, it got a lot of attention on day one. This one didn’t get as much attention day one, but it’s gotten a lot more this whole month. A lot of people seem to really like it, which makes me very happy, because this time around the audience wasn’t a concern at all, not to be rude. This is just for me and James and the people who helped make it happen.
GSC: Do you feel soaking in the glow of it, or has putting this out got your head rolling on what the next one might sound like? Or are you like let me learn these songs to get ready to go on the road?
LF: Just learning them to go on the road, because I pretty much know what the next one will sound like in my head. Right now, we’re soaking in this moment. The last two records, once they came out we got to work on the next one. It feels good to finally be able to sit on one for once. We’re gonna promote it as much as possible because we know it’s good. If you like it, share it around. That’s the best way to support us. It’s exciting to deeply learn these songs to go on the road with them. I feel very excited for the year ahead with this album.
GSC: What are the logistics of you guys playing live by the way? Do you have a Mary Poppins bag full of a million instruments you pull out?
LF: We haven’t played a lot of shows. We’ve been around for over five years and we’ve played ten or so shows. Early shows were me on piano and James on drums. Recently, we brought in one of our friends named Blaze. He’s pretty much the third lobster guy. He plays bass. He was telling a story of him seeing me in Walmart when his band KeepSweet was active and when our first record came out where he says he was intimidated to say hi.
GSC: That’s so cute.
LF: Really sweet. Eventually we became friends and we worked on his band’s record, hopefully that’ll come out soon, while also working on My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace. He’s been playing bass with us for like a while now, and he’ll be coming with us to do more shows. The setup is bass, piano, drums, and we have backing tracks. This next time we do it, I’m gonna be switching between piano and guitar. We can finally bring back the twinkle and play a lot of older stuff live again.
GSC: Two last questions for you, who are some of your favorite bands that more people should be checking out?
LF:I want to shout out my homies. Ogbert the Nerd, Hey, ily!, Fly Over States, Gunnar from Rookie Card’s new band. Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Tyler is a good friend. He’s been blown up which makes me so proud. It’s really awesome to see him just completely take the world by storm. Ginger Bee, they also feel like a friendly rival. Gus is the biggest sweetheart ever. There’s this band called inbirdseye, they have an EP called Speakeasy. Look it up on YouTube on Jomeez Channel. There’s a band from Colorado Springs called Mirkwood that I really like, another band called Cabin that’s also really cool. I feel like I am forgetting so many fifth wave homies.
GSC: The one last question, what is something outside of music that brings you joy, that may surprise people?
LF: I like cooking. I have a kitchen job in a deli that I actually enjoy. I like feeding people, hearing what different people like, figuring out new ways to make the same old ingredients refreshing. I like being inventive with sandwiches. I also love collecting cassettes, I have a crazy cassette collection. I don’t have a turntable, I don’t really like vinyl. The ones I have are mostly because I couldn’t get them on cassette.
