Interview: New Plague Radio Discuss Their Single/Video "Methamphetamine Dance"
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“All three of us are really fond of brutal foreign horror films and 90’s cartoons, so a lot of the music was written with something like Baskin or Darkwing Duck playing in the background. ”
What are some things/people/places that inspire the trio's creativity when working on new music? Is all of the music created by the trio produced in house?
All three of us are really fond of brutal foreign horror films and 90’s cartoons, so a lot of the music was written with something like Baskin or Darkwing Duck playing in the background.
Chief Redeye is a theme park fanatic, and his verses are typically written in line for the Matterhorn. Donovan is so obsessed with the Dark Souls video game franchise that he has worked references to them into almost all of our songs. He keeps saying he’ll stop and we do not believe him. We have a mastering engineer, but she’s the only other person who works with us. Everything else is just the three of us banging on the 18 or so instruments sitting around the house.
Congratulations on the completion and release of your debut EP "The Beeswax", which features "Methamphetamine Dance". Describe for us your creative process for the development of the song itself.
Chief Redeye brought a new verse to rehearsal about the adrenaline spike of a live performance and Donovan decided to try and re-interpret the cadence as a guitar riff. The rest of the song came together more or less by itself, with Donovan stitching the chorus out of an analogy he uses to talk about the feeling of existential panic.
As the director of the "Methamphetamine Dance" video, how did you come up with the treatment for the visual and do you look forward to directing more?
Redeye wrote a couple potential video ideas that were far too grotesque to actually film, but one of them featured a girl in a bathtub listening to us on the radio. Donovan, a frequent noise complaint recipient in his regular life, suggested we change it to a girl being rudely interrupted by her loud bandmate neighbors.
We had a blast filming it (didn’t sleep for 36 hours but still a blast) and are preparing to film a video for our second single, ‘Rock Like The Smiths’ here in the next week or so.
The "Beeswax" includes four songs; were there others that were recorded that you decided not to include on it? If so, why not?
There were a lot of songs that didn’t make the EP, most of which we will be releasing later this year. We felt those four songs did the best job of expressing what we like as a band. On top of that, when your last song is a near ten-minute rock opera about video game cannibals, it doesn’t leave a ton of extra space.
With the EP now released, what are some of New Plague Radio's goals musically for this year?
We just finished building a vocal booth in our living room (check it on Instagram @Newplagueradio I’m sorry we had to), so that should make recording smoother while the world is still on fire. We’re working on filming genre-bent rap covers of classic songs, so hopefully we’ll have that up on YouTube relatively soon.
We have a bunch more originals and videos on the way, of course. And Donovan has this crackpot scheme to build a screen printer and start sending people free band t-shirts, but we’ll believe it when we see it.
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