On being consumed by the work

You’re best known as a musician, but you’re also a painter. Can you talk about making time for painting when music is presumably your primary creative focus?

The sad reality of being a musician is that the schedules are really insane and you rarely have time to even take care of yourself. Sometimes, you don’t even have a break between touring, and you get immediately thrown into writing mode. But I love being overworked because it makes me think way less about my emotions or what I’m feeling deep down. I work myself to the bone.

It’s really tricky to get into painting mode. When I was a kid, I used to paint all the time, and I used to spend hours in front of a canvas or papers, just sketching, enjoying. [At] Central Saint Martins College of Art I did painting, and was lucky enough to integrate my music practice into my art. I moved it forward toward installation work. That was sort of the progression between my mediums.

Painting is more like a hobby now, and I integrate it into graphic design—the posters I do, and the album package and visual elements. The album design is very, very thought out, and I pick my collaborators really carefully. Vasso Vu, who shot the album cover for Evangelic Girl is a Gun, also has a fine art background. I spend time with a lot of painters. The intentionality of the medium of painting is very sensual and very personal, and it’s very deep. Inside the psyche, I feel like mark-making is one of the most profound mediums, compared to music. But music is a whole package and an industry of its own. So is the fine art world. But to answer your question, I don’t really have as much time as I would like to do painting, but I make time.

I’m drawn to you saying that overworking yourself is a great way to not think about your emotions. Can you talk more about that?

I feel like it’s not surprising to anyone that I’m a very, very sensitive and emotional person, and that’s what makes me make the work that I make… I always ask god, “Why do I feel so much when other people feel so little?” I never figured out why everything hits me like a wave of mutilation. It’s so intense, and I view other [people], and they don’t feel as much, and I envy that. [I’m] always striving to feel less and less, and it wears you out after a while. Or you put it all inside a vault, and then it comes out in the medium of art.

I think overworking is one of the tools of coping. It’s definitely one of the healthier ways, rather than using drugs or doing reckless things. I’m one of the lucky people who gets to pursue art. That is a very privileged position. If I can work to the bone and it helps me release something out of me and it touches other people, then I’ll keep doing that, because at least I’m doing a service in some way.

You release albums at a faster pace than many musicians these days. Is that related to how much you find yourself working on your art, or is the pace a function of some other thing?

Yes. The moment I released softscars, I immediately started writing again… You nurture this project for so long and then it’s over, and then it starts to feel really empty. Same thing goes for touring. When I tour and it ends, I get this massive spout of depression. It’s very common because you get such an adrenaline rush. A lot of people that I’ve spoken to, musicians and other artists who tour a lot, tend to always keep busy and go into sessions, start making a new project, or work on something else.

When I finished softscars, I started writing on tour. There would be days when I would sleep in the studio and wake up in the studio. Me and Chris Greatti would go 15 hours sometimes, fall asleep on the carpet. I feel like all artists know the vibe when you’re just dying to make more things, you’re dying to create. It’s probably stemming from some unresolved trauma, but I don’t know. I do enjoy making work and making music. It’s one of the most therapeutic things that god has given to mankind.

How do you know when a song is done or it’s time to start another song?

I just know. There are so many moments of perfectionism that I’ve experienced throughout my lifetime—I’m only 27, but I speak like I’m fucking Yoda or some shit—but when you’ve just been writing a lot, you know when you’re starting to tweak a little bit, and you just make all these really obnoxious changes that no one is going to notice but you. When I notice that’s happening, I’m like, “Let’s just go back to the original version. This was perfect. Let’s see it as is. Don’t overthink it.” There are a couple of songs where I do have that gut feeling that it’s not going to be released though.

I’m curious if this also applies to knowing when an album is done.

I guess an album is the fully formed body of work that comprises multiple songs. Usually, if you have a plan for how long you want the album to be, then you know when the album is done. What if it completes its story? There’s a different meaning to whether a song is done or whether an album is done, but sometimes you just got to give it to the divine power, let it be in god’s hands.

On Evangelic Girl is a Gun, the song lengths are shorter in some cases. How does this relate to you feeling that the story of the album was done?

There’s a lot of controversy [around] song lengths and people wanting more, but I feel like when I was trying to extend some of the shorter songs like “Skullcrusher,” it just didn’t hit as hard. I was playing around with a lot of arrangement styles, but that was the original demo recording structure—not the actual demo, but the demo recording structure. I wanted to keep it as it was, and it ended engulfed in flames. And when something is engulfed in flames, it’s engulfed so quickly. I wanted to make it seem fleeting, but everyone has their own opinions, and I don’t give a fuck whether people not like it or not… Everyone is entitled to their own opinions about what they feel a song should be. But then, at the end of the day, if you like the music, you like it. If you don’t like it, you don’t.

You’ve written that Evangelic Girl is a Gun paints an homage to the artist’s role. What do you consider the artist’s role to be?

When an artist has really moved me is when the art speaks to me in volumes without any words. One of the most pivotal albums that really encompasses this point for me is White Pony by Deftones. I feel like some instrumentals, as well as vocalization-inclusive tracks, really speak to me without using any deep linguistic tools. I feel like this is trying to capture a moment, a feeling that you can’t describe. This is the artist’s weapon. This is what the artist is meant to be doing—to transcribe without any words a feeling, a memory, a moment, or the human experience.

Is the artist’s role political? There’s music that is trying to stay at a certain point in the current societal state, and there’s music that’s trying to subvert from that completely and embrace peace and love, and you can see it through the times. Art is a dialogue between humans and the society they are in, or the time that they’re in, and the landscape of politics and culture. It’s a reflection, a response. I think that is the most powerful weapon an artist can have. I could have gone down many other different career paths, but I chose to do this because I felt that I was rather inclined—more inclined than other things—to pursue it.

At what point in the process of making your music do you bring your collaborators in? I’m really interested in how you choose your collaborators, too. I know some of them have been with you for years.

I write the music on my own first, and bring [my collaborators] a skeleton of the demo. Depending on the type of demo I have and which direction I know it’s going, I choose the person who I know will be able to speak volumes to it or cacophonize—like, alchemize something more in line with what I already made in the demo. I’m very well in tune with the types of production styles that my collaborators are in, so I tend to curate it quite stringently… I’m one of those lucky people who have always had really fantastic people around me all the time.

It’s interesting that the sound of yeule is changing despite the collaborators [staying] relatively the same. I feel like it’s because each album for me is an evolution, and it’s the future that is mutated. You can’t always be the same person. My style has always been very versatile. That’s why I did electronic music, because it wasn’t very confining to a specific thing. It was so experimental.

As you’ve grown in your music, have you realized that you have certain writing habits that you either lean into or try to work against?

Yeah. I used to always have really detailed [aims] like, “Okay, I want it to sound like this. I want it to really exude the stylings of the ’90s or early 2000s.” I always had really extensive notes about what I wanted it to be. But then, recently, I feel like it takes away the spontaneity of making art. Sometimes, experimenting and being spontaneous creates really beautiful things, so I tend to steer away from planning it too much.

Psychologically too, you can look at what the basic human needs are. One of [our needs] is spontaneity and play. I feel like once you take away the aspects of play and spontaneity in writing music, then it feels really calculated, so I just write whatever the fuck I want to write. I try not to plan as much anymore, but to an extent, you can’t go in without anything. You’ve got to have some musical knowledge or a basis. But I know when the limit is, when it’s getting so calculated that it doesn’t feel as free.

I’ve read that you’re using less Auto-Tune, sometimes none at all, in the vocals on Evangelic Girl is a Gun. That feels like a very deliberate choice as compared to spontaneity and play. I’d love to hear more about where that choice came from.

I feel like what you’re saying is [antithetical] to my point, because I think it’s not. I think the rawness of the voice is play. If you want to sing in tune, you use Auto-Tune. It’s also a very iconic style of electronic music, and a lot of artists use [it] to create a very iconic sound. It’s not bad intrinsically, but it is something that I feel tones me down a bit when I’m trying to make a very guttural scream or phase into a more full set of voice from a growl. Many different types of vocal styles don’t work with Auto-Tune… I used this application with my drummer, and we were trying to see where AI music was at, to see whether we had to plan our grand exit for music soon. We were testing the waters a little bit, and the sounds we were generating were really eerie. They were using the pentatonic scale and really beautiful music theory knowledge inside the AI-generated stuff, and we were just dumbfounded.

I appreciate you broadening my perspective on this, because you’re right that this actually does go hand in hand with play and spontaneity instead of going against it. Earlier, you were saying that your music doesn’t need lyrics to speak to a person. To what extent do you have to resist putting vocals on top of a stretch of music? Or do you just know when a song doesn’t need lyrics?

Sometimes I have arguments with producers where I’m like, “I think this should just sit on its own. It’s so beautiful.” I remember when I was writing softscars, I was letting the guitars growl and hum and letting the feedback just roll, and I didn’t want any vocals over it. I just know [that’s the right decision] because when I hear something, I want to hear it without anything else. When you curate things, it’s either you know when you should have it, or you don’t know when you should have it. When I hear something instrumentally, I want to be engulfed in it or consumed by it.