Cola is a post-punk band based in Montreal, featuring members of Ought and US Girls. Their latest record, The Gloss, is out now on Fire Talk.
Tim Darcy is the vocalist and guitarist of the Montreal-based post-punk band Cola, and formerly of Ought; Bret Kaser is the vocalist of the NY-based electronic punk band Lip Critic. Both bands put out new records this past spring — Cola’s The Gloss and Lip Critic’s Hex Dealer — so to celebrate, the two got on the phone to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Tim Darcy: How’s it going?
Bret Kaser: It’s going good. We’re on the ninth show of our tour. We’ve got 22 dates in total, so we’re almost at the halfway point. We’re in Los Angeles at the Echo.
Tim: Nice. So when I saw you just recently in Luxembourg, was that technically the same tour?
Bret: Yeah, for all intents and purposes. It was separated into a European and a US leg, but we only had about a week-and-a-half break between the two legs. So is feels kind of like one contiguous thing.
Tim: Yeah, a week-and-a-half is not a reset. I feel like in some ways, going home for, like, five days is almost worse.
Bret: Yeah, it totally jogs your brain — it’s like a relief where you get home and you’re like, Ah, we finished it. And then you remember that you gotta start two seconds later.
Tim: Yeah, totally. Also, I don’t know about you, but I feel like — actually, I don’t know how old you are. I assume you guys are all in your early 20s.
Bret: I just turned 26 yesterday.
Tim: Happy birthday!
Bret: Thank you. How old are you?
Tim: 33.
Bret: OK, cool. Not that far apart.
Tim: Yeah. But that was all to say, I’ve been touring for just over a decade now, minus the pandemic, so I feel like it’s always a similar pattern where I get back and I kind of feel manic for two days, almost like I’ve taken like Adderall or something. I just want to clean my house.
Bret: Oh, my god, I get the crazy brain for cleaning. I get home and I just tear apart my closet instantly.
Tim: [Laughs.] So you’re halfway through right now? How’s it been going so far?
Bret: It’s been super fun. I really didn’t know what to expect because we’re a pretty new band in the scheme of everything. This is our fifth year and we’ve put out 20-some tracks spread out between mixtapes and EPs, but this is the first full length album that we really attempted. So. I was planning on just playing to nobody for a month — which, I’ve got no problem doing. I would have a great time just playing in the practice space for a month, you know? But people have been pulling up more than we were expecting, and people have found the album. It’s been very pleasantly surprising to actually have a few people at each show that are apparently very engaged in the record. Definitely wasn’t expecting it.
Tim: That’s awesome. I’m not surprised. I mean, for people listening, we played together at Babys [All Right, in Brooklyn] last year.
Bret: Yeah, with Thanks For Coming.
Tim: Yeah, that was a sweet show. And then we just played at Out Of The Crowd festival in Luxembourg, and we’re going to play together again at Bowery next month. I’m not surprised because the record is great and the live show is so fun.
Bret: I think it’s an interesting combo, our two bands. I feel like on paper, a lot of people might not see us as being massive fans of each other, but me and Danny [Eberle, Lip Critic’s drummer] both listened to Ought when — he was probably in high school and I was in early college, because he’s a little younger than me. But there’s something about the songwriting — and it carries through into the Deep In View record as well — that I think we all find really satisfying. There’s so much about the way that you guys write songs and the way that you guys play that I feel is very inspiring to us, and something that we just really love to play with. We love bills that are contrasting and that don’t feel directly like, “Oh, yes, this makes perfect sense!”
When you were working on your last record, this new one, The Gloss — what were the feelings coming in to it? Because right now, we’re pretty deep working on our next album, and this will be only our second or third big project, and we’re kind of feeling like we want to blow everything up and restart. But how does it feel coming into making a record after making so many with similar collaborators?
Tim: I really relate to that idea of blowing it up. Over the three Ought records. I feel like that was our trajectory. The first two were really in the same blueprint of the sound world, and then for the third record, we had a pretty organic feeling of making a lateral move and seeing what else we could do as a band, as collaborators. I always have a level of admiration for artists who home in on their thing, and they just do that their whole career. I’m almost in awe of it, because I’m just so not that type of person. But then at the same time, there’s the quintessential example of someone like Neil Young, where part of what makes his career inspiring is that kind of relentless reinvention. It feels like he’s following his whims and his honest desires. I’ve been getting more and more out of accepting that about myself, and getting off on checking out other artists’ careers who do that type of thing. I’ve been going through the back catalog of John Cale, and he just goes everywhere. Sometimes it’s not something I want to listen to again and again, but I just appreciate the sincerity of his desire to follow the whims wherever they take him.
But yeah, that’s cool. So you’re thinking of this record you’re working on as your third major thing. You guys just put out a full length — when did that record come out?
Bret: It’s only been out a month, but we put out another a record that was kind of like a mix tape, but it was almost the same runtime, called Lip Critic II a few years ago. At the time, we thought of Lip Critic II as our first full length album in a way — it was 10 tracks — but we’re sort of deeming it a mixtape because it was so all over the place, and we didn’t really feel like it was this unified piece of work. Then when we were going into Hex Dealer, this record, we were super locked in. We had all these really loose storyboards of how we wanted the record to play out, how we wanted the narrative to be built. I wrote a script of phrases and dialogue that I had our friend read, and then we recorded it and spliced it in throughout the record. So we wanted it to be this really codified record of songs, but also a little like an audio collage where you can listen to it four or five times and hopefully hear different things in it each time.
But this next record, we’ve been working on it for a while because the Hex Dealer, even though it came out in May, had been done for a very long time. It’s been mastered and everything for, I want to say, upwards of a year-and-a-half before it came out. So we’ve been working the whole time on another album. A lot of the time, we’re in between these two modes of feeling like we’re still writing stuff for the last album, and feeling like we’re writing stuff for an album, like, five albums from now. Like things that are so far gone, that feel not even like the same band. We’re in that pocket now where we have so many tracks. Because we just me and Connor [Kleitz], who do all the production, we just produce a ton. That’s always how we’ve worked — we just produce a massive amount of roughs and then whittle down 50% of the roughs into more concise tracks, and then that becomes the record. So we’re just at that point where we’ve got so much work and we’re so hyped on all of it, but you can’t have a 35-song [record]. Nobody wants to listen to that. So we gotta try to figure out where we land in the timeline of, do we make something that that feels solid but a little derivative, or do we make something that feels kind of divorced from the idea of the band but feels very fun and entertaining? I’ve never really had that feeling before, where I feel in between a few ideas.
Tim: That’s interesting. Are you playing those songs live?
Bret: Not yet. They’re all still just on our laptops.
Tim: It’s interesting to think about how to approach presenting that stuff within your discography. Because some of what you’re talking about, it’s almost like you’re world building. You’re talking about five records from now, which is a cool idea. I’ve never really been that type. I’ve always been very rooted on just whatever the next record is going to be. But it makes me think of a band like Sonic Youth — in between those big early records, they did Master=Dik. You know, after Sister, they just did an EP where Thurston raps. So do you just mix it up like that, or do you let it simmer and become a full album or your new sound or whatever? Do you have any feeling about that?
Bret: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always worked in the way of, I’ll do a project and then I need to do something else in between the two projects. I’ve always done the structure of: I make a Lip Critic project and then I go and make another project, and then I make another Lip Critic project. It’s kind of like a palate cleanser. I did a solo album in between Lip Critic II and Lip Critic: Truth Revealed. And then I launched a tiny clothing brand — I took all these costuming classes when I was in college and learned all this sewing stuff, and I did 120-some pieces of reconstructed vintage clothing. Then I came back and started working on the next Lip Critic album. This kind of refresher has always helped me because I’m really distractable as hell, and I’m very multimedia focused. I really like graphic design — I do all our all our merch and all our album covers and music videos. So those projects really help to reset my brain about making another album.
But this is the first time where we’ve been touring too heavily for me to be like, Oh, let me go make another album with another project. It’s the first time where I’ve been like, Oh, I have to make another Lip Critic album after I’ve made a Lip Critic album. And it’s completely fried my brain — in kind of a good way, though, where I feel like I can’t make another Lip Critic album. Connor and I are just producing this off-the-wall bullshit, that is then getting forced into the framework of Lip Critic. Which, again, makes us make stuff that we would never make otherwise. So I do think there’s some weird positives to it. We start making tracks that are like techno tracks and feel like acid and industrial stuff. And then we start to try to jam drums on top of it, and it weirdly works. You figure out weird, roundabout ways of making it work.
Tim: It’s interesting to hear how you guys work, and the fact that you’re so technology-based with it. [Cola] is the first band I’ve ever been in where we write a bit over the internet. That’s how we’ve done the two records — we’ll send each other demos and then get together and workshop them. But we really think of ourselves as the power trio, like a band in a room. That’s the sound of the record, not many overdubs. To go back to this being a funny pairing, but also a cool pairing, I think there’s a kind of a Luddite streak in what we do. But I’m really intrigued by this idea of the way you guys work. It sounds like you could just open stuff in an Airbnb when you’re on tour and work, which is pretty cool.
Also, I feel like both of our bands do some investigation of technology lyrically, and there’s maybe a whiff of dystopianism.
Bret: Definitely.
Tim: I was curious — I mean, it feels lame just evoking “technology.” I guess more specifically, I’ve been thinking about the internet, and my impulse is usually to view it as mostly a misstep or something. But I’ve been trying to be more open-minded. Even thinking about the music industry — talking with people at our label [Fire Talk Records], they view streaming and DSPs as largely a positive thing coming out of an era when there was even less money in music. And thinking about the positive aspects of being able to connect really directly with your fans, or even the ability to just drop a single and have it connect with an audience and not necessarily be going through the big press machine putting a value judgment on it… I’m trying to be more open-minded. But I’m curious what y’all’s take is, or your relationship to technology. Because being at your shows, I feel like I’m in the rave scene of The Matrix. There’s a lot of glitchy tech elements to the music, whereas, I feel like with our records, it’s a little bit more straight up. We’re just like a rock band, and the lyrical themes are considering man’s relationship to technology. But what’s your relationship to it?
Bret: I feel like my music taste and my love of art in general stems a lot from the internet. I grew up in Connecticut and my parents both taught high school art in New York State, so I was going to a lot of art museums and I was seeing a lot of art. They were really active music listeners; they took me to a ton of shows. But I never really had that, like, brain blast moment until I was looking at stuff on the internet, like Skrillex and Benny Benassi and listening to dance music and finding metal. I remember finding Metallica records on the internet, clicking on them because the album art looked cool, listening to stuff on OG Pandora. All this stuff just kind of rocked my world. I talk about this a lot, too, with the dudes, about the whole idea of how regional scenes got exploded by the internet, and really heavily by SoundCloud and Bandcamp specifically. Like, a bunch of kids in my town were really into rappers from Florida, and we were really into bands from all over. There was no real focus on the area that they were in. We were probably about an hour drive from New York — that’s where I went to go see all the shows I ever went to — and there was no focus ever in my mind of, Oh, I care about New York bands, I care about New York rappers and New York DJs. I was listening to stuff from Iran and China and all over the US and in Europe and never thinking about where it was from as a reason to listen to it.
So I think that’s a big part of the thing that I love about the internet in relation to music. The sad part is just the effect of the internet on the world — music is just a footnote in it. Overall, the effect of the internet on the world is something that is so hard to even begin to quantify, because it’s literally like we changed reality forever. But the effect on music, I think, is pretty 50/50. It gifted us this massive decentralization of all music. You can now go on the internet in the middle of Wyoming and listen to music from Turkey — like, “I wonder what music was being made in Istanbul in the ‘50s?” And you can just listen to a bunch of it. You have no limitation on what you find. But at the same time, it’s been used by profiteering companies to essentially just extract every last penny out of the music industry, and not give any of that to artists. It’s this crazy double-edged sword of, the music industry is massive and there’s a ton of money in it, just not a lot of it ends up going to artists. But yeah, the thing that I think is so powerful is just that the global pool of music is now accessible to almost anyone.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the renewed importance of curation, when everything is possible and everybody has access to everything. That makes sense to me as a path to idiosyncrasy. But also, I think it’s a bit of a fabrication. The internet’s just a tool. You can use it in any way. If you’re reading the major indie sites or whatever, that’s just your pipeline. It wouldn’t be any different than getting Rolling Stone magazine or something back in the day. But then you can also use [the internet] as a library to find whatever.
It’s interesting to hear that that’s your relationship to it. Where do you think your kind of dystopian outlook comes from then? Because it sounds like you’re talking about having a positive relationship to the internet. I have the same relationship, honestly. I mean, I grew up in a pretty rural part of New Hampshire, so I didn’t have high speed internet until later in high school. I remember my brother having a hard drive with thousands of records on it that he had downloaded from Soulseek and just letting me take whatever, and that was a huge part of my musical education. But I feel this tendency now to view the internet and technology as a bad thing. I think for me, the golden era was before smartphones — that era where we had high speed internet, but not all the time. Where do you think your dystopian outlook comes from?
Bret: I think in the band, we all have the same feeling that the people who have power over the content and over technology do not really care if they’re helping or hurting anyone. The problem that we see with all of it is not necessarily the technology that we have, but the fact that it’s being wielded by people who don’t give a fuck about anything other than amassing power and wealth and influence. So there’s this heavy feeling all the time. Every time we even play a show or we put out a track or we promote something, it feels like we’re just a drop in the pond of a much larger mechanism. We have a lot of beliefs and ideas that we think would benefit the world overall; we try to walk the walk as much as we can in terms of all the things we support and align with. But it does just feel like at the end of the day, we’re a digital hardcore band of four people and we can’t stop, like, the acquisition of Bandcamp. Bandcamp felt like it raised us in a weird way. We all grew up putting records out on it — as well as SoundCloud — and finding so much music through it. To have it get acquired by the company that owns Fortnite, and now acquired by another company — with Bandcamp Fridays and all that stuff, the money is not going where it was going anymore.
Even something like that, that felt such an anomaly in the scheme of these digital music sharing platforms, it feels like everything is heading towards a consolidation towards the top. Not even just technologically, but in terms of wealth and power in general, there’s this feeling of consolidation, like things are getting sucked out of the communities that actually use them and being pulled up to the top where people are owning and controlling things. So that’s one of the big things that we feel like we’re fighting against, this giant tidal wave of power and influence that we do not have. We just want to make our tracks and play our shows and make videos and t-shirts, and it becomes harder and harder and harder as time goes on to do it when power and wealth and influence are getting consolidated at the top.
Tim: Yeah, definitely. It’s funny, we did a Bandcamp listening party earlier today — I don’t know if you’ve ever done one of those.
Bret: No, I haven’t.
Tim: It’s kind of cool. It plays the record and you’re in there with whatever fans RSVP’d, and there’s a little chat room. Just very wholesome, lots of nice people in the chat. And, like, three-quarters of the way through, I was like, “Man, this is so great. Big up Bandcamp.” And then I was like, “Fortnite overlords: If you’re reading this, please don’t delete this space.” [Laughs.] It feels like there’s a ghostly hand hovering over the delete button. But I totally agree. It was such a big part of my early experience playing in bands. It was such a good tool. It’s still such a good tool.
Bret: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, technology can be wielded to improve people’s lives and make things easier and more accessible, if it’s chosen to do so. And it can also do extremely the opposite. So I feel like it’s important to think about why you use stuff and what you use, and be mindful of all of it. Be mindful of, where’s the flow of cash going? Where’s the algorithm pointing? Who’s making the decisions? It’s that Prince quote from the VMAs in, like, 2001, where he goes, “You use the computer, you don’t let the computer use you.” You gotta be mindful, because a lot of this stuff is not being controlled by people that care about you. Cola and Lip Critic care about you, though!
Tim: Yeah, exactly.
