Nick and Shane Sullivan front the Brooklyn band Joyer; Jack Medlyn and Maxwell Elphick are thee guitarists-slash-drummers for the Adelaide band Swapmeet. The new Swapmeet record, Mount Zero, just came out this summer on Winspear, and next month Joyer will be supporting them on their first US tour. To celebrate it all, the four got on Zoom to get acquainted before hitting the road.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Nick Sullivan: It's cool to meet you guys before tour. There's been times where we meet up with a band that we've never met, and it's just like, “We'll see how it goes…” Not that I expect you guys to be crazy or anything.
Jack Medlyn: Just you wait.
Nick: Have you guys ever had to do that? Just meet up with a band that you've never met before and be on the road with them?
Jack: Kind of. Only for, like, three days, though.
Nick: Well, you got us for four, so…
Maxwell Elphick: Hell yeah.
Nick: We might push you to your limit now.
Shane Sullivan: Do you have any tour initiations that you make bands do? Because we do.
Maxwell: Yeah, we’ve got this one that we get every band to do with us when we go on tour. We go for a 10 kilometer run before every show, like just before doors. We want to make sure that the band we're playing with can run for 10 kilometers.
Shane: You wanna make sure we're in shape.
Nick: [Laughs.] We've been listening to your album so much. Winspear always has the best bands, so I found you guys just because I always check out what they are about to release. It's sick. I feel like you guys have so many sounds going on, which is cool. We did read a bunch of articles and your Wikipedia right before this because we were like, “We gotta come in with the hard hitting questions.”
Shane: So we'll know if you're lying.
Nick: You guys seem to also get hit with the get-called-any genre-even-if-it-doesn't-make-sense thing. Do you try to write to a genre or do you guys feel like you just do whatever feels right and whatever it is, it is?
Jack: I feel like we just do whatever it is, it is. The one constant is just playing guitar.
Maxwell: We've been hit with the ‘90s thing a lot. There's even articles that say we all became friends because of our shared love of ‘90s music, which we don't know where that came from because it's just not true. [Laughs.]
Shane: That's one that gets thrown around a lot, and also just the vague umbrella of “shoegaze,” which we get tagged with a lot and it’s not something we've ever identified with. I see people calling you guys that too, which I always find really funny because I wouldn't consider you guys shoegaze.
Nick: We had an article once that was talking about our album and being like, “I hate this kind of music, usually when I see a press release that mentions Slint, I just throw it away completely, but I like this album.” And I was like, We didn't mention Slint… They just started hating on influences that they assumed that we have.
Jack: So, we thought we'd get in early with this question because as I understand, it's one of your favorite questions: We want you guys to rank your top five favorite fruits.
Shane: Woah! We do this on tour all the time!
Jack: Really?
Shane: Wait, did you read this somewhere? Damn, the internet's a crazy place. Or maybe we talk about that too much.
Nick: [Laughs.] We did our research.
Shane: Banana, mango, pineapple, apples, and cherries.
Nick: Do you have a type of apple?
Shane: It's kind of basic now, but Honeycrisp is my favorite. I feel like it's everyone's favorite.
Maxwell: Honeycrisp isn't as popular here. I think everyone goes for the Pink Lady.
Shane: Oh, Pink Lady, that's pretty good. It's kind of similar.
Nick: I think mine's banana, mango, pear, grapefruit, and raspberries.
Maxwell: Do you guys eat a lot of fruit on tour?
Shane: We try to get some fresh food in us, but not really. Sometimes I'll rip a gas station banana… Did you guys think about your top five?
Jack: No. We'll have a good top five on tour.
Nick: Alright, our next question. So, you guys are the two that switch between guitar and drums a lot. What instrument did you start on and what's your main principal instrument?
Maxwell: Mine's guitar. I only really started playing drums because of Swapmeet — and I love drums so much, I think it's really fun to get to do both. It's the classic thing of in a band practice, the guitarist is always wanting to muck around on the drum kit, and we get to do that all the time, which is great. But guitar's my one.
Jack: I also started playing guitar way earlier than drums. We're the same. Neither of us are actually good drummers. We're just trying to fake it.
Nick: You can usually tell when it's like, “This person is just playing because they have to out of necessity,” but your drums are so tight. We’ve even seen live videos of you guys and were trying to be like, “One of them's gotta have started on drums…” But that's so interesting.
Shane: Nick, that was his first instrument, so he takes over drum duties on our recordings. I wish I could play, but I'm not very good at it.
Nick: You're not bad. Our bass player is the one who always jumps behind the kit, and he's pretty bad. But Shane's pretty good.
Maxwell: Our bass player is the one who's played drums for the longest.
Nick: But he never plays drums, right?
Maxwell: He never plays drums. But I reckon he will on the next thing. He played drums for, like, eight years and then started playing bass the last year of high school.
Alright, this one's for Shane. From your Instagram, we've seen that you post Duster a lot. What other bands do you like, if there are any, and why don't you post about them as much?
Shane: [Laughs.] Wait, do I really post about Duster a lot? That's awesome.
Nick: This is like Nardwuar.
Shane: That's just my favorite band ever. It's the only band I care about… No, I feel like I just used to be way more up to date with posting, but I don't post a lot anymore. But I gotta get some more bands on there. Maybe I'll throw you guys on my personal Instagram.
Jack: Let’s go.
Shane: But Duster’s really cool. We were super, super into them when we first started and we were just trying to make Duster rip-off music. And I guess that's when I was posting on the ‘gram.
Maxwell: Hell yeah. Same as us. We were big Duster heads. Got a four-track because of Duster as well.
Shane: They were very formative band. But we kind of got stuck in that of sound for a while. We still really get the slowcore tag from all of it. I still like a lot of that stuff, but I try to branch out, keep people on their toes a little more.
Jack: Do you still play much of the Duster influenced stuff live?
Nick: We hardly ever play what's not the most current. We'll do a couple old songs, but a lot of that stuff's pretty weeded out of our set. We almost put a really old slowcore song in the set for this run, but we have a fill-in drummer, so we thought it'd be easier to just do stuff that he would know better.
There's a lot of songs where you guys trade off vocals. We both sing in Joyer, but we never sing on the same song. How does that come about?
Jack: I feel like it can be, “I'm stuck, come do a verse,” or something. When we're making music, it's like everyone's just crowded around the laptop and someone has a little mic most of the time, and whoever pops up it’s like, “OK, I guess they're doing this verse…”
Nick: That's really sick. It makes such a unique change of pace for the song whenever a different vocalist comes in. We've been writing a lot and we're like, “Man, I wish we were brave enough to do that.” I feel like we sound the same, when we talk and sing, so I don't think it would be noticeable like it is for you guys. But I love that when that happens on your tracks.
Jack: Thanks.
Maxwell: Alright, this one's for Nick. It's a fuck, marry, kill: System of a Down, Daft Punk, and The Prodigy.
Nick: Woah… OK, so, I’d probably marry Daft Punk because they're my favorite out of all of those. I'd probably kill The Prodigy because I only like, like, two of their songs. And then System of a Down… they're fun in the moment, but I don't need to commit myself to them forever.
Jack: This one's for Shane, another fuck, marry, kill: Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Leonard Cohen.
Shane: Ooh.. I'm gonna marry Bob Dylan. He's just got so many songs, so I feel like I wouldn't get too bored.
Nick: Are we basing this off of the music or the person?
Shane: If it’s the person, I'm fucking Leonard Cohen. He's such a horny guy, and I like that. I like how horny his songs are. But in terms of music, I'm gonna kill him. I'm only getting into him recently. His songs a really, really good, but Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson are such staples for me. So I'm gonna marry Brian Wilson musically, but kill him sexually.
Jack: I like that.
Nick: Actually, I think that we could do one for you, because when I was reading your Wikipedia, there was three bands mentioned: Pinegrove, Big Thief, and Julia Jacklin.
Maxwell: I feel like it'd be a different answer for everyone in the band.
Jack: I'd kill Pinegrove, and I'd marry Big Thief. I don't want to say the other one.
Nick: That's fair.
Jack: But, musically, that’s where I’d go.
Shane: Alright, should we stop recording? Do you think that's enough content?
Maxwell: Yeah, I reckon we're contented up.
Shane: Nice.
