2023 was a great year for noise rock with bands like Model/Actriz and Mandy Indiana pushing the genre’s sonic boundaries in new directions. Yet if anyone location has been a nexus point for inventive engaging guitar skronk it has to be Atlanta Georgia, with last year featuring excellent releases from Vangas, 15000 Guns, Big Yellow and my personal favourite Buice. With their dynamic, dexterous and intense brand of noise rock garnering them a sudden cult following. I was lucky enough to have a zoom call with the bands bassist/lead singer Hayden Locke to discuss the bands artistic process, influences and the wider Atlanta scene.

So recently released your second album One Day You’ll See the Sun and it’s recently gained a lot of online traction and especially on rym. So, I wanted to know how you guys are feeling about that response?

I didn’t really use rate your music, so I hadn’t become aware of how that impacted artists’ works quite to the extent until it just kinda happened.

There was a meme that people, in our community, down here in Atlanta, we’re sharing, of like oh it’s higher on rate your music than ‘Bad’ by Michael Jackson look at that, that’s hilarious. I mean, it’s awesome. It’s in a way, validating. I just find it very strange that stuff like that happens. Like that people care, you know, that’s f*cking wild.

Has it opened up any new opportunities or new ideas for the band so far, or maybe opened you guys up to a wide audience?

I feel like rate your music and a lot of these forums have also showed us because we’ve gained a lot of traction here and cause we’re from, like from the southeast of the United States. But seeing the like response to the internet had really expanded towards countries like the UK in particular. Like, I noticed after like, attraction, rate your music, I was able to notice like a lot of British people just like found out about this and I have no idea how. I theorize it’s because it sounds like Black Midi and the British were just like, oh, yep.

I theorize it’s because it sounds like Black Midi and the British were just like, oh, yep

Additionally, this whole album was a testing ground in a way. There’s a song on there that was kind of like testing the waters from what we wanted to do in the future. And kind of especially seeing the response of the album, I feel like it did impact what we’re going to be doing moving forward as a project. So yeah, no, that definitely had an impact on the material we’re currently working on.

When you went into like creating the album. Were there any specific conceptual or artistic goals you had in mind?

It kind of wrote itself. a lot of these songs are from various points in my life. and in our lives. The band’s gone through a multiple lineup changes. Some of these songs have been like kicking around, since like, 2020 and some of them we wrote a couple of months before we went into the studio. It in essence is a collection of songs. There’s not necessarily a concept behind them, although there are loose concepts throughout the album between like how ‘Crooked Girl’ and ‘The Sun’ kind of bleed into each other like that’s a little dramatic. But ultimately it was kind of built through us playing songs at shows. We had released our first album back in 2021 and we just played that album basically like every time we would play, we just played the whole thing and we kinda didn’t really know where to go from there. We started gradually adding just ‘ADHD’, ‘Windy’ and ‘Grifter’ for like an entire year and then we gradually over time sort of adding other songs to these stats. And that kind of led to the skeleton of the album like the whole transition at the beginning of the album of track one into track two, kind of almost bleeding into one song, that’s just literally how we play it, and we wanted it to translate on the album. But, yeah, even then there are songs that didn’t necessarily come through playing in shows that we wrote in the studio like, ‘Apocalypse Now’ we never played it to show until the album already came out. In ‘221935’ also played a couple of times before it ended up coming but the most part that was a song that kind of came more from the writing process. It did kinda come together as a general group of songs, but there are themes in between.

I found in the lyrics lyrics of the album, this is kind of distinct twisted Americana imagery like ‘I am Mothman’ in particular but also ‘Lake City MO’. So, I was wondering,  what were your main lyrical inspiration for the album?

I mean, that’s pretty accurate. I feel like I do really put a lot into like my lyrics. There are tracks like Apocalypse Now where I’m basically just talking about American politics. The entire time, but there are even other tracks on the album like even like ‘ADHD’ and ‘Mothman’ or a song like the ‘Sun’ or even ‘Crooked Girl’. Even if they’re not directly about American politics, it’s kind of a residual after effect of living in the United States. I feel like it is a cynicism of American politics. To the degree of almost sarcasm.

Even if they’re not directly about American politics, it’s kind of a residual after effect of living in the United States.

Do you think that’s kind of what is that what the album title One Day You’ll See the Sun is about?

So that’s funny. That kind of just worked out. That ended up like being, huh, I wrote all these songs about this thing and the name works. Shit, that’s cool. The actual name one day you’ll see the sun came from an unrelated story of in 2019 when our band is like really really young and really bad, God bless Ian Valdez and Russel Houk. I love them and they would agree we were not good. And December on ironically the same day we dropped the album in 2023 exactly 4 years before that I don’t know how it worked out. We had a conversation about how we wanna make our First album and we didn’t know what to call it. We were debating making it self-titled, which is eventually what ended up happening a couple of years later, but that was a little unrelated. We wanted to name our first album One Day You’ll See the Sun, the only consistency was that we wanted ‘I am Mothman’ on the album, everything else about the original version of the album is completely different.

It kept getting kicked down the road and when we had a complete reshift of members we didn’t really want to go with that idea yet. We kind of just wanted to put together some songs, self-title it so we could like play the songs at shows and people could go listen to something we had out, but our priority was still One Day You’ll See the Sun. And so, we wound up taking 4 years to make One Day You’ll See the Sun and so a lot of the original themes and ideas on the first version of the album, even ‘I am Mothman’. We’re completely different like that the version of that song that we originally wrote pre COVID was very different from the version that we have now. But that it yeah, it was kind of originally created on it from a place of optimism. I’ve personally been through a lot of like traumatic stuff and I kind of use lines like that, metaphors, and stuff. To kind of make me continue to do this. Cause if I didn’t, there would be no One Day You’ll See the Sun. It’s originally something I would tell myself out of a sense of optimism, but as I ended up writing the album, to kind of recognize the irony of it, I’m like, you got this name for a album that is very, very depressing and hopeless and how we’re all f*cked. Like that is kind of the vibe of the album, I don’t know, it’s funny it worked out that way.

Did you find that for most of songs on the album it kind of came out of jamming and such or were there tracks where it and it was a process of more deliberate step-by-step construction?

There was a bit of both honestly, when really listening to the tracks, you can kind of figure out which ones are which. Like, ‘221935’, we wrote that one originally off jamming. But then there are tracks like ‘Apocalypse Now’, where it’s a whole multi-week process of writing. Whereas ‘221935’ literally got new sections by playing the song at multiple shows and then like Checking out the vibe at the show like ‘that bridge we used was kind of boring let me do something else’ and then ‘we did this and like this parts cooler’. Then we decided that all right maybe if Josh screamed over the part and I did like a like a Slint impression for a second, it’ll sound really interesting. It kind of built itself, organically that way. Whereas a lot of newer songs we have on our next album are like ‘Apocalypse Now’, we’ve been doing a lot of like sitting down and writing out these tracks for this next project, but this one had a couple of songs that were made organically by playing them.

One of the real standout tracks for me was ‘Untitled’ which features Karina Techert on vocals. When you constructed that track was it like from day one you wanted a different singer, or did you initially try out with your own vocals?

So, this, song goes back a while, and originates from a jam as well. It was me, Jack, and one of our former drummers. It was eventually constructed into like a whole song but originally it was just a 12 min jam at some point and like 5 min into it our drummer is going dunn dunn and then I was doing dunn dunn dunn dunn and we kind of built it around that idea. In terms of the guest vocals, I mean, I never wrote the lyrics to the song initially. I pretty much only helped with the instrumentation. And from the part that I played it was legitimately a case of guys I can’t play bass and sing the song. It’s like, my brains hurt guys can’t do it, no can do. So, we originally planned, a different guest vocalist to sing the song. But we took a break for about a year, and then we originally kind of had our last lineup change and we ended up deciding that Karina would be really apt to sing on the track. We didn’t have to, but we chose to change the lyrics, cause I wasn’t a fan of them. I really think that Karina knocked out the park. It was a song that needed a vocalist for a minute and that would kind of go between people and then that’s the person we decided.

Speaking of vocals, I really like your vocals on the album a point they kind of reminded me more of like that kind of like classic noise rock stuff like Jesus Lizard or the Birthday Party, but at other points they remind me of Death Grips, so I was wondering what are the influences on your vocal delivery?

That’s, one of my favourite questions. This one’s crazy to me, the MC ride comparisons. Cause there’s certain songs like Windy, for example, where literally when we were writing it. Then Jack, our guitarist, played the opening riff and then started playing the rest of the song and I was like, wouldn’t it be sick if I did like an MC ride impression on this. That would be sick. I love Raygan Busch. I’ve always found his vocal style very real. Coming from a place of genuine hurt is the way I would describe it. And then Isaac Wood, especially on for the first time, when I first heard that album the vocal deliveries on it really of blew me away. And that’s kind of why I just kind of gravitate to that BCNR album the most. Is the vocal delivery on those really dissonant like if Slint got interpolled. Slint in particular is another one that I take a lot of personal influence from. Other people that come to mind are Adrian Bellew from Discipline era King Crimson and then Alex Kent for sure. That kind of vocal delivery in vocal size, what I’ve tended to gravitate towards.

I love Raygan Busch. I’ve always found his vocal style very real. Coming from a place of genuine hurt is the way I would describe it.

On a wider scale are any artists have specifically influenced this album or the bands overall sound, whether that be musical or otherwise?

Well I forgot to mention this in my vocal style and songwriting but a lot of it does just come from genuine frustration, and me trying to take it out in a way that’s therapeutic, and that creates those raw styles. Those other bands help to influence what directions to take it. I think that we’re actually very, influenced by a lot of like local projects here too like bands like 15,000 guns and Vangas in particular are really sonically influential.

I gotta say Swans just start entire discography really really influenced us. Unintentionally honestly because I only really recently got into them, but This Heat is a band that really started to influence the hell out of us and apparently the entire musical landscape. Even stuff from like, Glenna Branca, Polvo, obviously Black Midi, like the entire neo-noise rock scene from like, 2019 -2021 even squid. And then like, weird, no wave post-punk from the late seventies, early eighties.

a lot of it does just come from genuine frustration, and me trying to take it out in a way that’s therapeutic, and that creates those raw styles.

There seems to be at least from my outside perspective a pretty vibrant scene in Atlanta and seen producing a lot really great experimental and noise rock. So ask us like, what do you think the reason why that is occurring? You know, is like any venues or labels or anything like that?

So that. That one really shocked me. I never expected because It doesn’t really make much sense, like especially if you’re from the United States. It’s kind of like not in a bad way, but just seem like Atlanta? Atlanta has a noise rock scene? I never thought like the music that I was into is particularly popular and so. I don’t know. It really did just kinda happen. We started Vangas it and then 15,000 guns did it a little after us pretty independently of us, and then Vangas had been doing it for a while and there was just all of these these bands. We just kind of found each other and for some reason noise rock seems to be popular in Atlanta. I really don’t know. I might it might be that Atlanta has a history of enjoying high energy. I mean, I certainly would be in agreement with that and maybe that plays into it, but I really don’t actually know why.

I mean it’s pretty awesome. Atlanta is a major city for music, that could be why but yeah noise rock is not what I would have personally expected to happen. The venues and stuff that exist in Atlanta are really good with noise rock is a like, 529 the Earl. Athens, Georgia also has a bit of a noise rock scene kind of coming up right now like this band called Johnny Falloon. There’s labels here we’re on a label right now called familiar face. They’re based out of New York now though. There are other local labels in Atlanta like, Roperidge who does a lot of neo-shoegaze, and in Poor Taste records is another one out of Atlanta.

I feel like a lot of the bands here encourage each other and want to make the sound here notable. Instead of trying to like jump on top of each other to be the biggest band. Personally, I’m focused on trying to innovate the scene as a whole. What we have here with like freak-core which a name that Me and Nico from the band Big Yellow talked about. Like Alex from Big Yellow would talk about how scene doesn’t have a name, what are we gonna call it? We talked about how shoegaze, which is just a term, it’s not actually a genre. They were just these bands are all playing together until one day a, publication was like this is shoegaze. And they’re like sure shoegaze and they just went with it. There was one time where Big Yellow played show, and someone messed up a poster and called them freakcore. Because their Instagram bio at the time said, ‘freaky little hardcore band’ and they just called them freakcore. They were like that’s kind of cool and I was like, yeah, sure so I guess that’s just what it’s called now. But my like. One of our main goals is to grow that, because that tends to not only benefit you individually, but it benefits the entire like ecosystem of musicians as a whole when you’re able to group together all these bands.

One of our main goals is to grow that, because that tends to not only benefit you individually, but it benefits the entire like ecosystem of musicians

Are there any smaller acts, especially within the scene that you would like recommend people to check out?

So, 15,000 Guns, Big yellow, Vangas, Walking heads, High Visceral, We Are Damselflys, Junior Joy, Johnny Falloon, Downgrade. I would say that’s a really good starting point. If you wanna get the main idea, Downgrade, Vangas, 15,000 Guns, Big Yellow. Those are the other bands I would highly recommend to start with.

If you had to like kind of summarize freakcore in one sentence, what would it be?

Loud.

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