Founded in the summer of 2021, Los Angeles rockers The Loud Bangs were brought together by a love of shoegaze, ‘90s alternative, and German club music. The result: thick guitars, analog synthesizers, fuzzy production, and introspection, in that their songs typically center around the subject of mental health. Gaining a reputation as "the Pink Floyd of Shoegaze," their songs are peppered with public domain field recordings alongside sporadic howls, some oohs and ahhs, a few cryptic words here and there. These sparse ornaments and the song titles seem to be all that’s needed to let you into their world.
By Kamil Bobin
Discovered via Musosoup
Kamil) Hey The Loud Bangs, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What first got you into music?
Thanks for the interview! We love LITM!
In each of our families, there's at least one brother, sister, father, mother, uncle or someone to blame for turning us into music geeks. So you can blame them for their 90s collections and our retro vintage vibe! Plus, we all agree that music is a nice escape from our worries. We need it to live!
How do you balance your time in the studio with other commitments such as a part-time job, family, admin?
It sucks, we hate it. We are all typical starving artists in our early 20s with ten roommates. We did a lot of music this year and, not going to lie, we have spent A LOT of time in the studio. Lucky for us it's not too expensive as our producer Darren Callahan has his own space and gear. We only need to go to a big studio (hello, Sunset Sound!) if we're doing real drums, which we do for about half our tracks (the others are with some drum machines and loops, all programmed by Marcus Nemuro, our drummer, or Darren).
Your latest release is 'Salvation Memorial Hospital'. Can you tell us more about the making of it and if there were any unusual things happening during the process?
'Salvation Memorial Hospital' is our sixth EP to come out in 2022. Alice Street, our creative force, got a deal in 2020 but didn't finish much releasable stuff until late 2021. It was a long process back then to get a song just right. When Darren entered the picture, he just works so fast and we like everything he does that the more we DID make, the more we COULD make. It's probably turned out a little more lo-fi because of these limits, but the songwriting is so much better because of that speed. We also don't share anything outside the band until it's final, so we don't have many influences aside from ourselves.
The first EP, 'Zaera,' took about six months, and the next two took only half that time. So many EPs! Originally, we had an EP plus two LPs in our deal with Shoeplaze. They ended up splitting this into 5 EPs plus a b-side EP called 'The Alice Experience.' And we actually have four other unreleased songs and a stack of remixes so there might be another b-side EP in the future. When choosing the best five songs that really fit together, we wrote replacement tracks or moved things around so that kicked songs like 'Bell Gardens' and 'Sex Complex' off the releases.
Where did you get the inspiration for this EP?
We like 'Salvation Memorial Hospital' better than any of our other EPs though because it takes the most chances and still sounds kinda singable. We loved 'Highway Safety Films," but it's not as catchy. This one also really hits the themes better than some past EPs -- things like the paranoia of early romance, or the anxiety of letting your new partner know your dirty secrets. That's what a song like 'Playboy Tattoo' is about, for example -- not wanting to reveal you've had a lot of lovers before a current boyfriend or girlfriend and being judged about it.
How long did you work on 'Salvation Memorial Hospital'? Was it an easy process for you?
The EP was done together with 'Future Plaza,' which came out in October 2022. So it was about 12 weeks total to do both EPs. At the very end of recording, Alice went to Mexico City and hasn't come back to LA yet, so we're doing some of the last b-side mixes and vocals remotely. That's kind of a pain, but seems to be working.
The main thing we all argued about the most was how pop it should be versus how noisy. We did some new things like vocal pitching and using a lot more synthesizers, so it could be considered more 'today sounding.' However, we also had big washes of guitars that also made the tracks very raw.
And, even though we didn't plan this, these songs all have really weird structures. 'Spectral Field' has one verse and then five minutes of sonics. 'Late Day Magnets' has, like, two separate choruses. 'Candy Sometimes Always' becomes a different song halfway through. 'Future Bruises' has one progression, no choruses, and a giant Sigur Ros ending. And 'Playboy Tattoo' makes no structural sense whatsoever. Alice brought in some strange changes this time and, along with previous ones like 'Glass Cabinet," we definitely found some new ground for Shoegaze.
How do you know when a work is finished?
Darren tells us! We'd keep working on it, or want to, and then Darren would lock us out of the studio. 'Go away. Don't overthink it.' He's always right. A song is right at that one moment you want to hear it again and again and again -- in the car, in the stereo, on your phone. When you press rewind more than four times in a row, and you're not still tweaking things, it's done.
Can you write what was your best performance in your career? How do you remember it?
We remember the first time we thought the band was special. We already talked in the past in the press about our first listen-through of 'Zaera.'
But it was really when we heard the final version of 'New Flavors,' the first song on our April 2022 EP, 'Introducing The Loud Bangs,' that showed us what was possible. That song is full of wrong choices -- too many guitars, too few words, too funky a groove, a bit too long for so few chords -- but at the time we first heard that mix we were blown away. It was both super brittle, super catchy, and super aggressive. Even in Shoegaze, we hadn't really heard something like that. 'New Flavors' actually hurts your ears with all those distorted 'la la las' by Alice and those 18 guitar tracks all turned on at once, and Hannah Remley's bass, playing whenever the fuck she felt like it. It was magic.
How do you find yourself in the music business? When you started out in music, did you know it would be like this?
We could have guessed we wouldn't have been popular. We only have a few thousand listeners at this point. We really don't know how all this works. Alice just comes at things differently from anyone else -- both business and art. We have a few advisors, but I don't think many people are thinking this is a career. Even in Shoegaze, a sub-genre with a lot of tropes, our music is even too-not-Shoegaze for Shoegazers. Maybe we're more 'stonergaze,' as we've been called a couple times, because we make such good headphone records. You can smoke and just go deep -- there are so many details. Daisy Gutierrez, as lead guitarist, is often asked to just play two notes or one quick accent -- but after hundreds of those it sounds like a real guitar part!
Who is your favourite musician?
Bowie! Or Kate Bush. Or Matty Healy. Or Hayley Williams. Or Kevin Shields. Or Grouper. Or Steve Kilbey of The Church -- he's a recent favorite of the band.
What are your plans for the future?
Our label deal is now fulfilled and we weren't a hit... so... We'll see? There might be another b-side EP next year, or some remix EPs, or maybe finally the original version of our full two records, which had different running orders, songs, and intentions. We still love that five-song side one, five-song side two feel that the EPs gave us, but maybe we'll just have to press some real records to really get that in the future. Wish us luck!