The chaos of this spring is pooling around our ankles as we begin to navigate the landscapes of vaccinated social outings and taste the words “post-COVID.” However, it’s a fallacy that there will be a normal we can return to. The past year and a half caused an incurable chasm between the routines of our old lives and our standards now. We mouth the same words differently.
New Orleans punk group, Special Interest, is releasing old demos into a new world. Trust No Wave, arriving Friday on DISCIPLES / R.A.T.S. (preorder) and streaming exclusively on Ears to Feed Tuesday, presses on a fresh vein of rage and mayhem. The collection includes early demos from their debut album Spiraling along with four unreleased songs.
They wrote the tracks from this reissue shortly after the group was born in 2016. Vocalist Alli Logout and guitarist Maria Elena started Special Interest with guitars and power tools. Once Ruth Mascelli on electronics and Nathan Cassiani on bass joined, they discarded the power tools but continued to coat their work with ingenuity.
The melodies of this reissue sound like they were filtered through a kaleidoscope. Layering shoegaze guitar riffs with avant-garde punk melodies, each track erupts in a transcendent collision.
Mascelli etched out the commotion of the day they had while recording these songs. “We recorded these demos in the springtime – a little over six months after we had played our first show. My most vivid memory is that it was raining torrentially as we ran from the car into the studio,” they explained. “This is what we must have sounded like playing through a busted PA in a liquor store parking lot. Absolute cacophony, ketamine consciousness – totally true and pure.”
Unraveling like drawing a portrait without picking up your pen, each track spills out as unrefined, yet spellbinding. Special Interest constantly flirts with new ways to mold saturated melodies into genre-bending storylines. With this reissue, they have solidified their place as a vanguard of the current punk-electronic terrain.
The four demos from Spiraling gift us with intimacy as if you were snaking through a crowd at a basement show. In “Disco,” you end up in a space closest to Logout’s sonorous vocals and raging repetition of “Disco, disco, disco / We all disco.” The track refrains from a narrative structure and instead taps into the listener’s visceral emotions.
Mascelli described the group’s oscillating approach to songwriting. “Listening back now it’s wild to me how despite being in such a raw and unrefined state we had already stumbled upon our sound. A few of the songs are somewhat coherently formed whereas others are totally shapeless freak outs,” they said. “The scuzzy primordial soup from which all our other ideas emerged.”
The unheard tracks sift through their hallmark lens of frenzy and fervor. The lead single and opener, “Disease” immediately sets you in a distorted universe that doesn’t obey traditional logic. Seamlessly threaded into the fabric of their sound is a cover of the Italian new wave band Chrisma (Krisma), “Black Silk Stalking.” While maintaining the heart of the track, they infuse it with layers of synth and amplified bass.
The reissue ultimately reflects the devotion to their sound they’ve had since they first united. “It’s the sound of us learning to play off of each other and for me personally learning how to play music at all,” Mascelli commented. “While there are more polished versions of these songs and in general we have grown so much as a band I still think these recordings capture the energy of that moment in time better than anything else.