Back in mid-June, Liily put on an incredible show in Boston with tourmates Model/Actriz and Catcher, in support of their debut album, TV or Not TV, which found the band redefining its sound in a powerful way. I had the chance to speak to drummer Maxx Morando as they head out to Phoenix for the final date of this leg of their tour, after having a short respite in the Denver area. As they drove west through the canyons and valleys of Colorado, Morando was kind enough to talk to me about the band, album, and tour.
The first question I ask once the signal stabilizes is something I’ve been pondering for quite some time since first hearing Liily’s debut EP, I Can Fool Anybody in this Town and TV or Not TV back-to-back: there’s a stark shift toward a rhythmic, dark, and industrial post-punk sound on the latter, and I inquire if that decision was something they’d made going into the studio or if it just fell into place during recording.
Morando reveals it’s more the former: while they recorded I Can Fool Anybody in this Town when the band members were all roughly 18 years old, many of the songs were actually written years earlier when they had an average age of 15. It’s an impressive fact considering how compositionally advanced the songs from the EP are, though it makes more sense when Morando tells me he and vocalist Dylan Nash started in music when they were about 8 or 9, with bassist Charlie Anastasis and guitarist Sam de la Torre picking up their axes around age 10. He says they’ve collectively done a lot of musical discovery since then, as well as just growing up, and so TV or Not TV thus reflects what really is moving them these days.
Noting that Spotify shows that their listener base is actually strongest in London, I ask Morando if they feel a kinship with or influence from the specific UK brand of post-punk and he affirms that emphatically, invoking names like black midi, Fontaines D.C., and Idles as touchstones. They’re set to head out on tour with London’s TV Priest soon, supporting the band’s new album My Other People.
While we’re on the topic of the ever-widening genre of post-punk, I note that Liily are one of several bands using horns to diversify their sound and ask if they’ve considered touring with a horn section of some kind. Morando says they’d love to, but financially and spatially it’s a bit of a difficult prospect, though one they hope to explore someday. Horns make you “feel a certain kind of way,” he says, and in a very rhythm-section-forward record, they became one of the methods of layering in more melodic elements when even Nash’s talk-singing often lines up more with the drums and bass.
Since he’s brought up the subject of Nash’s vocals, I ask if there’s a specific origin to the imagery of the album, which multiple times invokes mirrors as well as the physical parts of the body like the eyes and throat, a characteristic they share with Catcher. Morando says he never really thought about it from this angle, but of Nash’s writing Maxx says that Dylan generally gets a specific image in his head and then “writes what he sees”, which checks out with the lyrical style of the record.
He brings up the “coiled hand” from the opener ‘Mr. Speaker Gets the Word’ and describes how Nash balances very specific visions – like the “ghoulish” twisted hand – with lyrics that are nonspecific enough to let listeners still have their own interpretation of what exactly a man with a coiled hand who “does what he can” means to them. He also touches on a lyric from ‘I Am Who I Think You Think I Am’, where the “accelerator” in the lines refers to this “hyper-accelerated culture” the band has grown up alongside and had to accept, which they envision in the song as a gaping maw capable of mangling even sturdy metal.
Before we conclude, I take the occasion of it being the end of the tour to ask if there are any particular memories that stand out for the band on this journey around North America. For Maxx, he brings up the days they’ve had to relax at an Airbnb in the Denver area with Catcher after weeks with a show nearly every night, saying it was the first real opportunity for the two bands to get to know each other.
He also fondly recalls their pair of Canadian shows with Model/Actriz (who joined them for fewer dates than Catcher), describing them as “absolutely insane” and recounting how people commented that the night got progressively louder with each successive band taking the stage. It’s a fitting testament to where Liily have set themselves up in a relatively short amount of time – at the pinnacle of a thriving, churning, noisy cacophony that calls to an ever-larger group of listeners.
Interview by Collin Heroux