Born from a chain of unfortunate logistical conflicts surrounding South-By-Southwest in 2018, New York City’s own Gustaf might be one of the most unconventional success stories in recent memory. It’s the kind of tale that seems perfectly New York, if not exclusive to that place: they clawed their way from impromptu beginnings to notability in the art-rock and post-punk scene there, all without even the aid of any recorded music for much of their existence, save for single ‘Design’ – though that one caught the attention of Beck, who ultimately came to remix it, and even before that was one of the first to shed some outside light on one of NYC’s best nascent bands.
By the time their debut album, the excellent Audio Drag for Ego Slobs, arrived on Royal Mountain Records, the band was announcing tours with titans of punk and punk-adjacency like Idles and Ireland’s Pillow Queens, catapulting them very much to the front of people’s mind on the sheer strength of their songs and truly effervescent live performances. Audio Drag grew the sound they put forth in ‘Design’ to album-size, something the band calls “minimal punk” and “weird punk” on their Bandcamp page. The former is especially apt, as everything about the guitars, bass, and drums is lean and spare throughout the record, leaving plenty of space for vocalists Lydia Gammill and Tarra Thiessen to create the interplay that has defined the band’s sound thus far. Gammill takes the traditional “lead” vocal, but Thiessen redefines the nature of a “backing” vocal altogether – it’s pitched-down low and distorted into something firmly seated in the uncanny valley, and they call this the titular “audio drag”.
Thiessen’s warped delivery plays various roles across the album, joining in the peanut-gallery group vocals on songs like ‘Cruel’ or forming an exaggerated echo for choice bits on many others, adding a wry sense of commentary in real-time as songs progress. Thiessen does all this live as well, in between jumping up and down like mad and providing percussion with a slew of devices including the traditional (a tambourine) and the unlikely (a mangled can of Café Bustelo, and various rubber animals). Gammill is equally expressive onstage, although at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum – she gets into character as the narrator of these songs and often dons a scowl and stares off far into the middle distance, the pure embodiment of intensity. The songs chiefly deal with the difficulties of navigating interpersonal relationships, with stuff like ‘Best Behavior’ and ‘Cruel’ seemingly coming from the perspective of entitled men, one of the forms of the “ego slob” – though not the only one. On the Royal Mountain site, the band say the phrase is about “someone who does a sloppy job of translating the outside world within the context of themself” – so anyone with poor reality testing can fit the bill, like the narrator of ‘Dog’ who gets jealous of an ex-flame’s canine companion despite the innate subservience that dynamic entails.
A large amount of what gets termed as “post-punk” today revolves in some part around inverting common turns of phrase, and Gustaf takes up that mantle as well in their music. Sentence fragments progress each song, like a movie scene that goes black periodically and finds the character in an updated position when the lights return. They’ve got a mug that reads “people get used to terrible things”, a line from ‘Design’, and a shirt branded with ‘MINE’ in block letters over and over – they recall the style of artist Jenny Holzer, known for projecting ominous blanket statements about human nature on the sides of buildings in massive scale.
But don’t think for a second the band are too self-serious. Despite the tight instrumentation cemented by the rhythm section of Tine Hill and Melissa Lucciola, the guitars of Vram Kherlopian come bursting over the top of everything else on songs like ‘Mine’ and ‘Package’ and prove they can cut loose. And with Gammill and Thiessen both so animated onstage, it’s impossible to not be compelled to dance. They’ve got reference points far older, but a contemporaneous comparison would be how LCD Soundsystem is known for marrying inherently danceable tunes with wide-ranging emotional explorations.
For the penultimate song of the evening, ‘Happy’, Gammill brings up a guest from the crowd. It’s her father – this is the end of their tour with label-mates Pillow Queens and Deanna Petcoff, and he’s come to see the final gig, and joins her to sing ‘Happy’. The song finds the younger Gammill alternating rapidly between playing the flute and singing, seeming to feign a bit of annoyance that the human body is not capable of doing both simultaneously. She mentioned that her dad is a big part of the reason she felt comfortable pursuing music; a touching moment to offset the sarcasm that’s underpinned most of the evening.
When it’s all done, it’s impossible to not have been taken in by the unique energy of Gustaf. More than any act in recent memory they exude the air of the kind of act that only comes along once or twice in a generation, weird new-no-wave dance-punks from the City, destined for something big. A couple of decades ago this would be a band you’d pack into something like CGBG to go see and leave on an adrenaline high, sweating and professing that they’re one of the best live bands around because they most certainly are. Haphazard and underground as their beginnings may have been, the secret’s out.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
