Q&A: Fwango Keeps DIY at the Forefront in New Single “Over It”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
HAILING FROM THE SUN-SOAKED STREETS OF LOS ANGELES – Fwango is the DIY, self-taught brainchild of four college friends with a shared love for their musical forebears. Combining the sharp edges of garage rock with the melodic sensibilities of indie pop, the band pulls from the confessional lyricism and raw dynamism of Interpol, Built to Spill, Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes. The result? A sound that feels both nostalgic and undeniably fresh.
Their latest single, “Over It,” is a testament to their evolution, marking the fifth release in a steady stream of singles that have solidified Fwango as a rising force in the indie music scene. Produced in collaboration with Grammy-winning engineers Wil Anspach and Phil Joly, “Over It” represents the band’s most dynamic effort to date.
The track is a sonic rollercoaster of emotional release, marrying driving basslines and powerful drum patterns with a wistful, reverb-laden guitar riff. Over it all, the vocals soar with urgency, weaving an anti-breakup love song that teeters between bittersweet resignation and defiant hope. It’s a poignant exploration of the complexities of modern relationships—raw, authentic and deeply relatable.
Fwango’s Midwest roots shine through in their grounded, unpretentious approach to their craft. Though LA has undoubtedly left its mark on their aesthetic, their sound remains infused with the muted sincerity of the Midwest, a refreshing counterpoint to the polished sheen often associated with their adopted city.
With their unique blend of storytelling and razor-sharp instrumentation, Fwango’s music is intimate and electric—a promise of what’s to come from this exciting new band.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
LOGAN: Interpol is a heavy inspiration and we realized we were sounding even more and more like Interpol. We started to listen to even more of their music, and we realized they were doing some really cool shit. There's ones where from the jump, we knew we wanted to make music that is inspired by The Strokes or Arctic Monkeys and music we grew up listening to on repeat until we knew every word. The Strokes would be the big one. I feel like everyone here has their own favorite band that’s inspiring their creative process.
LUNA: Say if someone hasn’t heard of your music yet, which song would you introduce your discography to and why do you gravitate towards that song?
ZACH: I've been saying “Over It,” because it's our latest song, and it's the one that I'm the most proud of. So usually if people ask, I'll say “Over It,” but before it was “Cover My Eyes.” I remember Cal said something really sweet, where he said that song had our sound. I think a lot of songs end up revolving around that sound. I had never heard of Interpol until we started writing that song. Then I started listening to Interpol and it easily became one of my favorite bands.
CAL: “Over It” is a great one to show new folks, just because I feel like it's pretty much all four of us popping off to the best of our abilities.
LOGAN: I agree as well. I feel like every part of it is a little different from the previous part. I think that means that it has a little something for everyone. Each of those parts can be found in one of our other songs too. I feel like if you really like the choruses on “Over It,” then you're going to love “Cover My Eyes.”
LUNA: What inspires you to push boundaries within your sound? Are there any specific experiences, artists, or moments that have encouraged you to explore new musical territories?
ZACH: We like really weird music and it’s super easy to listen to and fun. I also really like strange sounds. One of my favorite things is listening to an interview with a producer, and they're talking about this weird combination of steps that they got where they broke every single rule along the way, and the output was some sound that they've never heard. Any time I make any sort of sound that I've never heard, I feel really, really proud of that. A really great songwriter once told me to learn the rules so well that you can break them and that you can forget all of them completely. “Over It” is a really good example of us doing that, where we worked with this crazy talented audio engineer who knows all the rules but constantly is telling us to break them.
CODY: We are pushed by new collaboration. Each experience has made us realize how much more we can do and grow and that's pushed us a lot. The first couple songs were very internal within us four and the engineer we previously worked with. Once we kept expanding, we were working with new people and growing a lot from that.
LOGAN: I'm listening to Spotify all day, and I work from home, and just trying to discover new songs. I think we're really trying to branch out as listeners a lot and listen to as much as we can. I think we're all very voracious music listeners. If you look at our group chat, half of the group chat is sending a song and saying, ‘I want to do that. Can we try to do that?’ A lot of times previously, we would have the demo pretty complete and then we practice it, and now we're working on trying to produce some weird sounds and get all four of us in a room and see if we can make something happen.
LUNA: You have released your new single “Over It.” What is the inspiration behind the song and what themes and emotions do you explore?
CAL: I wrote the original demo, and for me. The music came before any thematic stuff. I was in the mood to play off of The Strokes and Interpol combined, and did that with the lead guitar lines and I sent a verse and a chorus to the guys. We revisited a few months later to try and flush it out more. I sat down while my girlfriend and I were watching Parks and Rec and I wrote the entire back half of the song, which was the outro and the second chorus and all that stuff. So it all happened in the solo. It all happened very quickly. I brought it to the guys, and we workshopped the music a lot more from there and things changed quite a bit. I feel like the bones came really easily, and then fine tuning it was a long process, but it was super rewarding because I think it turned out really, really well musically and thematically. As far as lyrics go, it stemmed from a dream I had about me messing up my relationship and having a feeling of regret about that, even though it didn't even happen. I gave that idea to Logan and he expanded upon it.
LOGAN: I received that and I started writing some lyrics on it. I learned that concept from Cal and I was going to continue this concept. I didn't want to strip away the entire concept. The further I wrote on it, I do think it became more related to things I was thinking about or dealing with or my own perspectives on fear of how a relationship could end. I ended up going down a route where it was more of a bottled moment of how it might feel to know that a relationship could be ending and just all the thoughts that would be going through your head at that moment, and the ultimate reflecting on that. I think the song ends in this big moment. I think it's cool because it's a final cry out. It's like an anti-breakup song.
LUNA: You’ve been doing a DIY approach and self-releasing your music, including “Over It.” What’s been the most rewarding and challenging part of handling your own release strategy?
ZACH: I think the rewarding part is you have complete creative control of every element. I'm very fortunate to be in a band with three filmmakers. I do believe that everything an artist creates, from Instagram posts to video content, is a part of that artist's output as art as a collective package. It's fun to get to explore other mediums in that way. We're not particularly great at release strategy. We don't have a marketing team, but I do have three people that love to make films, and that's really cool. One of our music videos is just so silly. It's like a guitar hero parody for an otherwise very, very serious song. Having the freedom to have that juxtaposition across mediums in the art itself is really, really cool. We probably wouldn't be able to get that if we weren't completely DIY. Having that freedom is really, really cool. The challenges are that I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to marketing. I don't think any of us really know, so it's just our own research, and it is a lot to manage. We've recently brought on a social media manager, which is really, really helpful, but it's hard to have lives and jobs and have to make all of this music and self produce it, and then also have to worry about all of the social media and the release cycles and the outreach. Creative control is really, really nice.
LUNA: Do you think the DIY approach has helped shape your sound and image in ways that might not have been possible if you had gone through traditional channels?
CODY: A lot of the decisions we make for our music, it's the blessings that no one is telling us what to do or how to put it out. When a song finally gets out there, it's happening because we're so passionate about it. Recently with “Over It,” the way we've marketed it is as organically as possible, because we had so much fun with it and we didn't try to put any alternative visual identity to it, besides what it was. I think the benefit to that is it's totally organic. Everything that you hear in that song, and everything you see about that song comes from us, and there's no person or entity telling us otherwise.
LOGAN: To add to that, there are ways in which we've done things that have reflected on our sound. I think pros and cons for sure, but I think some of the pros are we have taken our time with things, and sometimes that can make me feel antsy, but when it actually comes out and I like how it sounds, it feels really, really good. When we work with someone, it all feels very like word of mouth. We really get to be the first point of contact with people that we might work with. We have 100% control over stuff, so we're not really getting referred to anyone or pushed in any creative direction, which I think is pretty cool that at the end of the day, whatever comes out, when I go back through and listen to it, I know exactly why everything sounds the way it does. I am pretty proud of that.
ZACH: To speak specifically to the sonics of it, the recording engineer that we worked with on the song, he was the lead engineer at East West – one of the nicest, highest quality studios in the world. We worked with him in his private space where there's a lot of weird stuff around, like the microphone that we used for the outro vocal of “Over It” – which is a very unique tone that I've never heard before – was a microphone that he built with his hands out of a telephone that we ran through a box of speakers and miked down a hallway in a bathroom. There's a lot of really weird, strange stuff going on sonically in that song that just adds texture because we were not in some crazy night studio. We were with a crazy talented engineer in his studio, but a studio built around the idea of DIY and creating new sounds, and that these 90s and early 2000s bands that we love weren't trying to make everything sound perfect. It was beautifully messy, and that's what created that genre really cool.
LUNA: How do you picture people listening to your music? What’s the environment and setting you think is best for listening to your work?
ZACH: I think Logan has said this before. If I were to imagine somebody listening to our music, walking down the street with headphones on, maybe having a little bit of an emotional crisis. I could imagine somebody walking down the street with headphones on, contemplating their life.
CAL: I was going to say people listening during a drive, anything where you're doing something.
LUNA: What are you most excited for your listeners to take away or experience with this new era of music?
ZACH: It really does feel like we're in a little bit of a renaissance of beautiful new music right now. I think creating music is more accessible than it's ever been. Cal can come to us with a Garage Band demo that he has fully arranged and written all of the parts himself. You can write drums, bass guitar, vocals and do an okay job producing a demo to get an idea across with absolutely no technical knowledge. I think that is absurdly uplifting as an artist, thinking back to days where you had to go into a million dollar studio and record to tape. People can create art and get discovered, but just engaging in the process of creation regardless of discovery, I think that's incredible.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
ZACH: Right now, we have a song called “Consequences” that is pretty close to being done that we're really excited about. It might actually split into two new songs, because we just ended up overriding and overriding, and we realized we might have two really good potential songs out of it. Cal just worked on this demo called “Hang Tight” that I've been producing. I was producing it on a plane the other day, and we're all really excited to get our hands on it. I'm moving to New York, and a big part of that is wanting to get more connected with the music scene that we're all super inspired by, and to build a studio out there and to produce more out there. I want to produce a lot more with this band and make more music. I think all the songs we have in the pipeline, we're all really excited about.
LOGAN: The demo pile is looking good, and I'm very happy about that for this year. We're finding our new rhythm with Zach being remote, but I think it's going to be really cool. I think we're going to really be in a good place with it, also, can't say we have anything lined up quite yet, but hopefully, some shows around LA. We're definitely trying to get more involved with the local scene. We've played some really awesome shows around, and definitely want to keep offering the opportunity to people to see us live, and also for us to keep getting better at playing live and that's something I'm looking forward to. I think we're all just looking forward to getting another one cooking. What's really promising and exciting for us is that we had a TikTok blow up a year and a half ago about “Cover My Eyes,” and that put millions of eyes on us, and when millions of eyes were on us, we gained a shitload of fans. I think that gave us the confidence of realizing that we are making good stuff. I think it's shown us that we can keep doing what we're doing, and all we need is to break that barrier of people noticing it, because once people notice it, they'll catch on and they'll follow us into it. We have so many great fans from all over the world that are now just following us. We only have five songs out. I think that really puts a fire under our ass to keep releasing and keep writing, because we're doing something correct.
LUNA: Is there anything you would like to add?
ZACH: One thing that was crazy, crazy special about this process for me was the people we got to work with and highlighting them is really cool because it was just such an honor. We got to work with Greazy Will and the recording engineer, who's just so crazy talented. Phil Joly, the mixing engineer, when we were doing our pre-production talks with him, he was giving us direct stories about getting vocal tone for Julian Casablancas of The Strokes. The fact that I could not hold back my smile, and the fact that his team reached out to us and we got to work with them and I got to produce with them, the whole process was one of the most artistically fulfilling experiences I've ever had. I'm emphasizing that it was really cool.
LOGAN: We definitely owe them a lot of gratitude for taking a chance on this and working with us, and I hope we made them proud, because they really killed it.
