Q&A: Mind’s Eye Redefines Indie Sleaze With New Album ‘Long Nights and Wasted Affairs’
THE RETURN OF INDIE SLEAZE — this time around, has the backing of TikTok virality: midwest emos, gas station shows, and indie lead singers doing the absolute most. Mind’s Eye is only one of the indie bands who’s riding the wave. To an extent, Mind’s Eye’s newest album, Long Nights and Wasted Affairs, feels like an extension of the band’s TikTok satire and quirky commentary on alternative culture — except, the album is way too intricate and skilled for it to simply be an extension of jokes and silly moments.
The third studio album of the band and the first with its current lineup, Long Night and Wasted Affairs is a compilation of love songs and indie heartache anthems. A perfect balance of each instrument with a diamond-in-the-rough, organic and layered production style, Mind’s Eye perfects the indie recipe. From massive breakdowns to thinly and elongated emo-rock–inspired guitar lines, simplified but driven drum patterns, and insinuating bass lines, Mind’s Eye reminds everyone of their favorite indie bands.
Leading up to the release of Long Nights and Wasted Affairs, Luna caught up with the five members of the band on the creative process, their TikTok virality, and all things indie bands.
LUNA: What's your favorite song at the moment?
ANDREW SCOTT: Just because I was listening to it coming home from work, “Dr. Feelgood” by Mötley Crüe.
JACK DUDA: Also just because I was listening to it this morning, “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake.
VINCE LOPEZ: This is because I've been watching an unhealthy amount of RuPaul … “Call Me Mother” by RuPaul.
KELLI KUMIKO: I think my song is “Begin Again” by Jessie Ware.
JACOB CAMBRA: Probably anything by Turnstile.
LUNA: On the topic of name, what does the name Mind's Eye mean?
LOPEZ: I came up with Mind's Eye because I really liked the band Tears for Fears. Once, when I was in high school — it was probably like 2015 — I was listening to that song. And there's a part of that song where he says, “In my mind's eye…” and I was like, Mind's Eye would be a cool band name. Then probably, like, five years later I started making music. I was like “Oh, I remember that one time that I thought ‘Mind's Eye’ was cool.” But if I had to say what it means, it’s that we make music for you to picture things to scenes, scenarios in your head, images, things that you would picture with your mind's eye.
LUNA: For this album, there’s definitely a storyline, perhaps even multiple storylines. I just want to get it from your own words: What is the overall theme? What's the storyline?
LOPEZ: The overarching theme of the album is the stages of liking someone, then loving somebody, then losing somebody, and then trying to figure out how to be with yourself. I would say that's the overarching theme: just different forms of liking someone or wanting somebody, and/or not having.
SCOTT: The final song in the album was one of my favorite songs on it. It's the several months post-breakup song or [when] you’re looking for the next thing. I think the album wasn’t a concept album or written with that idea in mind. But when the songs are completed, they do kind of follow a storyline — definitely not intentional, but just how it should happen.
DUDA: They just all turned out to be love songs. They all had to be love/breakups/obsession songs. There's the one oddball about killing people (laughs) — it still has to do with love at the same time.
LOPEZ: I think every song on the album has — and especially the ones Kelli wrote — that yearning of wanting somebody, but the only one that has a different storyline that doesn't really coincide with the world of the other songs is “Trouble,” because for that song we were just like, “What if we made a song about this guy that kills people who was mean to this girl he likes?” That's the only one that's different because we're talking about hitting you in the head with a hammer. The other ones are like, “Do you like me?”
LUNA: What was your favorite musical moment on this project? Mine is probably the breakdown for “Lies.”
LOPEZ: It's a good song. That one was awesome to come up with. We were in the practice room and it was honestly because Jack had put me on to a lot of Midwest emo, which is not a thing that I would previously listen to if it hadn't been Jack and Andrew. I remember in the practice room I was like, “Jack, can we do something that's kind of like, [mimics emo guitar riffs], and the noodle-y thing?” And then Jack was like, “Yes.” And then Andrew was like, “Yes.” And then Jacob was like, “Yeah.” It all just came together.
DUDA: I sort of agree with that being the best moment because it was very natural and very euphoric when we were making the little breakdown part. I think the breakdown part in "Trouble," too. We also came up with the idea for it in the practice room. Kelli wrote the whole song, pretty much, with Vince, and then we were like, “Oh, maybe it needs a bridge.” And then we just played this super long bridge part and we ended up producing it out. It just turned out to be really cool and crazy long and kind of trippy.
SCOTT: Random ’70s psychedelic rock moment. For me, as I listen to the album more, it’s again back to “New Fixations.” It’s the transition from the verse into the chorus on “New Fixations” because [of] the verse is stripped-back and I'm doing a reverb-like, ping-pong delay guitar line and the way it moves into the chorus. The guitars are doing the chord-y thing but there's a bass line there that is sick. It's like boom, there's a big bass dive. It’s just a head-bobbing moment of the album where it goes from a twinkly chorus into something that you can really groove to.
LOPEZ: It's not a conscious thing — our songs are just all dramatic. There's always a crescendo, big end. I would describe a lot of our songs as almost cinematic.
LUNA: I wrote down synth-scaping, dreamland, psychedelic, and lo-fi.
LOPEZ: Those are cool words.
LUNA: I thought it was interesting that you guys didn't really listen to Midwest emo, because that's how you popped up on my TikTok. I have so much Midwest emo on my TikTok and one day I just saw your profile on my For You page. One of the questions I had included is that I did not associate the music with the band that I saw on TikTok at all. How did the [comedic] bit that you started on TikTok first come to mind? Why did you stick with it? Do you like TikTok? What's your relationship as a band to that platform?
LOPEZ: Mainly, it's really only me doing the TikToks because we are not together that often. But we have an interesting relationship with TikTok. If it wasn't for TikTok we wouldn't be where we are right now. “Wasted Affairs” took off on that, and it's because I made some stupid-ass TikTok that was like, “Whoaaa, posting my song until the alt girls show off their outfits and how sad they are to it.” I did that as a joke and it blew up. So if it wasn't for TikTok, I wouldn't be where I am, and Mind's Eye wouldn't have as big of a success as it does.
But also, if it wasn't for TikTok, I would probably be less mentally ill. I just love making the subculture content, the niche — “Oh wait, I've met somebody like that!” I would always make fun of e-boys and I was just like, “Let me try to combine it.” And I had an idea to be a cringy lead singer of an indie band. And then people would be like, “Oh, that guy's soooo cringy.” And then I'd be like, “Also, I'm actually in an indie band. Got you!”
A lot of the times I act like Mind's Eye isn't the band, like we're not posting the video. It's somebody else. But I'm trying to rope in people from the cringe, and when they hear the music they would be like, “Oh, well, the music isn’t cringe.” I just try to have fun with the TikToks and try to do humor and then shock them with the skills of the rest of the band. I rope them in with my cringe, and then the rest of the band keeps them with the good music. Pipeline! It’s all a scheme.
LUNA: I want to talk about “Astrology Girl” because that's the only track I can remotely connect to the TikTok version of this band — but that's because it offers an explanation, this overt irony to it. Why was this track included? How did it get started? Does it have anything to do with the TikTok virality that took off on its own?
KUMIKO: I mean, with the TikTok presence and stuff… it's hard to talk about the band without talking about the TikToks and the TikTok audience. From playing shows, we see more people who know us from TikTok. Those are the edgy alt girls with the dyed hair and the big boots. It's just something you can't really ignore, and it's a bit to everybody. “Astrology Girl” was a bit song that I played for Vince on FaceTime because I thought it would be funny. Now it's on the album. We can dunk on the bit because that was me five years ago. You know, at a basement show, smoking a cigarette outside.
LOPEZ: I was pretending that I like beer in front of cool girls. And I was watching Pulp Fiction three times a day. We've all been cringe. I also like to make fun of the people [who] are gatekeepers, who don't let people like what they like. [People who are] like, “Oh, you like Radiohead? That's a red flag!”
SCOTT: You know what, people that say The Beatles aren't a good band. You can't say that because they're super legendary. Just because you don't like them now, it doesn’t make it bad.
CAMBRA: I was gonna say, modern music wouldn't be anything even close to what it is without The Beatles. None of us would be doing this. Nobody could take responsibility for anything without the Beatles.
DUDA: To bring it back to “Astrology Girl” a little bit, when Kelli made it, I was immediately like, “This should be the single to push because it seems so TikTok-able. I can just see people using it, and it'll be such a cringy TikTok song.” But it's so catchy and so good at the same time.
LUNA: You guys are definitely utilizing the whole Gen-Z, TikTok, technology thing to your band's benefit. You're really good at promoting yourself; you're really good at envisioning how people can listen to those songs and have their own interpretation. And you guys live in different cities, but it works. How do you feel about being away from each other all the time but making it work? Is that difficult? Have you incorporated it into a daily routine/writing process?
DUDA: We're not all separated from each other. We all live in LA except for Kelli. Oh, and Jacob lives in OC so he's a little bit farther from us. But it’s not that hard. Kelli will mostly send us songs and then we just elaborate on them, then they become more fleshed-out.
SCOTT: The seed of an idea would usually be either from Kelli or from Vince. Then I might take them and load them up and do a pass of guitar parts over them. And then take that, send it to everyone, then when we practice and write, you would go into the rehearsal studio — just without Kelli — and practice to get everything tightened up. We might take one of those ideas and just kick it around in the rehearsal studio a little bit, tweak it some more and maybe add a section, and you just keep doing iterations of it until it feels good. When we're in the studio, we can play it from front to back, make a demo of it. Usually that's kind of a finalized idea that's ready to take to that next stage of polishing, where you sit down with a producer and record it, put everything down, and make those final decisions.
DUDA: I also feel like the whole making of this album is our first project together, so it wasn't really streamlined. We didn't have a process in a way that was systematic. Sometimes we were jamming songs out, sometimes Kelli was sending us stuff that we were just like, “Alright, this is the song!” Sometimes me and Andrew came up with riffs… It was all over the place. Then we started working with a producer, and he took us over the finish line with everything. It wasn't really a streamlined process. It took a pretty long time because we didn't know what we were doing. But it came together in a really, really good way, which is awesome.
LUNA: What is going to be the most exciting part or most exciting thing in the year of 2023 for you?
LOPEZ: I think, honestly, the biggest thing was going on tour. I think that really solidified the band because it is all happening fast. I still feel like an imposter, just some guy who wanted to make a song and … I still feel the way I did when we started. But going on tour was that pivotal moment. I think it was Seattle, where we went on stage and people were yelling individual member’s names and they were singing the lyrics out loud. And I think that was the most exciting thing — it's like, “Wow, we are a real band.”
I’m definitely excited for the album to come out, for sure. It's almost [taken] three years to finish the album, and it does really feel like this album is the Mind's Eye debut. It really feels like we found Mind's Eye, we found a rhythm of what our sound is, what we are.
SCOTT: With the tour, it was really cool at the start because you're playing those back to back to back shows. The first show of tour is always a little, “Okay, here we go… We're gonna do this…” Everyone meets up, drives to the venue. But then what's really cool and probably one of my favorite aspects of tour is when you start getting into the fifth show, sixth show, and you've done it each night. Everyone's so locked-in. It just becomes so much fun to do because you're not stressing about “Are we going to play good?” It’s just, go out there and have fun and do the show, and it comes out great. That's always a really, really cool spot to be in.
LOPEZ: I think it's funny that by the end, I do bits in between, almost like standup things. I don't know when I was going to say — it was just I vomit shit out — but by the end, it was almost like I had a standup routine.
LUNA: I'm gonna do a spit-fire run: What would be your perfect national tour lineup look like? Drop names.
LOPEZ: Inner Wave!
DUDA: Definitely Inner Wave. Oh! Yesterday I had this thought: Sweet Pill would be so crazy. Sweet Pill and Inner Wave and Mind's Eye would be such a strange show lineup, but it would be so cool.
LOPEZ: I honestly think this will be crazy. I think it'd be funny as fuck if we went on tour with Morrissey because there's a joke in the TikTok comments that people call me a modern day Morrissey.
LUNA: That has not hit my timeline (laughs).
LOPEZ: You missed out! I just think it'd be funny because Morrissey is, like, the big red flag.
SCOTT: You gotta run out on stage with a ribbon or something, or a bouquet of flowers.
-
weekly tunes playlist has been updated! new tracks from @furtradeband, @pecqband, @garryfool & more! check it out! https://t.co/ToFU0R6YGo
