Q&A: With a Lot of Nerve and Welcomed Whiplash, Venus Twins Seek Balance and Composure in New EP, ‘/\/\/\/\/’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY TATE ☆
QUESTIONING THEIR AUTHORITY WHILE NEWNESS ABOUNDS — Venus Twins invite their listeners into a brooding, pitiless, and fortuitous new EP /\/\/\/\/ (pronounced “stitching”), releasing through revered independent punk outlet Three One G.
The twins tout a history of DIY dedication chronicling their adventures from Denton, Texas to their current home of Brooklyn, New York. /\/\/\/\/ waits for no one, propelling instantly in a fashion only properly coined by spawning in a digital universe of terror, holding listeners as willing hostages, somewhere close to the realms of Dying Light.
Although the duo’s sound typically characterizes unidentifiable rage, /\/\/\/\/ walks a glittering ledge of necessary experimentation with more electronic influence as a matured pairing to their expected disquietude, inspiring emotion-driven risk that will almost certainly pay off.
Behind a vengeful sound sits two 26-year-old hopefuls ready and willing to restore faith in sound. Read on to find out more about the Twins’ solace in seeking sanity beyond failure, how they could have been famous MLB players, and making art for fun.
LUNA: Is there a certain feeling that you’d like people to have when they listen to /\/\/\/\/ for the first time?
JAKE: It was a visceral reaction that we had while making it.
MATT: We wanted it to be haunting.
JAKE: I wanted it to come across that way [and for it to] feel how I felt while we were making it.
MATT: Yeah, dark and stressed out, and then feelings of not being stressed out, but it always goes back to being stressed out and haunting and (yells) AGHHH!
JAKE: I want people to feel like they're exploding as well.
LUNA: Do you think we should listen to it out loud or with headphones?
MATT: I would say the best quality headphones you’ve got.
JAKE: I would hope that if it's played out loud, you're not doing anything else, just sitting there and listening to it. It really is a start-to-finish thing.
MATT: It's a piece for us. It’s one song, in a way, it's 13 minutes.
LUNA: Did you write it as one song?
MATT: It was written as two songs originally, and you're getting the inside scoop. This is the first we're talking about this. It was originally written as just the second track and the fourth track, and then we had an interlude that we wanted to include, so we thought, “Okay, let’s just make this an EP.”
JAKE: We had an intro, middle, and outro, essentially, but that only stemmed from us playing live so much. We would always have interludes in between songs that never actually made it to the record. Sh*t that we did to keep the flow of the show at a manageable pace. Aside from that, we're just blasting off for 25 minutes straight, so we wanted to have that in the EP as well.
MATT: Something fun and stupid. Stupid, meaning fun, and we made it work to be haunting in a way, continuing with that theme.
LUNA: When and where was the best live show you've ever played and what stood out to you the most about it?
JAKE: There are different shows that were fun because of where we were and then there are also shows that we really f*cking rocked, and I feel good about it.
MATT: I can think of two instances. One would be our Trans Pecos show with Pons, Catalyst, Party Hats, and Peak. We played last, and we only got to play for a little over 15 minutes.
JAKE: Because the show went so late. We had to get out of there, but they gave us 15 minutes and we blasted off. It was the most energy we've ever played with, ever.
MATT: We tried to fit so many songs in a short amount of time, and then play fast and noisy and Jack was ripping out my string.
JAKE: That show was f*cking ridiculous. Maybe some of the other ones would be one of the Pearl Street shows. We had some really good shows in Austin.
MATT: We were playing with Deaf Club before we were on Three One G, and Justin Pearson who owns Three One G plays in Deaf Club, so we wanted to play really well. We really brought it and then he wasn’t there, so he didn’t see us, but it was still a really good show.
JAKE: Anytime we're playing with somebody who we love and admire so much, the pressure makes us perform well. It makes us try so hard.
MATT: Yeah, try.
LUNA: Do you know the stereotype of someone having three beverages at all times?
MATT: I literally did that this morning.
LUNA: What are your three drinks of choice?
MATT: This is a great question because I literally do this, and I think about it too. It'd be sparkling water, for one. If I didn't finish sparkling water from yesterday, I'll just throw it in the fridge open. I don't care that it'll be a little flat by the next day, whatever. Obviously coffee with oat milk, and then water. Normal water. What's yours?
JAKE: Same.
LUNA: The double water is wild.
MATT: One's gotta taste good and one is for the chug.
LUNA: What's the most interesting city that you've been to?
MATT: Oh, my gosh, probably New Orleans. It has a cool punk scene.
JAKE: New Orleans is a really fun and terrifying place. It is lawless, and that's why we like it. Then Christiania was the best place we've ever been in. That’s our favorite place.
LUNA: What did you like about it?
MATT: It was so beautiful, and everybody's riding bikes. Bikes were littering the streets, and it seemed really nice. It was bougie in a way, I don’t know how else to say it. It was in Copenhagen, but Christiania is a free place. That was insane. You’re not allowed to have your phone and take photos or videos of anything.
JAKE: They said it started out as an army barracks, and then when it was dismantled people moved in and lived freely in this village-type community and it kept growing. I don’t know if I’m giving the correct synopsis, but now it’s this tiny thing in the middle of a super nice city.
MATT: So I guess we like lawless cities. New Orleans, such a beautiful city. I guess Copenhagen is not lawless, but the sh*t inside it was crazy. And free healthcare.
LUNA: You mentioned the stress that you felt when you were making this EP — are there any particular themes that you like to explore in your music, or is it more so based on how you're feeling at the time?
JAKE: The key is, whatever you're feeling at the time, and having music or art as the vessel to get those feelings out. Sometimes you can be more intentional about whatever you want to get across when it comes to noisier music, especially. I think we wanted to make it sound crazy.
MATT: We wanted to explore the harshness. I guess now that I think about it, being stressed out was the biggest feeling. We have moments of softness in the EP too, but why were we doing that? Like the interlude in “God Help Me Bury This F**** Light” and “Stitching.”
JAKE: A lot of it’s wrapped up in failure, or thinking you're a failure and stressing out so hard to make sh*t work.
MATT: Trying too hard. Trying too f*cking hard at something you didn't need to and working too hard instead of working smart. And then FOMO…feeling like you’re gonna miss out if you didn't go on tour, or [aren’t] on Instagram posting — just stressing out about art instead of making it for fun. This whole thing is almost ironic, considering how noisy it is. We were doing too much. We explored being a failure and feeling down about it.
LUNA: Is that why you chose the name /\/\/\/\/?
MATT: This name is a zigzag stitch, and it’s called Stitching. I was sewing a lot at the time and Tabitha taught me how to sew.
JAKE: Matt's relationship was totally failing because of us trying to get all this other career stuff to work. There's other aspects of our lives that were falling apart, like we were not hanging out with people. We weren't seeing anyone and when we were home, we were confined to work, work, work. Then we would go out on tour and stress about all of that.
MATT: It sucked.
JAKE: Basically, we were constantly stitching all these pieces together.
MATT: Trying to make it work! In hindsight, that was f*cking stupid. Stitching a big ass puzzle together and patchworking this awesome life of rock and roll music that we thought we had to do, just doing the wrong things. We chose that name to stitch it the right way.
LUNA: Would you ever go goth?
MATT: We did go goth actually.
JAKE: We're about to go really goth…I guess maybe not necessarily goth, but we’re going emo.
MATT: The next release is emo, screamo pop.
LUNA: “I Just Can’t Get Enough!” made me think of a moment in a Pierce The Veil song and that pop-y style of punk that marked a lot of my adolescence. Did you ever listen to them growing up, or do you feel any inspiration from that type of band?
MATT: I loved pop punk, but a little more pop punk sounding than that metalcore screamo-y Pierce The Veil or Sleeping With Sirens type band, although I did like them a little bit.
JAKE: We love Saosin.
MATT: I love that new record they did in 2016 or 2018. We do like screamo a lot.
LUNA: What are your top three albums of the 2010s?
JAKE: Hellboy by Little Peep, The Ocean And The Sun by The Sound Of Animals Fighting, and Wildlife by La Dispute.
LUNA: If you could only bring five things to a deserted island, what would you bring?
JAKE: I would bring my computer, my interface, a microphone, XLR, and my guitar.
MATT: Maybe a cable that doubles as the XLR?
LUNA: (Laughs) No food?
JAKE: Well, the food…is it a deserted island? As long as there are coconuts on the island, I'm fine.
MATT: I'm gonna say something wildly different here. A personal chef with a gigantic warehouse full of ingredients and food. That counts as one thing, okay, no, well, that counts as three things. And a guitar to go onto Jake's laptop so I can also play guitar and record.
JAKE: Well, it’s my computer, and I'm gonna be pretty selfish with my time on it.
MATT: Okay, true, fine, so I got those things, that would be awesome.
JAKE: Oh, coffee, lots of coffee.
MATT: Maybe a plane that I could fly back to America with. A plane and a pilot.
LUNA: How do you feel your music-making process would be affected if social media didn’t exist?
JAKE: That’s a crazy question.
MATT: We would do way less video stuff. I like making videos, but really, [I wish] I could write songs all day.
JAKE: We would put out way more music.
MATT: We’ve been discussing this a lot lately. For some reason, it takes a certain amount of mental energy even in autopilot. Even when we're on autopilot, aka just living, I think about what we have to do on social media or TikTok, Instagram, the music videos. Like, what? We should just be writing the songs.
JAKE: The style of our music would probably change a little bit because I've been able to find music via social media. I'd probably go to a lot more shows and be inspired by the New York scene.
MATT: Our live set would probably be way different.
JAKE: We might even just sound more like everybody else around us.
LUNA: When you were little kids, what did you want to be when you grew up?
MATT AND JAKE: Baseball superstars.
MATT: We wanted to be famous MLB players.
JAKE: And then I figured out that I sucked at that, and when I started playing trombone, I wanted to be a professional trombonist in a symphony.
MATT: I wanted to teach music.
JAKE: What's crazy is when I was 10, that's kind of when I changed my mind to being a professional trombonist, and that lasted up until I was 18 or 19. That’s when I gave that up. It’s pretty crazy that was only seven years ago.
LUNA: Would that version of you be proud of yourself now?
JAKE: I think so, because at least I’m trying hard and practicing and working on the craft. That was always a theme with playing trombone. I was working really hard at that.
MATT: Our baseball player version of ourselves would [be proud]. It would make sense, because we love music and our dad was in bands growing up. Nothing serious, but I always loved watching Foo Fighters play that one music video. That was so sick to me. Or Queens of the Stone Age, they were rock stars.
JAKE: In some form or another, I wanted to be a performer.
LUNA: Do you have any set goals for the next year after this EP comes out?
JAKE: Yes, we want to tour with Maroon 5 (group laughs).
MATT: We have two records that are basically almost done that we want to put out. We'll probably go on two tours next year, hopefully with a US agent, because Three One G is trying to help us out with that.
JAKE: It'd be nice to go back to Europe for one of those tours.
MATT: It would be sick to support someone in Europe.
JAKE: Or do it as a headliner, if we can make it in work. I would like to be able to have more outreach than this year, whether that's with a press person or whatever.
MATT: Basically, our goal is to keep this newfound sense of balance that I feel we finally achieved at the age of 26, and keep that going, because this year has been the biggest learning experience. The end of last year, and now this year, we’ve been applying what we learned last year, so that goes in hand in hand with /\/\/\/\/.
JAKE: Keep learning, keep writing, and then don't be afraid to put it out. Don't be afraid to say it's done.
LUNA: Is there anything else you would like to add?
JAKE: I would like to say that having fun is the best. Have fun with your art.
MATT: Be stupid. Be like a kid and color with crayons. Paint with your finger and then do that with your music, because it doesn't matter. Bye everyone.
